ENTRY 9: The Color of Friendship

(Picture from DisneyChannel.com, http://tv.disney.go.com/disneychannel/originalmovies/index.html)


The Color of Friendship is a 2000 Disney Channel Original Movie starring Lindsey Haun (as Mahree Bok) and Shadia Simmons (as Piper Dellums). The movie is set in South Africa and Washington D.C. during the apartheid era. Mahree is a white South African whose father is a policeman, and an overjoyed man after finding out that activist Steven Biko has been caught by South African authorities. Piper is a black American living in Washington D.C. as a daughter of US Congressman Ron Dellums, who extremely opposes the apartheid system and oppression of black South Africans. Mahree has been chosen to spend a semester abroad with the Dellums family, but is surprised to find that the Dellums are black. Piper and her family are also surprised to see that Mahree is white. At first there is tension between Mahree and the Dellums, but they soon get to know each other and get along. It is during this time that Mahree realizes that blacks and white can live together without fighting all the time. But when Steven Biko is killed by the South Africa police mass protests around the world take place, and employees from the South African embassy take Mahree away from the Dellums family. Congressman Dellums hears about this and threatens the South African embassy of kidnapping Mahree. Things settle down and Mahree returns to the Dellums, with a new realization of the happenings in her home country. With the apartheid abolished and blacks liberated, Mahree returns home with a better knowledge of everything she just experienced.

I picked this movie because it was unlike a lot of Disney Channel movies. Most DC movies are about individual teenage issues, but The Color of Friendship focuses on a more serious matter that was discussed globally. The movie didn’t really hold back in their message to viewers, which made the film that much more powerful. I think that it’s important that kids know about this, and the Disney Channel definitely got a hit movie (which won an Emmy in 2000).

Race is more than evident in this movie especially with the surprising reaction from both Mahree and the Dellums when they first meet each other. As a cultural creation over time, race is a concept that puts people into certain groups because of certain characteristics. The grouping of people is merely a creation of humans over time, and is not necessarily true or set in stone. Mahree expected the Dellums to be white, and the Dellums expected Mahree to be black. Mahree classified all Americans as white and when she found out that the Dellums weren’t white, she was shocked. She was not used to do this because she is not used to being black people, or being on the same level as blacks (the only black person she knew was her maid back home, but even the maid was inferior to her). The Dellums were the same way and were surprised to have a white South African in their home. They too were probably not used to this because they thought that Mahree would see them as inferior, like the black South African Steven Biko. Classifying people into races according to their physical attributes only produces harmful effects. In Race: The Power of an Illusion, Part I, The Difference Between Us, Hammonds says that humans created race and used it in so many negative ways, that we are the only ones who can unmake it. This is shown in the movie with abolishing the apartheid and liberating black South Africans.

When I first saw this movie in 2000 I didn’t know about the apartheid and was kind of disappointed that the Disney Channel made this movie. It wasn’t like any of their other movies, so it was disappointing. But as I watched it later on, I was more aware of the issues happening in the movie, and therefore I had a better appreciation for it. It wouldn’t really surprise me if what happened to Mahree in the movie (being taken away by the embassy after Biko was killed) really happened in real life during that time.


Race: The Power of An Illusion, Part I, The Difference Between Us , 2003. http://dvss.bgsu.edu/vss- bin/vss_SR/bgsu/search?location=&query=race
+power+illusion&initialpage=0