The History of Negative Black Stereotypes, The Brute Caricature (Warning LONG ASS READ!)

[Maximus Rex]

Both American slavery and the Jim Crow caste system which followed were undergirded by anti-black images. The negative portrayals of blacks were both reflected in and shaped by everyday material objects: toys, postcards, ashtrays, detergent boxes, fishing lures, children's books. These items, and countless others, portrayed blacks with bulging, darting eyes, fire-red and oversized lips, jet black skin, and either naked or poorly clothed. The majority of these objects did not use the word nigger; however, many did. In 1874, the McLoughlin Brothers of New York manufactured a puzzle game called "Chopped Up Niggers." Beginning in 1878, the B. Leidersdory Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, produced NiggerHair Smoking Tobacco - several decades later the name was changed to BiggerHair Smoking Tobacco. In 1917, the American Tobacco Company had a NiggerHair redemption promotion. NiggerHair coupons were redeemable for "cash, tobacco, S. & H. Green stamps, or presents."

A 1916 magazine advertisement, copyrighted by Morris & Bendien, showed a black child drinking ink. The caption read, "Nigger Milk."

The J. Millhoff Company of England produced a series of cards (circa 1930s), which were widely distributed in the United States. One of the cards shows ten small black dogs with the caption: "Ten Little Nigger Boys Went Out To Dine." This is the first line from the popular children's story "The Ten Little Niggers."

Ten Little Nigger Boys went out to dine;

One choked his little self, and then there were Nine.

Nine Little Nigger Boys sat up very late;

One overslept himself, and then there were Eight.

Eight Little Nigger Boys traveling in Devon;

One said he'd stay there, and then there were Seven.

Seven Little Nigger Boys chopping up sticks;

One chopped himself in halves, and then there were Six.

Six Little Nigger Boys playing with a hive;

A Bumble-Bee stung one, and then there were Five.

Five Little Nigger Boys going in for Law;

One got in Chancery, and then there were Four.

Four Little Nigger Boys going out to Sea;

A Red Herring swallowed one, and then there were Three.

Three Little Nigger Boys walking in the Zoo;

The big Bear hugged one, and then there were Two;

Two Little Nigger Boys sitting in the Sun;

One got frizzled up, and then there was One.

One Little Nigger Boy living all alone;

He got married, and then there were None.(Jolly Jingles, n.d.)

In 1939, Agatha Christie, the popular fiction writer, published a novel called Ten Little Niggers. Later editions sometimes changed the name to Ten Little Indians, or And Then There Were None, but as late as 1978, copies of the book with the original title were being produced into the 1980s. It was not rare for sheet music produced in the first half of the 20th century to use the word nigger on the cover. The Howley, Haviland Company of New York, produced sheet music for the songs "Hesitate Mr. Nigger, Hesitate," and "You'se Just A Little Nigger, Still You'se Mine, All Mine." The latter was billed as a children's lullaby.

Some small towns used nigger in their names, for example, Nigger Run Fork, Virginia. Nigger was a common name for darkly colored pets, especially dogs, cats, and horses. So-called "Jolly Nigger Banks," first made in the 1800s, were widely distributed as late as the 1960s. Another common item - with many variants, produced on posters, postcards, and prints - is a picture of a dozen black children rushing for a swimming hole. The captions read, "Last One In's A Nigger."

The racial hierarchy, which began during slavery and extended into the Jim Crow period, has been severely eroded by a civil rights movement, landmark Supreme Court decisions, a black empowerment movement, comprehensive civil rights legislation, and a general embracing of democratic principles by many American citizens. Yet, the word nigger has not died. The relationship between the word nigger and anti-black prejudice is symbiotic: that is, they are interrelated and interconnected, yet, ironically, not automatically interdependent. In other words, a racist society created nigger and continues to feed and sustain it; however, the word no longer needs racism, at least brutal and obvious forms, to exist. Nigger now has a life of its own.

 

[Maximus Rex]

One of the most interesting and perplexing phenomena in American speech is the use of nigger by African Americans. When used by blacks, nigger refers to the following: all blacks ("A nigger can't even get a break."); black men ("Sisters want niggers to work all day long."); blacks who behave in a stereotypical, and sometimes mythical, manner ("He's a lazy, good-for-nothing nigger."); things ("This piece-of-shit car is such a nigger."); foes ("I'm sick and tired of those niggers bothering me!"); and friends ("Me and my niggers are tight.").

This final usage, as a term of endearment, is especially problematic. "Sup Niggah," has become an almost universal greeting among young urban blacks. When pressed, blacks who use nigger or its variants claim the following: it has to be understood contextually; continual use of the word by blacks will make it less offensive; it is not really the same word because whites are saying nigger (and niggers) but blacks are saying nigh (and niggaz); and, it is just a word and blacks should not be prisoners of the past or the ugly words which originated in the past. These arguments are not convincing. Brother (Brotha) and Sister (Sistha or Sista) are terms of endearment. Nigger was and remains a term of derision. Moreover, the false dichotomy between blacks or African Americans (respectable and middle-class) and niggers (disrespectable and lower class) should be opposed. No blacks are niggers, irrespective of behavior, income, ambition, clothing, ability, morals, or skin color. Finally, if continued use of the word lessened its sting then nigger would by now have no sting. Blacks, beginning in slavery, have internalized the negative images that white society cultivated and propagated about black skin and black people. This is reflected in periods of self- and same-race loathing. The use of the word nigger by blacks reflects this loathing, even when the user is unaware of the psychological forces at play. Nigger is the ultimate expression of white racism and white superiority no matter how it is pronounced. It is a linguistic corruption, a corruption of civility. Nigger is the most infamous word in American culture. Some words carry more weight than others. At the risk of hyperbole, is genocide just another word? Pedophilia? Obviously, no: neither is nigger.

After a period of relative dormancy, the word nigger has been reborn in popular culture. It is hard-edged, streetwise, and it has crossed over into movies like Pulp Fiction (Bender & Tarantino, 1994) and Jackie Brown (Bender & Tarantino, 1997), where it became a symbol of "street authenticity" and hipness. Denzel Washington's character in Training Day (Newmyer, Silver & Fuqua, 2001) uses nigger frequently and harshly.

Richard Pryor long ago disavowed the use of the word in his comedy act, but Chris Rock and Chris Tucker, the new black male comedy kings, use nigger regularly - and not affectionately. Justin Driver (2001), a social critic, argued persuasively that both Rock and Tucker are modern minstrels - shucking, jiving, and grinning, in the tradition of Stepin Fetchit.

Poetry by African Americans is also instructive, as one finds nigger used in black poetry over and over again. Major and minor poets alike have used it, often with startling results: Imamu Amiri Baraka, one of the most gifted of our contemporary poets, uses nigger in one of his angriest poems, "I Don't Love You."

. . .and what was the world to the words of slick nigger fathers too depressed to explain why they could not appear to be men. (1969, p. 55)

One wonders: how are readers supposed to understand "nigger fathers"? Baraka's use of this imagery, regardless of his intention, reinforces the stereotype of the worthless, hedonistic Coon caricature. Ted Joans's use of nigger in "The Nice Colored Man" makes Baraka's comparatively harmless and innocent. Joans tells the story about how he came to write this unusual piece. He was, he says, asked to give a reading in London because he was a "nice colored man." Infuriated by the labels "nice" and "colored", Joans set down the quintessential truculent poem. While the poem should be read in its entirety, a few lines will suffice:

. . .Smart Black Nigger Smart Black Nigger Smart Black Nigger Smart Black Nigger Knife Carrying Nigger Gun Toting Nigger Military Nigger Clock Watching Nigger Poisoning Nigger Disgusting Nigger Black Ass Nigger. . . (Henderson, 1972, pp. 223-225)

This is the poem, with adjective upon adjective attached to the word nigger. The shocking reality is that many of these uses can be heard in contemporary American society. Herein lies part of the problem: the word nigger persists because it is used over and over again, even by the people it defames. Devorah Major, a poet and novelist, said, "It's hard for me to say what someone can or can't say, because I work with language all the time, and I don't want to be limited." Opal Palmer Adisa, a poet and professor, claims that the use of nigger or nigga is "the same as young people's obsession with cursing. A lot of their use of such language is an internalization of negativity about themselves." (Allen-Taylor, 1998).

 

[Maximus Rex]

Rap musicians, themselves poets, rap about niggers before mostly white audiences, some of whom see themselves as waggers (white niggers) and refer to one another as "my nigh." Snoop Doggy Dogg, in his single, "You Thought," raps,

"Wanna grab a skinny nigha like Snoop Dogg

Cause you like it tall

and work it baby doll."

Tupac Shakur (1991), one of the most talented and popular rap musicians, had a song called "Crooked Ass Nigga." The song's lyrics included, "

Now I could be a crooked nigga too

When I'm rollin' with my crew

Watch what crooked niggers do

I got a nine millimeter Glock pistol

I'm ready to get with you at the tip of a whistle

So make your move and act like you wanna flip

I fired thirteen shots and popped another clip."

Rap lyrics which debase women and glamorize violence reinforce the historical Brute caricature

Erdman Palmore (1962) researched ethnophaulisms and made the following observations: the number of ethnophaulisms used correlates positively with the amount of out-group prejudice; and ethnophaulisms express and support negative stereotypes about the most visible racial and cultural differences.

White supremacists have found the Internet an indispensable tool for spreading their message of hate. An Internet search of nigger locates many anti-black web pages: Niggers Must Die, Hang A Nigger For America, Nigger Joke Central, and literally thousands of others. Visitors to these sites know, like most blacks know experientially, that nigger is an expression of anti-black antipathy. Is it surprising that nigger is the most commonly used racist slur during hate crimes?

