The Lyin’ King

As a kid (and adult) if I heard “The Circle of Life” playing I would get very excited.The Lion King is my favorite Disney movie, but one thing still confuses me about the film: Why were all of the animals so happy during the opening scene? Sure the lions loved singing about the circle of life, but for a zebra wouldn’t the song justify its death in order to feed someone else?

As Ian Haney-Lopez describes in an interview, this is an example of dog whistle politics. Whether or not all of the animals in the kingdom explicitly hear it, the song validates the predators’ perceived need to kill others. The song is a metaphor for racialized political rhetoric. According to Haney-Lopez, among the prey are the poor white Republican voters who would rather be perceived as hard-working than support a policy that would benefit them.

This “strategic racism,” as Haney-Lopez describes it, has resulted in a Republican Party that is supported predominately by white voters, and a Democratic Party that has a virtual monopoly on African-American voters. The Republican Party is certainly not alone in their racial rhetoric. In “Race and Party Competititon in America,” Paul Frymer argued that the Democratic Party has “an incentive to appeal almost exclusively to the majority group,” (6) because African-Americans are a “captured group” (9). The lions on Pride Rock have no reason to openly take a platform that benefits prey because they know that prey would never support hyenas. Meanwhile, the Republican Party embodies the advice that Mufasa gave Simba when he told him that their kingdom is “everything the light touches,” but nothing more. No matter what the Republican Party has done the African-American vote has remained loyal to the Democratic Party, so trying to appeal to minority groups would hurt them.