Remember the days when the Disney channel would come out with an original movie every month?

They would be called, cleverly, Disney Channel Original Movies? Most of them were pretty dumb. Fun to watch, but dumb. And then, in February of 2000, “The Color of Friendship” got released and everything we thought we knew about the Disney channel changed.

The studio that brought us such golden reflections on racial politics as “Peter Pan,” “Pocahontas” and “The Lion King” suddenly tackled South African apartheid like it was born for the job. Five incredibly short years after black South Africans cast their votes for the first time in history and Nelson Mandela was elected President, the freaking Disney channel was making movies about political assassinations and the Afrikaaner equivalent of the n-word. Then the movie won an Emmy. People sat up a little straighter and started paying attention.

Mahree Bok (Lindsay Haun) is a white South African student in 1977 who gets chosen to study abroad in Washington, D.C. for a semester. Her family is wealthy, Nationalist (supporters of apartheid) and employs many black servants. Her host family, on the other hand, is NOT WHITE. Surprises all around. Sobbing and wanting to go home and confusion and anger on all sides.

But things get better. Piper Dellums (Shadia Simmons), Mahree’s same-age host sister, stops hating Mahree when they go shopping together. Don’t forget this IS Disney, however righteous the cause.

Then Black Nationalist Steve Biko is murdered in South Africa, and Mahree must decide for herself whether to flee home to her ecstatic parents or stay with her new family and fight the system that killed Biko.

If you are uninformed about the struggle in South Africa, I truly think this is a good movie to start with. I mean it. The fall of apartheid is perhaps the greatest humanitarian victory of the last century. And it all starts with friends, people. Friends and Disney.

(2000)