No American minority group has been caricatured as often, in as many ways, as have blacks. These caricatures combined distorted physical descriptions and negative cultural and behavior stereotypes. The Coon caricature, for example, was a tall, skinny, loose-jointed, dark-skinned male, often bald, with oversized, ruby-red lips. His clothing was either ragged and dirty or outlandishly gaudy. His slow, exaggerated gait suggested laziness. He was a pauper, lacking ambition and the skills necessary for upward social mobility. He was a buffoon. When frightened, the Coon's eyes bulged and darted. His speech was slurred, halted, and replete with malapropisms. His shrill, high-pitched voice made whites laugh. The Coon caricature dehumanized blacks, and served as a justification for social, economic, and political discrimination.

Nigger may be viewed as an umbrella term - a way of saying that blacks have the negative characteristics of the Coon, Buck, Tom, Mammy, Sambo, Picaninny, and other anti-black caricatures. Nigger, like the caricatures it encompasses and implies, belittles blacks, and rationalizes their mistreatment. The use of the word or its variants by blacks has not significantly lessened its sting. This is not surprising. The historical relationship between European Americans and African Americans was shaped by a racial hierarchy which spanned three centuries. Anti-black attitudes, values, and behavior were normative. Historically, nigger more than any word captured the personal antipathy and institutionalized racism directed toward blacks. It still does.

© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology, and Dr. Phillip Middleton, Professor of Languages and Literature,

Ferris State University.

Sept., 2001

Edited 2012

 

[Maximus Rex]

The Sapphire Caricture

http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/sapphire/

The Sapphire Caricature portrays black women as rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing.(1) This is the Angry Black Woman (ABW) popularized in the cinema and on television. She is tart-tongued and emasculating, one hand on a hip and the other pointing and jabbing (or arms akimbo), violently and rhythmically rocking her head, mocking African American men for offenses ranging from being unemployed to sexually pursuing white women. She is a shrill nagger with irrational states of anger and indignation and is often mean-spirited and abusive. Although African American men are her primary targets, she has venom for anyone who insults or disrespects her. The Sapphire's desire to dominate and her hyper-sensitivity to injustices make her a perpetual complainer, but she does not criticize to improve things; rather, she criticizes because she is unendingly bitter and wishes that unhappiness on others. The Sapphire Caricature is a harsh portrayal of African American women, but it is more than that; it is a social control mechanism that is employed to punish black women who violate the societal norms that encourage them to be passive, servile, non-threatening, and unseen.

Sapphire Stevens

From the 1800s through the mid-1900s, black women were often portrayed in popular culture as "Sassy Mammies" who ran their own homes with iron fists, including berating black husbands and children. These women were allowed, at least symbolically, to defy some racial norms. During the Jim Crow period, when real blacks were often beaten, jailed, or killed for arguing with whites, fictional Mammies were allowed to pretend-chastise whites, including men. Their sassiness was supposed to indicate that they were accepted as members of the white family, and acceptance of that sassiness implied that slavery and segregation were not overly oppressive. A well-known example of a Sassy Mammy was Hattie McDaniel, a black actress who played feisty, quick-tempered mammies in many movies, including Judge Priest (Wurtzel & Ford, 1934), Music is Magic (Stone & Marshall, 1935), The Little Colonel (DeSylva & Butler, 1935), Alice Adams (Berman & Stevens, 1935), Saratoga (Hyman & Conway, 1937), The Mad Miss Manton (Wolfson & Jason, 1938), and Gone With the Wind (Selznick & Fleming, 1939). In these roles she was sassy (borderline impertinent) but always loyal. She was not a threat to the existing social order.

It was not until the Amos 'n' Andy radio show that the characterization of African American women as domineering, aggressive, and emasculating shrews became popularly associated with the name Sapphire. The show was conceived by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white actors who portrayed the characters Amos Jones and Andy Brown by mimicking and mocking black behavior and dialect. At its best, Amos 'n' Andy was a situational comedy; at its worse, it was an auditory minstrel show. (2) The show, with a mostly-white cast, aired on the radio from 1928 to 1960, with intermittent interruptions. The television version of the show, with network television's first all-black cast, aired on CBS from 1951-53, with syndicated reruns from 1954 to 1966. It was removed, in large part, through the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the civil rights movement. Both as a radio show (3) and television show, Amos 'n' Andy was extremely popular, and this was unfortunate for African Americans because it popularized racial caricatures of blacks. Americans learned that blacks were comical, not as actors but as a race.

Amos 'n Andy told stories about the everyday foibles of the members of the Mystic Knights of the Sea, a black fraternal lodge. The lead characters were Amos Jones, a Harlem taxi driver and his gullible friend, Andy Brown. Starring in a nontitle lead role was the character George "Kingfish" Stevens, the leader of the lodge. Many of the stories revolved around Kingfish, a get-rich-quick schemer and a con artist who avoided work, and, when possible, took financial advantage of the ignorance and naivete of Andy and others (see, for example, this clip from the episode Kingfish Sells a Lot). Kingfish was the prototypical Coon, a lazy, easily confused, chronically unemployed, financially inept buffoon given to malapropisms. Kingfish was married to Sapphire Stevens who regularly berated him as a failure.

Kingfish represented the worst in racial stereotyping; there was little redemptive about the character. His ignorance was highlighted by his nonsensical misuse of words, for example, ""I deny the allegation, Your Honor, and I resents the alligator," or "I'se regusted." Kingfish was not a good thinker or speaker. Even worse, he was a crook without scruples. He was too lazy to work and not above exploiting his wife and friends.

In other words, he was a television embodiment of some of the unforgiving ideas that many Americans had about black men. Other characters, including Lightnin,' a Stepin Fetchit-like character on the show, had jobs and were honest, but Kingfish's worthlessness justified Sapphire's harsh critique of his life. It must be noted, that Sapphire Stevens directed her disgust at her husband; hers was not the generalized anger that is today associated with angry black women.

1. In Yarbrough, M. with Bennett, C. (2000), the authors use these words to describe the Sapphire, "evil, bitchy, stubborn and hateful."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiixXgj4yE8

2. Here is an example from the episode, 1930. I'se Regusted [Radio series episode]. In Amos 'n' Andy.

(episode starts at approximately the 2:00 minute mark).

3. The peak of the show's popularity was 1930-31, when it attracted an audience of between 30 and 40 million people a night, six nights a week -- representing an astounding a third of the entire population of the United States.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Later Sapphires in Situational Comedies

Sue Jewell (1993), a sociologist, opined that the Sapphire image necessitates the presence of an African American man; "It is the African American male that represents the point of contention, in an ongoing verbal dual between Sapphire and the African American male ... (His) lack of integrity and use of cunning and trickery provides her with an opportunity to emasculate him through her use of verbal put downs" (p. 45). In the all-black or mostly-black situational comedies that have appeared on television from the 1970s to the present, the Sapphire is a stock character. Like Sapphire Stevens, she demeans and belittles lazy, ignorant, or otherwise flawed black male characters.

Blacks on television have been overrepresented in situational comedies and underrepresented in dramatic series; one problem with this imbalance is that blacks in situational comedies are portrayed in racially stereotypical ways in order to get laughs. Canned laughter prompts the television audience to laugh as the angry black woman, the Sapphire, insults and mocks black males.

Aunt Esther (also called Aunt Anderson) was a Sapphire character on the television situational comedy Sanford and Son, which premiered on NBC in 1972, with a final episode in 1977, and is still running in syndication. She was the Bible-swinging, angry nemesis and sister-in-law of the main character, Fred. Theirs was a love-mostly hate relationship. Fred would call Aunt Esther ugly and she would call him a "fish-eyed fool," an "old sucka," or a "beady-eyed heathen." Then, they would threaten to hit each other. Aunt Esther dominated her husband Woodrow, a mild-mannered alcoholic. In this latter relationship, you have the idea of the aggressive black woman dominating a weak, morally defective black man.

The situational comedy Good Times aired between 1974 and 1979 on the CBS television network. The show followed the life of the Evans family in a Chicago housing project modeled on the infamous Cabrini-Green projects. This was one of the first times that a poor family had been highlighted in a weekly television series. Episodes of Good Times dealt with the Evans' attempts to survive despite living in suffocating poverty. There were several racial caricatures on the show, most notably the son, James Evans Jr. (also called J.J.), who devolved into a Coon-like minstrel. After the first season the episodes increasingly focused on J.J.'s stereotypically buffoonish behavior. Esther Rolle, the actress who played the role of Florida Evans, the mother, expressed her dislike for J.J.'s character in a 1975 interview with Ebony magazine:

"He's eighteen and he doesn't work. He can't read or write. He doesn't think. The show didn't start out to be that...Little by little-with the help of the artist, I suppose, because they couldn't do that to me -- they have made J.J. more stupid and enlarged the role. Negative images have been slipped in on us through the character of the oldest child."("Bad Times" 1975)

In black-themed situational comedies when there is a Coon character there is often a Sapphire character to mock him. In Good Times a character that bantered with and mocked J.J. was his sister, Thelma. A clearer example of a Sapphire, however, was the neighbor, Willona Woods, though she rarely targeted J.J. Instead, Willona belittled Nathan Bookman, the overweight superintendent, and she put down a series of worthless boyfriends, an ex-husband, politicians, and other men with questionable morals and work ethics.

In situational comedies with a primarily black cast, the black male does not have to be lazy, thick-witted, or financially unsuccessful for him to be taunted by a Sapphire character. The Jeffersons, which aired from 1975 to 1985, focused on an upper-middle class family that had climbed up from the working class -- in the show's theme song there is the line, "We finally got a piece of the pie." George and Louise Jefferson were making so much money from their dry-cleaning businesses that they hired a housekeeper, Florence Johnston. Her relationship with George was often antagonistic and the back-talking, wisecracking, housekeeper approximated a Sapphire. She often teased George about his short stature, balding head, and decisions.

