I remember the moment I truly recognized the power Disney has to move young hearts and minds.
It was when I attended a sneak preview of Disney’s adaptation of the Chinese legend of Mulan, about a young woman who disguises herself as a man and takes up her wounded father’s sword to defend her nation.
I enjoyed the movie, with its combination of swashbuckling, slapstick and show tunes. But as I filed out of the theater, what I saw hit me like a fire-dragon rocket: two blond, apple-cheeked siblings, probably under the age of eight, leaping and sparring and loudly arguing over the right to pretend to be the movie’s main character, Mulan. A boy and a girl, neither of them Asian, both so enthralled by the film’s Chinese protagonist that they each aspired to be her.
It reminded me that Disney doesn’t just tell stories; it shapes dreams, creating heroes iconic enough to inspire young kids to imagine and be more, and providing empowering figures that enable people from different backgrounds to see themselves – and one another.
It’s still staggering for me to think that Mulan, a story from China with a gender-blurred title role, was greenlit, made and released in 1998 and is now broadly accepted alongside Bambi as a timeless animated classic – especially now that Maga has announced it’s coming after the House of Mouse, with the apparent objective to make sure that nothing like it is ever made again.
On 27 March, the Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, Brendan Carr – a dead ringer for Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s mirthless toon-terrorizer Judge Doom – sent a letter to Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, informing him that he had directed the agency’s enforcement bureau to begin an investigation into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Carr stated that he wanted to ensure that Disney had not been “promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination”, calling out as examples the company’s employee affinity groups, its “Reimagine Tomorrow” multicultural showcase and especially the company’s “inclusion standards”, a set of goals that aim to increase the number of characters from underrepresented groups to half of the regular and recurring roles on its TV network, ABC.
It’s hard to explain why any of these are “discriminatory” or “invidious”; voluntary employee-led clubs – which have no restrictions or requirements for membership – are discriminatory? A website featuring remixes of Disney songs sung by artists of color and explanations of how to sign “Mickey Mouse” in ASL is invidious? Even the “inclusion standards” are just broadly aspirational objectives, which could be met in any number of ways: Disney’s definition of “underrepresented groups” includes women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, disabled persons and military veterans.
But the mere threat of the investigation hastriggered Disney to begin a cautious reframing of some of these initiatives. The Reimagine Tomorrow site is gone, and now points to a generic inclusion page headed by the message: “At Disney, we want everyone to belong and thrive.” The company’s business employee resource groups have been redubbed “belonging” employee resource groups.
Carr’s letter makes it clear that mere semantic shifts won’t be enough, demanding that Disney’s policies be “changed in a fundamental manner”. And while Carr cites “equal opportunity rules” and the need to ensure “fair and equal treatment under the law”, it’s obvious that he won’t be satisfied until Disney changes the one thing that the FCC is restricted from regulating by the US constitution: its content.
Of course, the first amendment prevents the government from infringing on freedom of expression, except in very narrowly delimited ways. Where the FCC is concerned, the only way it can impose its will on a creative company’s storytelling choices is if they are obscene, indecent or profane or contain dangerous disinformation. So the agency can’t just demand that Disney stop making shows about Asian princesses or Black superheroes or Latina anthropomorphic automobiles.
Yet that’s just what Carr is doing – using the back door of equal employment opportunity to claim that by casting people who aren’t straight or white or male in its movies and TV programs, Disney is unfairly withholding employment from straight white males. And unless Disney is ready to announce Timothée Chalamet as the new Black Panther, which, thank God, it isn’t, targeting the studio’s ability to hire diverse talent is a deliberate attempt to force it away from making diverse stories.
That would spell business disaster for Disney.
Yes, the studio has had its share of flops, which the Maga mob has blamed on multicultural casting – including, most recently, its unfairly pilloried live-action remake of the 1937 animated masterpiece Snow White, starring Rachel Zegler, whose mother is Colombian. The film, made on a $240m budget, has so far earned just $142m at the box office, its prospects poisoned by controversy over Zegler’s advocacy on behalf of Palestine and racist backlash over her Latina heritage from online creeps.
But similar attacks were also levied against Disney’s The Little Mermaid remake, starring the African American actor Halle Bailey as Ariel, and that film was a box-office success and global streaming blockbuster. It also made the storyline relevant in new ways to young women – which makes sense, given that Disney’s goal with its remakes isn’t simply to photocopy the past, but to extend and refresh it, reaching untapped audiences of the present and emerging markets of the future.
If that means they sometimes swing and miss in the short term, in the long run it all evens out, because Disney doesn’t actually plan their business by quarter or year – they blueprint it by age bracket. Their franchises are designed to be evergreen and intentionally aligned to “graduate” kids up a ladder of content: girls go from Muppets to Disney Fairies to Disney princesses to Disney’s Descendants. Boys go from Cars to Pirates to Star Wars to Marvel superheroes. The ultimate goal is to ensure that there’s something for every stage of growing up until young adulthood arrives and their fans become parents themselves, allowing Disney to earn money across the consumer life cycle, generation after generation.
And every generation of Americans is more diverse. Baby boomers were 29% people of color. Gen X, 41%. Millennials, 46%, gen Z, 50%. The youngest rising cohort – those born after 2012, and currently squarely in Disney’s prime target demo – is officially the first to be “majority minority”, with kids of color making up a full 52% of gen Alpha.
Whatever Trump’s mandate may be, Disney’s demographic mandate should be stronger. The company defiantly and successfully resisted attempts by Ron DeSantis to strong-arm it into ending its diversity practices in Florida. While Trump’s flying assault is coming from a higher top rope, the Mouse should still be mighty enough to fend it off and roar back.
Disney’s incentive will be what it always has been: making money. But for diverse communities, the positive manifestation of Disney’s profit motive has been that kids growing up today know what it feels like to be mirrored in the media they consume, with all of the psychological and emotional benefits that confers.
I’ve seen this first-hand, as someone who grew up in an era nearly devoid of Asian representation in Hollywood, and who went through the bizarre experience of having my elder son, Hudson Yang, star in the first hit TV series focused on an Asian American family. To this day, Hudson still receives surprise hugs from people who grew up tuning into Fresh Off the Boat once a week, and wide-eyed stares from kids who have discovered it years later through TikTok clips and streaming reruns.
The network that aired the show for six seasons, beginning in 2014? Disney’s ABC, a decade before inclusion standards existed and before Maga was around to protest them. And that gives me optimism that Disney will keep doing what it has done so well for generations, regardless: give children from a wide array of backgrounds an answer – “now and here” – to the question in Mulan’s signature ballad: “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”
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