You Can’t Learn From the Past if You Erase It

🎨 Whitewashing History Makes Us More Likely to Repeat It

I was thinking about showing my niece old cartoons and realized I couldn’t find the versions I saw growing up. Not the unedited ones. You’d think in the age of streaming and binge-watching, you could find just about any movie or series ever made somewhere on the internet. And maybe some of it’s out there if you dig deep enough. But it’s definitely been removed from mainstream sources.

I’m talking about things like Song of the South, the original Fantasia, Bugs Bunny cartoons that used blackface or mocked Nazis, or Speedy Gonzalez. These shows have all been hidden away in vaults somewhere because their content isn’t politically correct or fashionable in contemporary culture.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting we hold these cartoons up as models to emulate. As a white writer, I’m not here to tell anyone else’s story — just to hold my own history accountable. I’m saying the whole idea of learning from our history requires that we know that history. If we hide it away, younger generations will have no idea how much things have changed — and how much more still needs to change.

And that’s the problem.

When Disney locks Song of the South in a vault, edits the Black centaur pedicurist out of Fantasia, or quietly retires Speedy Gonzalez, they’re not protecting children. They aren’t preserving innocence. They’re preserving their brand. There’s a difference.

They’re rewriting reality. They’re sanding down the rough edges to sell a version of history where they were always enlightened, always self-aware, always “woke.”

Except they weren’t. None of us were.

And pretending we were doesn’t make us better people — it just makes us liars. And it makes the generations that follow more ignorant.

Because here’s the truth: racism, sexism, and homophobia didn’t disappear when we stopped animating them. They just changed shape. If you can’t see the old forms, you’re going to have a hell of a time recognizing the new ones.

🪞 History Is a Mirror, Not a Hall Pass

Cartoons, books, films — they all reflected the bigotries of their eras. That doesn’t mean “it was fine back then.” It means if you want to understand how people thought, how prejudice worked, and how much effort it took to change minds, you need to see it unfiltered. If you want to understand how our cultural thinking has changed — and how it hasn’t — you need to see the whole picture.

Context isn’t an excuse. Context is clarity. Without it, you end up teaching history like a highlight reel — and highlight reels never show the fumbles. (Except gag reels, which is what the future will consider 2024–2028.)

⌫ Erasure Doesn’t Protect, It Blinds

Sanitizing media sends two toxic messages:

It’s always been like this. (Or at least it’s been this way a long time.)
Anything we don’t like can just disappear.

Neither is true. And both are dangerous.

Sanitized history erases not just racist caricatures, but sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic ones too. If the only media future generations see are the sanitized versions, they’ll never grasp what progress actually looks like. They’ll think society magically woke up one day and decided to be better. They won’t understand the fights it took to get here — or why those fights are still happening.

They won’t have the context for why movements like Black Lives Matter, feminism, or LGBTQ+ rights are still necessary. Too many of us like to imagine racism ended with slavery, or with the Civil Rights movement, or that it only reappeared with the headlines of 2020. We want to believe sexism ended when women got the vote or when bras hit the bonfire.

But bigotry didn’t begin with the murder of George Floyd or the #MeToo movement. Bigotry is still alive and well, and there has never been a period in our history when it wasn’t.

If your idea of bigotry begins and ends with the headlines of 2020, you may not recognize it when it’s wearing a suit and smiling from a boardroom.

📚 It’s Not Just Cartoons

I mention cartoons, because they’re an introduction for young people to concepts they will face as adults. But this isn’t limited to Disney vaults and Saturday morning reruns. The same instinct shows up every time schools pull Huckleberry Finn off the shelf because of the N-word, or parents demand To Kill a Mockingbird disappear because the subject matter makes them uncomfortable.

t’s easy to dismiss the topic when we’re just talking about cartoons, but it’s all censorship — whether books, films, or cartoons. And it’s all about hiding who we used to be and how we got here. Some of the greatest works of the 19th and 20th centuries are routinely removed from libraries and school curricula. Titles like:

Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (language, racial slurs)
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird (racial themes, slurs, depictions of rape)
J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye (profanity, sexuality, “undermining authority”)
George Orwell – 1984 (political themes; banned for being both “communist” and “anti-communist”)
Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451 (yes, the book about censorship gets censored)
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World (sexuality, drug use, anti-religious themes)
John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men (slurs, offensive language, violence)
Toni Morrison – Beloved (sexual violence, race, trauma — often pulled from schools)
Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (sexual abuse, racism)
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five (language, sexuality, anti-war themes)

And it’s even happening with more recent works:

Angie Thomas – The Hate U Give (police violence, race, profanity)
Art Spiegelman – Maus (graphic Holocaust depictions, nudity — banned in Tennessee in 2022)

Even Hollywood gets nervous. Gone With the Wind was briefly pulled from HBO Max before being restored with a historical disclaimer — which was the right move. Because here’s the truth: Rhett and Scarlett don’t stop being racists just because you hide the movie. All you’ve done is make it harder for a new generation to understand how racism was glamorized for decades as “romance.”

We can’t keep pretending uncomfortable history doesn’t exist. That’s not progress. That’s cosplay.

🫣 Don’t Hide the Truth

The answer isn’t censorship. It never is. If we haven’t learned that from the First Amendment, maybe we never will. The answer is context.

Keep the media available.
Add disclaimers or educational introductions. (HBO did this with Gone With the Wind, and it was the right call.)
Teach people how to watch old media critically instead of pretending it never existed.

Talk about it. Teach it. Share it. Help people understand the implications.

Historical literacy beats historical amnesia every time.

🔥 Why This Matters

It isn’t just about hiding old cartoons. When we whitewash, we lose cultural memory. We lose the ability to recognize how prejudice morphs over time. And we create shallow activism built on sanitized narratives instead of messy truths.

We’re not perfect. We never have been. We never will be.

But at least if we can track and understand our history, we have a slim shot at not repeating it.

You don’t defeat bigotry by hiding it.
You defeat it by dragging it into the light, pointing at it, and saying: “This is what we were. And this is what we’re never going to be again.”