Another example of a Sapphire was the character Pamela (Pam) James, who appeared on Martin, a situational comedy that aired from 1992 to 1997 on Fox. Pam was a badmouthed, wisecracking friend/foe of the lead character, Martin. Tichina Arnold, the actress who played Pam, plays Rochelle, a dominating, aggressive matriarch in the situational comedy, Everybody Hates Chris, which ran from 2005 to 2009, and is still aired on cable television. Arnold has mastered the role of the angry, black woman.

Angry Black Women with Guns

The film genre called blaxploitation emerged in the early 1970s. These movies, which targeted urban black audiences, exchanged one set of racial caricatures -- Mammy, Tom, Uncle, Picanninny -- for a new set of equally offensive racial caricatures -- Bucks (sex-crazed deviants) Brutes, (pimps, hit-men, and dope peddlers), and Nats (Whites-haters). One old caricature, the Jezebel, was revamped. The portrayal of African American women as hyper-sexual temptresses was as old as American slavery, but during the blaxploitation period the Jezebel caricature and the Sapphire caricature merged into a hybrid: angry "whores" fighting injustice.Black actresses such as Pam Grier built careers starring in blaxploitation movies. Their characters resembled those of the black male superheroes: they were physically attractive and aggressive rebels, willing and able to use their bodies, brains, and guns to gain revenge against corrupt officials, drug dealers, and violent criminals. Their anger was not focused solely, or primarily, at black men; rather, it was focused at injustice and the perpetuators of injustice.

In the film Coffy (Papazian & Hill, 1973), Pam Grier (Coffy) plays a nurse by day and vigilante by night who conducts a brutal one-woman war on organized crime. In the movie, she pretends to be a "strung out whore" to get revenge on the drug dealers who got her little sister hooked on heroin. Coffy lures the culprits back to their room where she graphically shoots one in the head and gives the other a fatal dose of heroin. The remainder of the movie finds Coffy using guns and her body to punish King George, a flamboyant pimp, the sadistic mobster Arturo Vitroni, and every Mafioso and crooked cop who crosses her path.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Sapphire in the 21st Century

Today, the Sapphire is one of the dominant portrayals of black woman. This is evident by the words of Cal Thomas, a commentator for FOX Television:

"Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She's always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They're usually angry about something. They've had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don't really have a profile of non-angry black women, of whom there are quite a few."("Transcript: Fox", 2008)

Thomas, admittedly an untrained sociologist, expressed what many Americans see and internalize, namely, images of Sapphires: angry at black men, white men, white women, the federal government, racism, maybe life itself. Thomas, shortly after making his statements about black women, agreed with a co-panelist that Oprah Winfrey is not angry.

The portrayal of black women as angry Sapphires permeates this culture. A Google search of Angry Black Women or ABW will demonstrate how pervasive this caricature has become. She lives in most movies with an all-black or predominantly black cast. For example, there is Terri, cussing and insulting the "manhood" of black men in Barbershop (Brown, Teitel, Tillman & Story, 2002) and its sequel, Barbershop 2 (Gartner, Teitel, Tillman & Sullivan, 2004). There is the augmentative Angela in Why Did I Get Married (Cannon & Perry, 2007). There is clip art of an angry black woman athttp://www.clipartof.com/details/clipart/16467.html. The clip art description reads, "Royalty-free people clipart picture image of an angry african american woman in a purple dress and heels, standing with her arms crossed and tapping her foot with a stern expression on her face. She could be mad at her child, a colleague or husband." There are stock pictures of angry black women, such as those athttp://www.inmagine.com/bld108/bld108498-photo. There are books devoted to angry black women, for example, The Angry Black Woman's Guide to Life (Millner, Burt-Murray, & Miller, 2004), and Web sites such ashttp://angryblackbitch.blogspot.com/where you can buy Angry Black Bitch cups, shirts, pillows, tile coasters, aprons, mouse pads, and Teddy Bears. There is even a pseudo-malady called, "Angry Black Woman Syndrome."

The tabloid talk shows that became popular in the 1990s: The Jerry Springer Show, The Jenny Jones Show, The Maury Povich Show, and The Ricki Lake Show, helped reinforce the racial stereotypes of African Americans, including the stereotype of black women as angry, castrating shrews. By the early 2000s, the "Trash Talk" shows had receded in popularity, in part because of the emergence of so-called "Reality Shows." Again, these shows served as vehicles for African American women to be portrayed as Sapphires. Vanessa E. Jones, from the Boston Globe, wrote of the Sapphire:

"You see elements of her in Alicia Calaway of "Survivor: All-Stars," who indulged in a temperamental bout of finger wagging during an argument in 2001's "Survivor: The Australian Outback." Coral Smith, who rules with an iron tongue on MTV's "Real World/Road Rules Challenge: The Inferno," browbeat one female cast mate so badly a week ago that she challenged Smith to a fight. Then there's Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of "The Apprentice," who rode the angry-black-woman stereotype to the covers of People and TV Guide magazines even as she made fellow African-American businesswomen wince."(Jones, 2004)

Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth gained a great deal of national disdain and celebrity as a contestant on The Apprentice, Donald Trump's reality show. Manigault-Stallworth, who is almost always referred to by the single name Omarosa, was portrayed (and intentionally acted) as a cross between a Jezebel -- a hypersexual flirt and seductress -- and a bitter, aggressive Sapphire. Lorien Olive (2008), a political blogger, theorized on how white people saw Omarosa:

"At least among white people, she was interpreted in various ways as conniving, lazy, selfish, a sham, overly-ambitious, uppity, ungrateful, and paranoid. I guess I was always less interested in whether Omarosa was actually any of those things or whether it was simply an effect of the distortion of the editing of reality television. I was more interested in the fact that Omarosa seemed to stand for something bigger in the eyes of many white people. Her constant accusations of racism directed toward her fellow contestants and the fact that she wore her alienation and distrust of her team-mates on her sleeve opened up a whole world of racial speculation and ridicule. I would say debate, but in all of my internet travels, I haven't found much of anyone who wanted to go out on a limb for Omarosa. The fact that so many white people felt justified in their hatred for Omarosa (a hatred that could be passed of as a benign over-investment in a guilty pleasure: a reality TV series) is telling. She became the symbol of everything that went wrong in the post-Civil Rights Era: paranoid "reverse racism"; the ungrateful and undeserving product of affirmative action; the "uppity" Black person who puts on airs; the beautiful, hyper-sexualized Black woman who pulled the wool over the powerful white man's eyes."

Olive next makes a connection that many others are making on Internet sites, namely, that First Lady Michelle Obama is the new Omarosa: a bitter, selfish, uppity, ungrateful, overly-ambitious Sapphire. One of the derisive nicknames for Michelle Obama is "Omarosa Obama." This demonstrates how the Sapphire caricature has broadened from an emasculating hater of black men to a bitter woman who hates anyone who displeases her.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Michele Obama as Sapphire

Sociologists often speak of how dominant groups praise a behavior when done by its members, but criticize a minority group for demonstrating that behavior. To use sociological jargon, this is an example of an in-group virtue becoming an out-group vice. According to the blogger abagond (2008), "Where white women are said to be 'independent,' black women are said to be 'emasculating,' robbing their men of their sense of manhood. Where white women are said to be standing up for themselves, black women are seen as wanting a fight. And so on. The same actions are read differently." Being an articulate foe of injustice may be seen as a praise-worthy trait among whites; however, black women with similar traits may be seen as bitter, selfish complainers.

Michelle Obama challenges the scripts that many Americans have for African American women. She is the antithesis of the Mammy caricature. The traditional portrayal of Mammy looked something like this: an obedient, loyal domestic servant, who cared more for the family members of her employer than she did for her own family; overweight and desexualized; and, most important to the portrait: not a threat to the social order. Michelle Obama is a Harvard-trained attorney, a conscientious mother, physically attractive, and she critiques and challenges the culture. She also does not fit the Jezebel image or its modern variant: the butt-shaking Hoogie Mama -- though FOX News tried to imply this when they referred to her in text as Senator Obama's "Baby Mama." Michelle Obama is not a Tragic Mulatto; she is a dark-skinned woman actively involved in civil rights and community activism. The so-called Tragic Mulatto was ashamed of her African heritage; Michelle Obama embraces her African American heritage and expresses her dissatisfaction with racial injustice.

So, if she does not fit one of the three dominant historical caricatures of African American women, what imagery is left? Ideally, she would be judged on her individual traits and not as a one-dimensional stereotype; however, there is little ideal about patterns of race relations in this country. Racial stereotyping, too often, is a convenient way to pigeonhole others into categories that make sense to us. Instead of allowing Michelle Obama to be central to a new cultural narrative of black women (and the black family) there is a growing tendency to view Michelle Obama's words and behaviors as examples of the black woman as Sapphire. When she said, while speaking at a Milwaukee, Wisconsin political rally, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback," she was accused of being an unpatriotic, ungrateful, and angry radical. In this portrait, she is more Pam Grier (sans the gun and the hypersexuality) than Sapphire Stevens; her supposed bitterness and hatred are directed toward her country -- and implicitly its white citizens -- and not toward black men. Finally, there was a label to stick to her. According to Erin Aubry Kaplan (2008), a journalist and blogger:

"It's worth noting how Michelle was admired as long as she filled the prescription of a successful black woman on paper -- college grad, married to an equally successful black man, a working but attentive mother, financially secure, immaculately turned out. But as soon as she began revealing herself as a person and airing her views a bit, she began shape-shifting in the public eye into another kind of black woman altogether: angry, obstinate, mouthy -- a stereotypical harpy lurking in all black women that a friend of mine calls 'Serpentina.' The consternation about Michelle suggested an old racist sentiment that you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can never take the ghetto out of the girl."

Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and other conservative talkshow hosts rushed to paint her as the ultimate angry black woman, and they wondered aloud what she had to be angry about. Not all the lambasting came from white Americans. Mychal Massie (2008), chairman of the National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives-Project 21 -- a conservative black think tank, said:

"I find it reprehensible that those like herself and her husband, being devoid of credible positions, are able only to blame America and castigate its citizens. And that is exactly what Michelle Obama did -- with one sentence, she attacked every American, regardless of party affiliation when she uttered those profane words...Many Americans contribute to the Obamas' extravagant lifestyle. From those who clean their floors to those who sweep their sidewalks. Her comments reveal ingratitude and were an insult to millions of hardworking Americans and legal immigrants who appreciate the freedom and opportunity America offers. This country has made it possible for Michelle Obama to enjoy every privilege she and her family enjoy. Compared to the eloquent grace of Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and yes, even Rosalind Carter, she portrays herself as just another angry black harridan who spits in the face of the nation that made her rich, famous and prestigious."

 

[Maximus Rex]

Central to these "critiques" of Michelle Obama is the couched argument that a person who is a successful attorney and administrator living in a nice home has forfeited the right to talk about injustice and inequality. This argument is short-sighted and flawed. It implies that only poor people have the right to express concerns about poverty, only the sick and diseased have a right to complain about inadequate health care, only a victim of crime has the right to complain about high crime rates, and so forth. The day that the privileged in this country -- and that includes Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mychal Massie, and Michelle Obama -- are as disgusted with injustice and equality as is the poor black or brown or white single mother in Detroit, Michigan, is the day this country takes a living step toward realizing its potential as the "city on the top of the hill." Critiquing America is not the same as hating America.

How does her saying, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback," validate Massie's claim that Michelle Obama is "another black harridan?" A harridan is a "scolding (even vicious) old woman" ("Harridan", n.d.). Calling someone a harridan for expressing an opinion is an ad hominem argument that tries to dismiss the substance of their opinion. Members of society who express unpopular opinions are often dismissed with personal attacks.

Conclusion

Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party rode the anger of white men into political dominance in 1994. What were they angry about? Affirmative action? Multiculturalism? Liberalism? Few people, especially members of the dominant group, questioned whether white men had the right to be angry. After Senator Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination, a great deal of media attention was given to Angry White Women, so angry they threatened to vote for the Republican candidate. Some of their anger was fueled by disappointment; that happens in every political campaign. Others were angry because Senator Clinton's campaign symbolized, for them, the struggles and promise of being women in this culture. Some were angry about the sexist slurs, both thinly-veiled and obvious and gross, that were directed against Senator Clinton. These angry white women had many reasons to be angry, but the point here is that their right to be angry was rarely questioned. However, when a strong-minded, high profile black woman expresses even a hint of displeasure at injustice in this culture she is treated like a non-patriotic, ungrateful Sapphire. The black woman who expresses anything short of a patriotism that borders on chauvinism is condemned.

With people of color, in this case black women, there is a tendency for labels to become enduring stereotypes. The Sapphire portrayal has been around for as long as black women have dared to critique their lives and treatment. Sojourner Truth was seen and treated as a Sapphire, as were Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Josephine Baker, Shirley Chisholm, Anita Hill, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, and bell hooks. But the Sapphire label has not been restricted to abolitionists, anti-lynching crusaders, civil rights activists, politicians, and black feminists/womanists. Black women executives who voice disapproval at company policies run the risk of being seen as Sapphires, especially when the policies involve race and race relations. Young African American women who show displeasure at being treated as potential thieves when they shop are treated as Sapphires. The black woman who expresses bitterness or rage about her mistreatment in intimate relationships is often seen as a Sapphire; indeed, black women who express any dissatisfaction and displeasure, especially if they express the discontentment with passion, are seen and treated as Sapphires. The Sapphire name is slur, insult, and a label designed to silence dissent and critique.

© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology

Ferris State University

August, 2008

Edited 2012

 

[Maximus Rex]

Jezebel Stereotype

http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/jezebel.htm

Perhaps she remembers

her great-great grandmother

who wanted to protest

but only rolled her eyes

and willed herself not to scream

when the white man

mounted her from behind.

--Andrea Williams(2001)

The portrayal of black women as lascivious by nature is an enduring stereotype. The descriptive words associated with this stereotype are singular in their focus: seductive, alluring, worldly, beguiling, tempting, and lewd. Historically, white women, as a category, were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty - even sexual purity, but black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory. This depiction of black women is signified by the name Jezebel. (1)

K. Sue Jewell (1993), a contemporary sociologist, conceptualized the Jezebel as a tragic mulatto - "thin lips, long straight hair, slender nose, thin figure and fair complexion"(p. 46). This conceptualization is too narrow. It is true that the "tragic mulatto" and "Jezebel" share the reputation of being sexually seductive, and both are antithetical to the desexualized Mammy caricature; nevertheless, it is a mistake to assume that only, or even mainly, fair-complexioned black women were sexually objectified by the larger American society. From the early 1630s to the present, black American women of all shades have been portrayed as hypersexual "bad-black-girls." (2)

Jewell's conceptualization is based on a kernel of historical truth. Many of the slavery-era blacks sold into prostitution were mulattoes.Also, freeborn light-skinned black women sometimes became the willing concubines of wealthy white southerners. This system, called placage, involved a formal arrangement for the white suitor/customer to financially support the black woman and her children in exchange for her long-term sexual services. The white men often met the black women at "Quadroon Balls," a genteel sex market.

The belief that blacks are sexually lewd predates the institution of slavery in America. European travelers to Africa found scantily clad natives. This semi nudity was misinterpreted as lewdness. White Europeans, locked into the racial ethnocentrism of the 17th century, saw African polygamy and tribal dances as proof of the African's uncontrolled sexual lust. Europeans were fascinated by African sexuality. William Bosman described the black women on the coast of Guinea as "fiery" and "warm" and "so much hotter than the men."(3) William Smith described African women as "hot constitution'd Ladies" who "are continually contriving stratagems how to gain a lover"(White, 1999, p. 29). The genesis of anti-black sexual archetypes emerged from the writings of these and other Europeans: the black male as brute and potential rapist; the black woman, as Jezebel whore.

1. The most infamous Jezebel was a Phoenician princess who married Ahab, king of Israel, in the 9th century B.C. As queen she introduced the worship of Baal and sought to suppress the worship of Yahweh (Jehovah), the Hebrew God. She persecuted the prophets of Jehovah, many of whom she ordered to be killed. Her disregard for Jewish custom and her ruthless use of royal power are illustrated in the story involving Naboth, a Jezreelite. Jezebel falsely accused Naboth of treason. He was stoned to death. Then, she and Ahab took possession of Naboth's vineyard. Her reign as queen was marked by similarly deceitful actions. The name Jezebel came to signify a deceitful and immoral woman. Her story is told in First Kings 18 and 19, and in Second Kings 9. In the New Testament book Revelations (2:20) the name Jezebel is used as a byword for apostasy.

2. Jewell (1993) uses "bad-black-girls" as a synonym for Black Jezebels.

3. See White (1999, p. 29). White's book is an excellent historical examination of the Jezebel portrayal, especially chapter one, "Jezebel and Mammy," pp. 27-61.

 

[Maximus Rex]

The English colonists accepted the Elizabethan image of "the lusty Moor," and used this and similar stereotypes to justify enslaving blacks. In part, this was accomplished by arguing that blacks were subhumans: intellectually inferior, culturally stunted, morally underdeveloped, and animal-like sexually. Whites used racist and sexist ideologies to argue that they alone were civilized and rational, whereas blacks, and other people of color, were barbaric and deserved to be subjugated. (4)

The Jezebel stereotype was used during slavery as a rationalization for sexual relations between white men and black women, especially sexual unions involving slavers and slaves. The Jezebel was depicted as a black woman with an insatiable appetite for sex. She was not satisfied with black men. The slavery-era Jezebel, it was claimed, desired sexual relations with white men; therefore, white men did not have to rape black women. James Redpath (1859), an abolitionist no less, wrote that slave women were "gratified by the criminal advances of Saxons"(p. 141). This view is contradicted by Frederick Douglass (1968), the abolitionist and former slave, who claimed that the "slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master" (p. 60). Douglass's account is consistent with the accounts of other former slaves. Henry Bibb's (1849) master forced a young slave to be his son's concubine (pp. 98-99); later, Bibb and his wife were sold to a Kentucky trader who forced Bibb's wife into prostitution(pp . 112-116).

Slave women were property; therefore, legally they could not be raped. Often slavers would offer gifts or promises of reduced labor if the slave women would consent to sexual relations, and there were instances where the slaver and slave shared sexual attraction; however, "the rape of a female slave was probably the most common form of interracial sex" (D'Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 102). A slave woman explained, "When he make me follow him into de bush, what use me to tell him no? He have strength to make me"(p. 101). At the same time, black men convicted of raping white women were usually castrated, hanged, or both (Winthrop, 1961, p. 157 and

n 44).

People make decisions based on the options they have and the options that they perceive. The objective realities of slavery and the slaves' subjective interpretations of the institution both led female slaves to engage "voluntarily" in sexual unions with whites, especially slavers, their sons, and their overseers. A slave who refused the sexual advances of her slaver risked being sold, beaten, raped, and having her "husband" or children sold. Many slave women conceded to sexual relations with whites, thereby reinforcing the belief that black women were lustful and available.

