The fairy tale Snow White has always struck me as kind-of an odd story to be so often told and re-told in our culture, since there seems to be such a racist undercurrent in it. The wicked Queen is obsessed with being “the fairest of them all”, and when she says that, she’s talking about skin color!* So she thinks that if she’s the whitest person, she’s better than everyone else. Isn’t that like that old caste system? I don’t know if it was intended, but the whole thing seems pretty racist to me!
Maybe it’s not so much racist though, as anti-racism, since the wicked Queen is the one who is such a white-supremacist; but isn’t the story also equating Snow White’s skin-color to her goodness and innocence? Maybe it’s intended to be just a metaphor, but it’s also being treated as literal, what with her name being associated with her skin tone and all. So no matter how you slice it, this story seems inordinately concerned with skin-color-oriented prestige, and as such is suffused with racist undertones.
But what I can’t understand is the Queen’s lack of resourcefulness in dealing with this problem! What’s really at issue here? It’s just the fact that some other girl has whiter skin than the Queen, right? So why doesn’t the Queen get someone to take Snow White to the beach once in a while so she'd get a tan? Then the Queen would be "the fairest of them all" again! Or maybe she ought to get Ms. White a tanning bed for her birthday. Then the Queen could run ads on TV making it seem like being tan is all the rage, and Snow White, being a young impressionable girl, would be peer-pressured into wanting to be tan all the time, right? And then there would be this tanning bed right there for her to use! At the very worst, the Queen could get some guy to hold Snow White down while somebody else sprays a spray-tan on her. All of these measures would have dealt effectively with this skin-color issue without calling for violence or murder plots, and the Queen would have still been alive and happy by the end of the story. It might not cure her of her white-supremacy, but heck, at least everybody would be able to tolerate one another and live together in peace, right?
But hey: Maybe the moral of the story is that racism (as exemplified in the wicked Queen) makes you crazy and is destructive to everyone, especially yourself. And if that’s the case, perhaps it’s justifiably a timeless classic for the ages.
* When I was a child, I thought “fair” meant pretty (actually, I think it did in the olden days, as in: “I must save the fair maiden!”), but it’s actually a reference to skin-tone in this case, I think: otherwise, why call the heroine “Snow White”? Either that, or they’re equating light skin-tone to beauty or value, and that’s perhaps even more racist!
