That's incredible!!!
From the article: As Timothy mouse, Dumbo’s only circus friend, remarks, “What’s wrong with his ears? … I think they’re rather decorative”. There is a very good answer to that question, and it’s so obvious that I struggle to understand how it has gone unremarked for all these years. What’s wrong with his ears is that they’re African elephant’s ears. Circus elephants belong to the tractable Asian species, characterized by their small, limp ears like leather rags. When Dumbo sneezes, he unfurls a pair of enormous horizontal ears, much more like the flaring coronal arrangement of the African elephant – a wild and uncompliant animal. If we translate this back into the anthropomorphic world of the movie, what it irresistibly implies is that Dumbo, the “baby with eyes of blue”, is half-African. In other words, he’s mixed-race. Concealed in this children’s cartoon, unnoticed over time, lies a civil rights fable concerning what used to be called miscegenation: the intermarriage of blacks and whites. The contemporary audience missed this, being too imbued with a culture where all acts of prejudice took their cues from the segregationist model to notice anything particular about the things that happen to Dumbo. Since then, many commentators have inspected Disney’s oeuvre for racist tropes. But no one looks at the elephant.