The idea that black women were naturally and inevitably sexually promiscuous was reinforced by several features of the slavery institution. Slaves, whether on the auction block or offered privately for sale, were often stripped naked and physically examined. In theory, this was done to insure that they were healthy, able to reproduce, and, equally important, to look for whipping scars - the presence of which implied that the slave was rebellious. In practice, the stripping and touching of slaves had a sexually exploitative, (5) sometimes sadistic function. Nakedness, especially among women in the 18th and 19th centuries, implied lack of civility, morality, and sexual restraint even when the nakedness was forced. Slaves, of both sexes and all ages, often wore few clothes or clothes so ragged that their legs, thighs, and chests were exposed. Conversely, whites, especially women, wore clothing over most of their bodies. The contrast between the clothing reinforced the beliefs that white women were civilized, modest, and sexually pure, whereas black women were uncivilized, immodest, and sexually aberrant.

Black slave women were also frequently pregnant. The institution of slavery depended on black women to supply future slaves. By every method imaginable, slave women were "encouraged" to reproduce. Some slavers, for example, offered a new pig for each child born to a slave family, a new dress to the slave woman for each surviving infant, or no work on Saturdays to black women who produced six children (Rawick, 1972, p. 228; Gutman, 1976, p. 77). Young black girls were encouraged to have sex as "anticipatory socialization" for their later status as "breeders." When they did reproduce, their fecundity was seen as proof of their insatiable sexual appetites. Deborah Gray White, a modern historian, wrote:

Major periodicals carried articles detailing optimal conditions under which bonded women were known to reproduce, and the merits of a particular "breeder" were often the topic of parlor or dinner table conversations. The fact that something so personal and private became a matter of public discussion prompted one ex-slave to declare that "women wasn't nothing but cattle." Once reproduction became a topic of public conversation, so did the slave woman's sexual activities. (White, 1999, p. 31)

The Jezebel stereotype is contradicted by several historical facts. Although black women, especially those with brown or tan skin and "European features," were sometimes forced into prostitution for white men, "slaves had no prostitution and very little venereal disease within their communities" (D'Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 98). Slaves rarely chose spouses from among their blood relatives. Slavers often encouraged, and sometimes mandated, sexual promiscuity among their slaves; nevertheless, most slaves sought long-term, monogamous relationships. Slaves "married" when allowed, and adultery was frowned upon in most black "communities."[/b] During Reconstruction "slaves eagerly legitimated their unions, holding mass-marriage ceremonies and individual weddings" (p. 104).

Unfortunately for black women, Emancipation and Reconstruction did not stop their sexual victimization. From the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s, no Southern white male was convicted of raping or attempting to rape a black woman; yet, the crime was common (White, 1999, p. 188). Black women, especially in the South or border states, had little legal recourse when raped by white men, and many black women were reluctant to report their sexual victimization by black men for fear that the black men would be lynched (p. 189).

4. In British North America, what we call racism did not really flower until the 18th century. In the 17th century, attitudes toward blacks and other non-whites tended to be more run-of-the-mill xenophobia. In the 18th century, this exploitation received ideological and "scientific" basis.

5. I considered using the word pornographic to describe the stripping and touching of slaves; however, pornography is more often associated with representations of people, and not the people themselves.

6. There is no date or manufacturer listed on the item or the cardboard box.

7. There is no date or manufacturer on the banner. Interestingly, there is a cloth flap covering her genital area; however, when lifted there is nothing there.

8. This postcard was produced by E.C. Kropp Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is a popular postcard as evidenced by its history of being reproduced. Reproductions began in the 1950s and continued into the 21st century.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Jezebel in the 20th Century

http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/jezebel/ash.jpg

The portrayal of black women as Jezebel whores began in slavery, extended through the Jim Crow period, and continues today. Although the Mammy caricature was the dominant popular cultural image of black women from slavery to the 1950s, the depiction of black women as Jezebels was common in American material culture. Everyday items - such as ashtrays, postcards, sheet music, fishing lures, drinking glasses, and so forth - depicted naked or scantily dressed black women, lacking modesty and sexual restraint. For example, a metal nutcracker (circa 1930s) depicts a topless Black woman. The nut is placed under her skirt, in her crotch, and crushed. (6) Items like this one reflected and shaped white attitudes toward black female sexuality. An analysis of the Jezebel images in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia reveals several patterns.

Many of the Jezebel objects caricature and mock African women. For example, in the 1950s "ZULU LULU" was a popular set of swizzle sticks used for stirring drinks. There were several versions of this product but all show silhouettes of naked African women of various ages. One version read: "Nifty at 15, spiffy at 20, sizzling at 25, perky at 30, declining at 35, droopy at 40." There were versions that included depictions of African women at fifty and sixty years of age. ZULU LULU was billed as a party gag as illustrated by this advertisement on the product:

Don't pity Lulu - you're not getting younger yourself...laugh with your guests when they find these hilarious swizzle sticks in their drinks. ZULU-LULU will be the most popular girl at your party.

The Jezebel images which defame African women may be viewed in two broad categories: pathetic others and exotic others. Pathetic others include those depictions of African women as physically unattractive, unintelligent, and uncivilized. These images suggest that African women in particular and black women in general possess aberrant physical, social, and cultural traits. The African woman's features are distorted - her lips are exaggerated, her breasts sag, she is often inebriated. The pathetic other, like the Mammy caricature before her, is drawn to refute the claim that white men find black women sexually appealing. Yet, this depiction of the African woman has an obvious sexual component: she is often placed in a sexual setting, naked or near naked, inebriated or holding a drink, her eyes suggesting a sexual longing. She is a sexual being, but not one that white men would consider.

An example of the pathetic other is a banner (circa 1930s) showing a drunken African woman with the caption, "Martini Anyone?"7The message is clear: this pathetic other is too ugly, too stupid, and too different to elicit sexual attraction from reasonable men; instead, she is a source of pity, laughter, and derision.

The material objects which depict African and black women as exotic others do not portray them as physically unattractive, although they are sometimes portrayed as being socially and culturally deficient. During the first half of the twentieth century images of topless or completely nude African women were often placed in magazines and on souvenir items, planters, drinking glasses, figurines, ashtrays, and novelty items.

It must be emphasized that the items that depict African and African American women as one-dimensional sexual beings are often everyday items - found in the homes, garages, automobiles, and offices of "mainstream" Americans. These items are functional - in addition to promoting anti-black stereotypes, they also have practical utility. For example, a topless bust of a black woman with a fishing hook attached functions as an object of racial stereotyping and as a fishing lure. One such object was the "Virgin Fishing Lucky Lure (circa 1950s)." It has become a highly sought after collectible nationwide.

An analysis of Jezebel images also reveals that black female children are sexually objectified. Black girls, with the faces of pre-teenagers, are drawn with adult sized buttocks, which are exposed. They are naked, scantily clad, or hiding seductively behind towels, blankets, trees, or other objects. A 1949 postcard shows a naked black girl hiding her genitals with a paper fan. Although she has the appearance of a small child she has noticeable breasts. The accompanying caption reads: "Honey, I'se Waitin' Fo' You Down South." (8) The sexual innuendo is obvious.

Another postcard (circa 1950s) shows a black girl, approximately eight years old, standing in a watermelon patch. She has a protruding stomach. The caption reads: "Oh-I is Not!...It Must Be Sumthin' I Et!!" Her exposed right shoulder and the churlish grin suggest that the protruding stomach resulted from a sexual experience, not overeating. The portrayal of this prepubescent girl as pregnant suggests that black females are sexually active and sexually irresponsible even as small children.

The belief that black women are sexually promiscuous is propagated by innumerable images of pregnant black women and black women with large numbers of children. A 1947 greeting card depicting a black Mammy bears the caption: "Ah keeps right on sendin' em!" Inside is a young black woman with eight small children. The inside caption reads: "As long as you keeps on havin' em."

In the 1964 presidential election between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, Johnson used the political slogan, "All the way with LBJ." A mid-1960s license plate shows a caricatured black woman, pregnant, with these words, "Ah went all de way wib LBJ." Johnson received overwhelming support from black voters. The image on the license plate, which also appeared on posters and smaller prints, insults blacks generally, black Democrats, and black women.

 

[Maximus Rex]

The Mammy Caricature

Mammy is the most well known and enduring racial caricature of African American women. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University has more than 100 items with the mammy image, including ashtrays, souvenirs, postcards, fishing lures, detergent, artistic prints, toys, candles, and kitchenware. This article examines real mammies, fictional mammies, and commercial mammies.

Real Mammies

From slavery through the Jim Crow era, the mammy image served the political, social, and economic interests of mainstream white America. During slavery, the mammy caricature was posited as proof that blacks -- in this case, black women -- were contented, even happy, as slaves. Her wide grin, hearty laugher, and loyal servitude were offered as evidence of the supposed humanity of the institution of slavery.

This was the mammy caricature, and, like all caricatures, it contained a little truth surrounded by a larger lie. The caricature portrayed an obese, coarse, maternal figure. She had great love for her white "family," but often treated her own family with disdain. Although she had children, sometimes many, she was completely desexualized. She "belonged" to the white family, though it was rarely stated. Unlike Sambo, she was a faithful worker. She had no black friends; the white family was her entire world. Obviously, the mammy caricature was more myth than accurate portrayal.

Catherine Clinton (1982), a historian, claimed that real antebellum mammies were rare:

Records do acknowledge the presence of female slaves who served as the "right hand" of plantation mistresses. Yet documents from the planter class during the first fifty years following the American Revolution reveal only a handful of such examples. Not until after Emancipation did black women run white households or occupy in any significant number the special positions ascribed to them in folklore and fiction. The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum period. In the primary records from before the Civil War, hard evidence for its existence simply does not appear.(pp. 201-202)

According to Patricia Turner (1994), Professor of African American and African Studies, before the Civil War only very wealthy whites could afford the luxury of "utilizing the (black) women as house servants rather than as field hands" (p. 44). Moreover, Turner claims that house servants were usually mixed raced, skinny (blacks were not given much food), and young (fewer than 10 percent of black women lived beyond fifty years). Why were the fictional mammies so different from their real-life counterparts? The answer lies squarely within the complex sexual relations between blacks and whites.

