On subsequent viewings, I’ve come to believe that the big issue with Zootopia isn’t that it functions as an apologia for racial bigotry, but that it’s operating on a fundamentally incorrect notion of what racial bigotry actually is.

Speaking as a college-educated, upper middle class white dude, what I often see among my peers - and I’m not going to claim I’ve never fallen into this trap myself - is a pervasive notion that racism is a rational response to an incorrect understanding of the world. That is, it starts with being given bad information - say, that a particular group is naturally violent - and the actual practice of racism springs from operating under the resulting honest misconception.

Watching the film again, I’m struck that the entire second half of the plot only makes sense if this is how you think racism works. The citywide racial panic that forms the second-act climax doesn’t boil over until Judy inadvertently furnishes the mob with a rational justification for their prejudice, and upon the discovery of empirical evidence that refutes that justification, the tension evaporates more or less immediately.

At a charitable reading, Zootopia suffers from a sort of short-sighted utopianism - i.e., the idea that racism could be cured if only people would understand a few things about how the world works. Less charitably… well, there’s a couple of reasons that this understanding of how racial bigotry works is so popular among my particular peer group.

First off, it diminishes personal culpability for racism in practice, allowing one to say: “my actions were reasonable in light of my understanding of the situation - I’d simply been given bad facts.”

More perniciously, however - and this is a big part of the reason it’s so attractive to the college crowd - is that it allows one to hold up one’s education as a shield against allegations of racism. “I can’t possibly be racist,” the defence goes, “racism is born of ignorance and I’m not ignorant. I have a piece of paper to prove it!”

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a calculated stance on the film’s part, but given the obvious target demographic of most of the background jokes, I’m wouldn’t rule it out, either.

