Maybe a Wolf Can: how Balto teaches young people about race, ethnicity, discrimination and equity.

Who could forget the classic movie from 1995 starring Kevin Bacon as the title character?

When I lived in New York City, I made a point of it to find Balto in Central Park as often as I could. When I started training for the Brooklyn Half after a long recovery from a debilitating injury, I ran by Balto on my long runs across the Queensborough Bridge for inspiration.

It wasn’t until a conversation with a friend and a recent re-watching of the film that I realized why I felt such an attachment to the story.

Balto is the way in to teaching the next generation of young people about race, ethnicity, discrimination, prejudice, and above all, equity.

How can a 90s children film do all of that?

Balto: a hero for mixed-race children

Balto is described in the film as half dog half wolf. He is shunned from the “civilized” dogs for being part beast. The pack of wolves surrounding Nome also exclude him because compared to the rest of the wolf-pack, he is a runt. My mixed race kids raise your hands. I know you can empathize with this. Mixed race people exist in two spheres of cultural identity without fully fitting in to either. As a mixed race person myself, I remember vividly the microaggressions from both white and Chinese peers. I wasn’t fully either, so I was neither. The journey Balto goes through, the lessons he learns, related to the struggles of those who don’t fit neatly into the preconceived notions of identity. As he comes into himself and embraces his own duality, mixed race children can do the same.

A dog cannot make this journey alone. But maybe, a wolf can.

This duality becomes incredibly important as our protagonist journeys with his band of outcasts through the rugged terrain of Alaska to retrieve the missing antitoxin and deliver it to the children of Nome who are in the midst of a diphtheria outbreak. Boris, the Russian goose who acts as Balto’s friend and mentor, reminds Balto in the hardest moment of the journey that the version of himself that honors only one part of his heritage is the part that has failed to complete the journey thus far.

Domesticated dogs have lost some of the grit and ingenuity that keep wolves alive in the wild. By embracing the other part of his identity, the part that he constantly tries to hide, Balto rises out of the blizzard, climbs the side of a dangerous mountain and pulls the crate of antitoxin to safety. A wolf would have loyalty to his clan and leave the antitoxin. A dog would not have the strength to reuse the antitoxin in such adverse conditions. The two sides of Balto work together to ensure that a village of young children survive.

Discrimination

Balto is ostracized from the community of dogs and lives in the outskirts of Nome in an abandoned ship with the other outcasts, Boris. a goose, and Muk and Luk, wayward polar bears who cannot swim. Balto is prohibited by both humans and dogs to move through the town.

Save for one dog, Jenna, the rest of the dog community treats Balto as a second class citizen because of his wolf heritage. They tease him. They mock him. They exclude him. They prohibit him from competing in the dogsled races, even though his genetic diversity provides him with skill far superior to the other dogs. When he does manage to win a race with his skill, the other dogs sabotage his opportunity to be a part of the group because they see Balto as inferior.

Very clearly, Balto is the target of prejudice because of his heritage. Both humans and dogs alike treat Balto as a diseased and uncivilized beast because he is half wolf. Steele frames Balto for stealing sausages by capitalizing on the prejudicial attitude of the Nome community against wolves or, in Balto’s case, “wolf-dogs”.

The beautiful part of this story is that we see how the prejudice and discrimination effect Balto. We see his sadness. We feel his pain. We feel shame when he is excluded. That empathy for Balto can translate into the real world for young children. Using Balto as a teaching tool, we can impart to children the way in which other children feel when we behave in a way that is similar to Steele and the other dogs.

Superordinate Goals

What social scientists know is that contact is not the solution to equity. Let me clarify. In today’s sociopolitical climate, a few terms get thrown around. Most important for this conversation are diversity and inclusion. Diversity is many different things in close proximity to each other. Inclusion, on the other hand, is the concept most people have been taught to label as “diversity”. Inclusion means the integration and equality of the different things in close proximity to each other. Just because a city is diverse does not mean its inclusive. You can have many different ethnic group existing in the same space but until those group have equal access to resources, enjoy equal freedoms, equally inhabit the space, there is no inclusion. The goal should be inclusion. Diversity weighs less in the conversation about striving for equity.

Social scientist have long known that the way to break down prejudicial attitudes and encourage true inclusion from different groups of people is through the vehicle of superordinate goals — essentially two separate groups of people working together to achieve the same goal (for more info just google the robbers cave experiment).

Back to Balto: in order to save the town’s children, a team of misfits and pedigree dogs banded together to deliver the antitoxin from the train station to Nome in extremely hazardous conditions. This is superordinate goals at its finest. When conflict continued, the two groups did not make progress. When they worked together, they saved the town. Children often need examples of how two objectively different individuals or groups can work together. It doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict to navigate, as clearly displayed in Balto. Simply, working together will save lives and ultimately lead to the destruction of inherited prejudice.

BONUS: Steele. Toxic Masculinity at its finest.

Steele is the male antagonist of the story. He is the perfect example of toxic masculinity. He believes that athletic prowess makes him superior to all other dogs. He views female dogs as trophies. He refuses to engage in deeply felt emotions. He uses caricatures of these emotions in an attempt to manipulate Jenna. He believes he has a right to Jenna. He openly discriminates against Balto. He keeps in place a culture that does not allow for deviation from his norm. Steele’s downfall and the restoration of justice in Nome amongst the dogs allows the viewer to see a world without his toxicity. It looks pretty nice.

In an age where Pixar is churning out animated features that deal with incredibly necessary topics for young people to engage with, let’s take a look back at a classic film that set a precedent for the future. Balto is an underrated animated feature that has the potential to be as impactful as Inside Out. Given the current sociopolitical climate, with the normalization of blatant racism and the resegregation of American schools, it’s time to use all the tools at our disposal to create change. I dream of a future in which being mixed race is not the exception but the rule, where different cultures come together in one person, where we are not afraid of what is different but invite it in to our homes and hearts.

Thank you, Balto. I’d be lost without you.