Abolitionists claimed that one of the many brutal aspects of slavery was that slave owners sexually exploited their female slaves, especially light-skinned ones who approximated the mainstream definition of female sexual attractiveness. The mammy caricature was deliberately constructed to suggest ugliness. Mammy was portrayed as dark-skinned, often pitch black, in a society that regarded black skin as ugly, tainted. She was obese, sometimes morbidly overweight. Moreover, she was often portrayed as old, or at least middle-aged. The attempt was to desexualize mammy. The implicit assumption was this: No reasonable white man would choose a fat, elderly black woman instead of the idealized white woman. The black mammy was portrayed as lacking all sexual and sensual qualities. The de-eroticism of mammy meant that the white wife -- and by extension, the white family, was safe.

The sexual exploitation of black women by white men was unfortunately common during the antebellum period, and this was true irrespective of the economic relationship involved; in other words, black women were sexually exploited by rich whites, middle class whites, and poor whites. Sexual relations between blacks and whites -- whether consensual or rapes -- were taboo; yet they occurred often. All black women and girls, regardless of their physical appearances, were vulnerable to being sexually assaulted by white men. The mammy caricature tells many lies; in this case, the lie is that white men did not find black women sexually desirable.

The mammy caricature implied that black women were only fit to be domestic workers; thus, the stereotype became a rationalization for economic discrimination. During the Jim Crow period, approximately 1877 to 1966, America's race-based, race-segregated job economy limited most blacks to menial, low paying, low status jobs. Black women found themselves forced into one job category, house servant. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1987), a biographer of the Civil Rights Movement, described the limited opportunities for black women in the 1950s:

Jobs for clerks in dimestores, cashiers in markets, and telephone operators were numerous, but were not open to black women. A fifty-dollar-a-week worker could employ a black domestic to clean her home, cook the food, wash and iron clothes, and nurse the baby for as little as twenty dollars per week. (p. 107)

During slavery only the very wealthy could afford to "purchase" black women and use them as "house servants," but during Jim Crow even middle class white women could hire black domestic workers. These black women were not mammies. Mammy was "black, fat with huge breasts, and head covered with a kerchief to hide her nappy hair, strong, kind, loyal, sexless, religious and superstitious" (Christian, 1980, pp. 11-12). She spoke bastardized English; she did not care about her appearance. She was politically safe. She was culturally safe. She was, of course, a figment of the white imagination, a nostalgic yearning for a reality that never had been. The real-life black domestics of the Jim Crow era were poor women denied other opportunities. They performed many of the duties of the fictional mammies, but, unlike the caricature, they were dedicated to their own families, and often resentful of their lowly societal status.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Fictional Mammies

The slavery-era mammy did not want to be free. She was too busy serving as surrogate mother/grandmother to white families. Mammy was so loyal to her white family that she was often willing to risk her life to defend them. In D. W. Griffith's movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) -- based on Thomas Dixon's racist novel The Clansman (1905) -- the mammy defends her white master's home against black and white Union soldiers. The message was clear: Mammy would rather fight than be free. In the famous movie Gone With The Wind (Selznick & Fleming, 1939), the black mammy also fights black soldiers whom she believes to be a threat to the white mistress of the house.

Mammy found life on vaudeville stages, in novels, in plays, and finally, in films and on television. White men, wearing black face makeup, did vaudeville skits as Sambos, Mammies, and other anti-black stereotypes. The standard for mammy depictions was offered by Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book's mammy, Aunt Chloe, is described in this way:

A round, black, shiny face is hers, so glossy as to suggest the idea that she might have been washed over with the whites of eggs, like one of her own tea rusks. Her whole plump countenance beams with satisfaction and contentment from under a well-starched checkered turban, bearing on it; however, if we must confess it, a little of that tinge of self-consciousness which becomes the first cook of the neighborhood, as Aunt Chloe was universally held and acknowledged to be.(Stowe, 1966, p. 31)

Aunt Chloe was nurturing and protective of "her" white family, but less caring toward her own children. She is the prototypical fictional mammy: self-sacrificing, white-identified, fat, asexual, good-humored, a loyal cook, housekeeper and quasi-family member.

During the first half of the 1900s, while black Americans were demanding political, social, and economic advancement, Mammy was increasingly popular in the field of entertainment. The first talking movie was 1927's The Jazz Singer (Crosland) with Al Jolson in blackface singing "Mammy." In 1934 the movie Imitation of Life (Laemmle & Stahl) told the story of a black maid, Aunt Delilah (played by Louise Beavers) who inherited a pancake recipe. This movie mammy gave the valuable recipe to Miss Bea, her boss. Miss Bea successfully marketed the recipe. She offered Aunt Delilah a twenty percent interest in the pancake company.

"You'll have your own car. Your own house," Miss Bea tells Aunt Delilah. Mammy is frightened. "My own house? You gonna send me away, Miss Bea? I can't live with you? Oh, Honey Chile, please don't send me away." Aunt Delilah, though she had lived her entire life in poverty, does not want her own house. "How I gonna take care of you and Miss Jessie (Miss Bea's daughter) if I ain't here... I'se your cook. And I want to stay your cook." Regarding the pancake recipe, Aunt Delilah said, "I gives it to you, Honey. I makes you a present of it" (Bogle, 1994, p. 57). Aunt Delilah worked to keep the white family stable, but her own family disintegrated -- her self-hating daughter rejected her, then ran away from home to "pass for white." Near the movie's conclusion, Aunt Delilah dies "of a broken heart."

Imitation of Life was probably the highlight of Louise Beavers' acting career. Almost all of her characters, before and after the Aunt Delilah role, were mammy or mammy-like. She played hopelessly naive maids in Mae West's She Done Him Wrong (Sherman, 1933), and Jean Harlow's Bombshell (Stromberg & Fleming, 1933). She played loyal servants in Made for Each Other (Selznick & Cromwell, 1939), and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (Frank, Panama & Potter, 1948), and several other movies.

Beavers had a weight problem: it was a constant battle for her to stay overweight. She often wore padding to give her the appearance of a mammy. Also, she had been reared in California, and she had to fabricate a southern accent. Moreover, she detested cooking. She was truly a fictional mammy.

Imitation of Life was remade (without the pancake recipe storyline) in 1959 (Hunter & Sirk). It starred Lana Turner as the white mistress, and Juanita Moore (in an Oscar-nominated Best Supporting Actress performance) as the mammy. It was also a tear-jerker.

Hattie McDaniel was another well known mammy portrayer. In her early films, for example The Golden West (Grainger & Howard, 1932), and The Story of Temple Drake (Glazer & Roberts, 1933), she played unobtrusive, weak mammies. However, her role in Judge Priest (Wurtzel & Ford, 1934) signaled the beginning of the sassy, quick-tempered mammies that she popularized. She played the saucy mammy in many movies, including, Music is Magic (Stone & Marshall, 1935), The Little Colonel (DeSylva & Butler, 1935), Alice Adams (Berman & Stevens, 1935), Saratoga (Hyman & Conway, 1937), and The Mad Miss Manton (Wolfson & Jason, 1938). In 1939, she played Scarlett O'Hara's sassy but loyal servant in Gone With the Wind. McDaniel won an Oscar for best supporting actress, the first black to win an Academy Award.

Hattie McDaniel was a gifted actress who added depth to the character of mammy; unfortunately, she, like almost all blacks from the 1920s through 1950s, was typecast as a servant. She was often criticized by blacks for perpetuating the mammy caricature. She responded this way: "Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making seven dollars a week actually being one" (Bogle, 1994, p. 82).

Beulah was a television show, popular from 1950 to 1953, in which a mammy nurtures a white suburban family. Hattie McDaniel originated the role for radio; Louise Beavers performed the role on television. The Beulah image resurfaced in the 1980s when Nell Carter, a talented black singer, played a mammy-like role on the situation comedy Gimme a Break. She was dark-skinned, overweight, sassy, white-identified, and like Aunt Delilah in Imitation of Life, content to live in her white employer's home and nurture the white family.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Commerical Mammies

Mammy was born on the plantation in the imagination of slavery defenders, but she grew in popularity during the period of Jim Crow. The mainstreaming of Mammy was primarily, but not exclusively, the result of the fledging advertising industry. The mammy image was used to sell almost any household item, especially breakfast foods, detergents, planters, ashtrays, sewing accessories, and beverages. As early as 1875, Aunt Sally, a Mammy image, appeared on cans of baking powder. Later, different Mammy images appeared on Luzianne coffee and cleaners, Fun to Wash detergent, Aunt Dinah molasses, and other products. Mammy represented wholesomeness. You can trust the mammy pitchwoman.

Mammy's most successful commercial expression was (and is) Aunt Jemima. In 1889, Charles Rutt, a Missouri newspaper editor, and Charles G. Underwood, a mill owner, developed the idea of a self-rising flour that only needed water. He called it Aunt Jemima's recipe. Rutt borrowed the Aunt Jemima name from a popular vaudeville song that he had heard performed by a team of minstrel performers. The minstrels included a skit with a southern mammy. Rutt decided to use the name and the image of the mammy-like Aunt Jemima to promote his new pancake mix. Unfortunately for him, he and his partner lacked the necessary capital to effectively promote and market the product. They sold the pancake recipe and the accompanying Aunt Jemima marketing idea to the R.T. Davis Mill Company.

