Black Pople In Old Cartoons - I Never Realized That's What They Were Supposed To Be

I just figured out why I never interpreted a lot of old 40's/50's/etc. cartoons with black people depicted as having black people in them when I was a kid.

(Such as this one.) (Via this, via this.)

There's so often this weird pale area around the mouth that takes up half the face.

I associate that w/ animals. (i.e. fur stopping and skin showing)

I'm pretty sure that as a kid, I never realized those were supposed to be illustrations of people, rather than illustrations of animals w/ dark fur & light skin walking around on two feet. Badly-explained animals or something (i.e. not clear, and never indicated, just what kind they were supposed to be distortions of).

(At that age, I didn't recognize any of the geographically- or racially-"identifying" words they were speaking as such.)

Now, what I'm not sure of is whether I ever noticed that "unidentified nondescript animals" were generally in cotton-picking-and-dancing cartoons, and that activities like the ones I & my relatives did were generally performed by type-identifiable (and often light-furred/feathered) animals.

Huh.