The R.T. Davis Company improved the pancake formula, and, more importantly, they developed an advertising plan to use a real person to portray Aunt Jemima. The woman they found to serve as the live model was Nancy Green, who was born a slave in Kentucky in 1834. She impersonated Aunt Jemima until her death in 1923. Struggling with profits, R.T. Davis Company made the bold decision to risk their entire fortune and future on a promotional exhibition at the 1893 World's Exposition in Chicago. The Company constructed the world's largest flour barrel, 24 feet high and 12 feet across. Standing near the basket, Nancy Green, dressed as Aunt Jemima, sang songs, cooked pancakes, and told stories about the Old South -- stories which presented the South as a happy place for blacks and whites alike. She was a huge success. She had served tens of thousands of pancakes by the time the fair ended. Her success established her as a national celebrity. Her image was plastered on billboards nationwide, with the caption, "I'se in town, honey." Green, in her role as Aunt Jemima, made appearances at countless country fairs, flea markets, food shows, and local grocery stores. By the turn of the century, Aunt Jemima, along with the Armour meat chef, were the two commercial symbols most trusted by American housewives (Sacharow, 1982, p. 82). By 1910 more than 120 million Aunt Jemima breakfasts were being served annually. The popularity of Aunt Jemima inspired many giveaway and mail-in premiums, including, dolls, breakfast club pins, dishware, and recipe booklets.

The R.T. Davis Mill Company was renamed the Aunt Jemima Mills Company in 1914, and eventually sold to the Quaker Oats Company in 1926. In 1933 Anna Robinson, who weighed 350 pounds, became the second Aunt Jemima. She was much heavier and darker in complexion than was Nancy Green. The third Aunt Jemima was Edith Wilson, who is known primarily for playing the role of Aunt Jemima on radio and television shows between 1948 and 1966. By the 1960s the Quaker Oats Company was the market leader in the frozen food business, and Aunt Jemima was an American icon. In recent years, Aunt Jemima has been given a makeover: her skin is lighter and the handkerchief has been removed from her head. She now has the appearance of an attractive maid -- not a Jim Crow era mammy.

© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology

Ferris State University

Oct., 2000

Edited 2012

 

[kingblaze84]

The English colonists accepted the Elizabethan image of "the lusty Moor," and used this and similar stereotypes to justify enslaving blacks. In part, this was accomplished by arguing that blacks were subhumans: intellectually inferior, culturally stunted, morally underdeveloped, and animal-like sexually. Whites used racist and sexist ideologies to argue that they alone were civilized and rational, whereas blacks, and other people of color, were barbaric and deserved to be subjugated. (4)

The Jezebel stereotype was used during slavery as a rationalization for sexual relations between white men and black women, especially sexual unions involving slavers and slaves. The Jezebel was depicted as a black woman with an insatiable appetite for sex. She was not satisfied with black men. The slavery-era Jezebel, it was claimed, desired sexual relations with white men; therefore, white men did not have to rape black women. James Redpath (1859), an abolitionist no less, wrote that slave women were "gratified by the criminal advances of Saxons"(p. 141). This view is contradicted by Frederick Douglass (1968), the abolitionist and former slave, who claimed that the "slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master" (p. 60). Douglass's account is consistent with the accounts of other former slaves. Henry Bibb's (1849) master forced a young slave to be his son's concubine (pp. 98-99); later, Bibb and his wife were sold to a Kentucky trader who forced Bibb's wife into prostitution(pp . 112-116).

Slave women were property; therefore, legally they could not be raped. Often slavers would offer gifts or promises of reduced labor if the slave women would consent to sexual relations, and there were instances where the slaver and slave shared sexual attraction; however, "the rape of a female slave was probably the most common form of interracial sex" (D'Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 102). A slave woman explained, "When he make me follow him into de bush, what use me to tell him no? He have strength to make me"(p. 101). At the same time, black men convicted of raping white women were usually castrated, hanged, or both (Winthrop, 1961, p. 157 and

n 44).

People make decisions based on the options they have and the options that they perceive. The objective realities of slavery and the slaves' subjective interpretations of the institution both led female slaves to engage "voluntarily" in sexual unions with whites, especially slavers, their sons, and their overseers. A slave who refused the sexual advances of her slaver risked being sold, beaten, raped, and having her "husband" or children sold. Many slave women conceded to sexual relations with whites, thereby reinforcing the belief that black women were lustful and available.

The idea that black women were naturally and inevitably sexually promiscuous was reinforced by several features of the slavery institution. Slaves, whether on the auction block or offered privately for sale, were often stripped naked and physically examined. In theory, this was done to insure that they were healthy, able to reproduce, and, equally important, to look for whipping scars - the presence of which implied that the slave was rebellious. In practice, the stripping and touching of slaves had a sexually exploitative, (5) sometimes sadistic function. Nakedness, especially among women in the 18th and 19th centuries, implied lack of civility, morality, and sexual restraint even when the nakedness was forced. Slaves, of both sexes and all ages, often wore few clothes or clothes so ragged that their legs, thighs, and chests were exposed. Conversely, whites, especially women, wore clothing over most of their bodies. The contrast between the clothing reinforced the beliefs that white women were civilized, modest, and sexually pure, whereas black women were uncivilized, immodest, and sexually aberrant.

Black slave women were also frequently pregnant. The institution of slavery depended on black women to supply future slaves. By every method imaginable, slave women were "encouraged" to reproduce. Some slavers, for example, offered a new pig for each child born to a slave family, a new dress to the slave woman for each surviving infant, or no work on Saturdays to black women who produced six children (Rawick, 1972, p. 228; Gutman, 1976, p. 77). Young black girls were encouraged to have sex as "anticipatory socialization" for their later status as "breeders." When they did reproduce, their fecundity was seen as proof of their insatiable sexual appetites. Deborah Gray White, a modern historian, wrote:

Major periodicals carried articles detailing optimal conditions under which bonded women were known to reproduce, and the merits of a particular "breeder" were often the topic of parlor or dinner table conversations. The fact that something so personal and private became a matter of public discussion prompted one ex-slave to declare that "women wasn't nothing but cattle." Once reproduction became a topic of public conversation, so did the slave woman's sexual activities. (White, 1999, p. 31)

The Jezebel stereotype is contradicted by several historical facts. Although black women, especially those with brown or tan skin and "European features," were sometimes forced into prostitution for white men, "slaves had no prostitution and very little venereal disease within their communities" (D'Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 98). Slaves rarely chose spouses from among their blood relatives. Slavers often encouraged, and sometimes mandated, sexual promiscuity among their slaves; nevertheless, most slaves sought long-term, monogamous relationships. Slaves "married" when allowed, and adultery was frowned upon in most black "communities."[/b] During Reconstruction "slaves eagerly legitimated their unions, holding mass-marriage ceremonies and individual weddings" (p. 104).

Unfortunately for black women, Emancipation and Reconstruction did not stop their sexual victimization. From the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s, no Southern white male was convicted of raping or attempting to rape a black woman; yet, the crime was common (White, 1999, p. 188). Black women, especially in the South or border states, had little legal recourse when raped by white men, and many black women were reluctant to report their sexual victimization by black men for fear that the black men would be lynched (p. 189).

4. In British North America, what we call racism did not really flower until the 18th century. In the 17th century, attitudes toward blacks and other non-whites tended to be more run-of-the-mill xenophobia. In the 18th century, this exploitation received ideological and "scientific" basis.

5. I considered using the word pornographic to describe the stripping and touching of slaves; however, pornography is more often associated with representations of people, and not the people themselves.

6. There is no date or manufacturer listed on the item or the cardboard box.

7. There is no date or manufacturer on the banner. Interestingly, there is a cloth flap covering her genital area; however, when lifted there is nothing there.

8. This postcard was produced by E.C. Kropp Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is a popular postcard as evidenced by its history of being reproduced. Reproductions began in the 1950s and continued into the 21st century.

The evil of White people historically never fails to amaze me.

 

[Maximus Rex]

The Coon Caricature

http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/coon/

The coon caricature is one of the most insulting of all anti-black caricatures. The name itself, an abbreviation of raccoon, is dehumanizing. As with Sambo, the coon was portrayed as a lazy, easily frightened, chronically idle, inarticulate, buffoon. The coon differed from the Sambo in subtle but important ways. Sambo was depicted as a perpetual child, not capable of living as an independent adult. The coon acted childish, but he was an adult; albeit a good-for-little adult. Sambo was portrayed as a loyal and contented servant. Indeed, Sambo was offered as a defense for slavery and segregation. How bad could these institutions have been, asked the racialists, if blacks were contented, even happy, being servants? The coon, although he often worked as a servant, was not happy with his status. He was, simply, too lazy or too cynical to attempt to change his lowly position. Also, by the 1900s, Sambo was identified with older, docile blacks who accepted Jim Crow laws and etiquette; whereas coons were increasingly identified with young, urban blacks who disrespected whites. Stated differently, the coon was a Sambo gone bad.

The prototypical movie coon was Stepin Fetchit, the slow-talking, slow-walking, self-demeaning nitwit. It took his character almost a minute to say: "I'se be catchin' ma feets nah, Boss." Donald Bogle (1994), a cinema historian, lambasted the coon, as played by Stepin Fetchit and others:

Before its death, the coon developed into the most blatantly degrading of all black stereotypes. The pure coons emerged as no-account niggers, those unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, or butchering the English language. (p. 8)

The coon caricature was born during American slavery. Slave masters and overseers often described slaves as "slow," "lazy," "wants pushing," "an eye servant," and "trifling." (1) The master and the slave operated with different motives: the master desired to obtain from the slave the greatest labor, by any means; the slave desired to do the least labor while avoiding punishment. The slave registered his protest against slavery by running away, and, when that was not possible, by slowing work, doing shoddy work, destroying work tools, and faking illness. Slave masters attributed the slaves' poor work performance to shiftlessness, stupidity, desire for freedom, and genetic deficiencies.

The amount of work done by a typical slave depended upon the demands of individual slave owners and their ability to extract labor. Typically, slaves worked from dawn to dusk. They were sometimes granted "leisure time" on Saturday or Sunday evenings; however, this time was spent planting or harvesting their own gardens, washing clothes, cooking, and cleaning. A slave owner wrote: "I always give them half of each Saturday, and often the whole day, at which time...the women do their household work; therefore they are never idle" (Stampp, 1956, pp. 79-80)

Slave owners complained about the laziness of their workers, but the records show that slaves were often worked hard -- and brutally so. Overseers were routinely paid commissions, which encouraged them to overwork the slaves. On a North Carolina plantation an overseer claimed that he was a "'hole hog man rain or shine," and boasted that the slaves had been worked "like horses." He added, "I'd ruther be dead than be a nigger on one of these big plantations" (Stampp, 1956, p. 85). After the closing of the African slave trade, the price of slaves went up, thereby causing some slave owners and their hired overseers to be more careful in their use of slaves. "The time had been," wrote one slave owner, "that the farmer could kill up and wear out one Negro to buy another; but it is not so now. Negroes are too high in proportion to the price of cotton, and it behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible" (Stampp, 1956, p. 81).

Slaves are generally associated with the harvest of cotton; however, slaves worked in many industries. Almost every railroad in the ante-bellum South was built in part by slave labor. Slaves worked in sawmills, fisheries, gold mines and salt mines. They were used as deck hands on river boats. There were slave lumberjacks, construction workers, longshoremen, iron workers, even store clerks. Slaves monopolized the domestic services. Some slaves worked as skilled artisans, for example, shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, mechanics, and barbers. These artisans were generally treated better than the slaves in the cotton and tobacco fields; therefore, it is not surprising that the artisans did better work. They included "many ingenious Mechanicks," claimed a white colonial Georgian, "and as far as they have had opportunity of being instructed, have discovered as good abilities, as are usually found among [white] people of our Colony" (Stampp, 1956, p. 63).

The supporters of slavery claimed that blacks were a childlike people unequipped for freedom. Proslavers acknowledged that some slave masters were cruel, but they argued that most were benevolent, kind-hearted capitalists who civilized and improved their docile black wards. From Radical Reconstruction to World War I, there was a national nostalgia for the "good ol' darkies" who loved their masters, and, according to the proslavers, rejected or only reluctantly accepted emancipation. In this context, the conceptualization of the coon was revised. During slavery almost all blacks, especially men, were sometimes seen as coons, that is, lazy, shiftless, and virtually useless. However, after slavery, the coon caricature was increasingly applied to younger blacks, especially those who were urban, flamboyant, and contemptuous of whites. Thomas Nelson Page, a white writer wrote this in 1904:

Universally, they [white Southerners] will tell you that while the old-time Negroes were industrious, saving, and when not misled, well-behaved, kindly, respectful, and self-respecting, and while the remnant of them who remain still retain generally these characteristics, the "new issue," for the most part, are lazy, thriftless, intemperate, insolent, dishonest, and without the most rudimentary elements of morality....Universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism. (p. 80)

1. For an excellent discussion of the work environment of slaves read Stampp (1956), Chapter 3.

 

[Maximus Rex]

At the beginning of the 1900s many whites supported the implementation of Jim Crow laws and etiquette. They believed that blacks were genetically, therefore permanently, inferior to whites. Blacks were, they argued, hedonistic children, irresponsible, and left to their own plans, destined for idleness -- or worse. It was not uncommon for whites to distinguish between Niggers (Coons and Bucks) and Negroes (Toms, Sambos, and Mammies), and they preferred the latter.

Racial caricatures are undergirded by stereotypes, and the stereotyping of blacks as coons continued throughout the 20th Century. The pioneer study of racial and ethnic stereotyping in the United States was conducted in 1933 by Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braley, two social scientists. They questioned 100 Princeton University undergraduates regarding the prevailing stereotypes of racial and ethnic groups. Their research concluded that blacks were consistently described as "superstitious," "happy-go-lucky," and "lazy." The respondents had these views even though they had little or no contact with blacks. This study was repeated in 1951, and the negative stereotyping of blacks persisted (Gilbert). The Civil Rights Movement improved whites' attitudes toward blacks, but a sizeable minority of whites still hold traditional, racist views of blacks. An early 1990s study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center found that the majority of the white, Hispanic, and other non-black respondents displayed negative attitudes towards blacks. For example, 78 percent said that blacks were more likely than whites to "prefer to live off welfare" and "less likely to prefer to be self-supporting." Further, 62 percent said blacks were more likely to be lazy; 56 percent said blacks were violence-prone; and 53 percent said that blacks were less intelligent than whites (Duke, 1991). Stated differently: the coon caricature is still being applied to blacks. Martin Gilens (1999), a Yale University political scientist, argued that many white Americans believe that blacks receive welfare benefits more often than do whites and that "the centuries old stereotype of blacks as lazy remains credible for a large number of white Americans." He claimed that opposition to welfare programs results from misinformation and racism, with whites assuming that their tax money is being used to support lazy blacks. Gilens blames, in part, the media. "Pictures of poor blacks are abundant when poverty coverage is most negative, while pictures of non-blacks dominate the more sympathetic coverage."

The coon caricature was one of the stock characters among minstrel performers. Minstrel show audiences laughed at the slow-talking fool who avoided work and all adult responsibilities. This transformed the coon into a comic figure, a source of bitter and vulgar comic relief. He was sometimes renamed "Zip Coon" or "Urban Coon." If the minstrel skit had an ante-bellum setting, the coon was portrayed as a free black; if the skit's setting postdated slavery, he was portrayed as an urban black. He remained lazy and good-for-little, but the minstrel shows depicted him as a gaudy dressed "Dandy" who "put on airs." Unlike Mammy and Sambo, Coon did not know his place. He thought he was as smart as white people; however, his frequent malapropisms and distorted logic suggested that his attempt to compete intellectually with whites was pathetic. His use of bastardized English delighted white audiences and reaffirmed the then commonly held beliefs that blacks were inherently less intelligent. The minstrel coon's goal was leisure, and his leisure was spent strutting, styling, fighting, avoiding real work, eating watermelons, and making a fool of himself. If he was married, his wife dominated him. If he was single, he sought to please the flesh without entanglements.

Hollywood films extended the brutalization inherent in the coon image. The first cinematic coon appeared in Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (Selig, 1905), a stupendously racist portrayal of two dimwitted and stuttering buffoons. Several notable slapstick "coon shorts" were produced in 1910-1911, including How Rastus Got His Turkey (Wharton, 1910) (he stole it) and Chicken Thief (1911). In the blackface comedy Coon Town Suffragettes (Lubin, 1914), a group of domineering mammies organize a "movement" to keep their good-for-nothing husbands at home. These early coons laid the foundation for the "great" movie coons of the 1930s and 1940s.

In the 1929 Fox film Hearts in Dixie (Sloane), Chloe is married to Gummy, a "languid, shiftless husband whose 'mysery' in his feet prevents him from being of any earthly good as far as work is concerned, although once away from his wife's eye he can shuffle with the tirelessness and lanky abandon of a jumping jack" (Leab, 1976, p. 86). Chloe dies of swamp fever, and Gummy remarries. The new wife is portrayed as a shrew because she tries to force Gummy to work. This movie was a comedy, and most of the humor centered around Gummy's attempts to avoid work and his coon dialogue, for example, "I ain't askin you is you ain't. I is askin you is you is." The actor who played Gummy was Stepin Fetchit, the "greatest" coon actor of all time.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Stepin Fetchit was born Lincoln Theodore Perry on May 30, 1892. A medicine show and vaudeville performer, he arrived in Hollywood in the 1920s. Perry claimed that he got the name Fetchit from a racehorse that won him money. However, he also told an interviewer that he came to Hollywood as a member of a comedy team know as "Step and Fetch It," and later adopted a variant of the name. His first featured movie role using the name Stepin Fetchit was in MGM's In Old Kentucky (Stahl, 1927). Whether as Gummy, Stepin Fetchit, or other names, he essentially performed the same role: the arch-coon. Daniel J. Leab (1976), a cinema historian, said this:

Fetchit became identified in the popular imagination as a dialect-speaking, slump-shouldered, slack-jawed character who walked, talked, and apparently thought in slow motion. The Fetchit character overcame this lethargy only when he thought that a ghost or some nameless terror might be present; and then he moved very quickly indeed. (p. 89)

Fetchit was the embodiment of the nitwit black man. As with the Zip Coon and Urban Coon, this old-fashioned coon character could never correctly pronounce a multisyllabic word. He was portrayed as a dunce. In Stand Up and Cheer (Sheehan & MacFadden, 1934), he was tricked into thinking that a "talking" penguin was really Jimmy Durante. Fetchit, scratching his head, eyes bulging, portrayed the coon so realistically that whites thought they were seeing a real racial type. His coon portrayal was aided by his appearance. According to Donald Bogle (1994), a film historian:

His appearance, too, added to the caricature. He was tall and skinny and always had his head shaved completely bald. He invariably wore clothes that were too large for him and that looked as if they had been passed down from his white master. His grin was always very wide, his teeth very white, his eyes very widened, his feet very large, his walk very slow, his dialect very broken. (P. 41)

Fetchit's coon characters were racially demeaned and often verbally and even physically abused by white characters. In David Harum (Cruze, 1934) he was traded to Will Rogers along with a horse. He was traded twice more in the movie. In Judge Priest (Wurtzel & Ford, 1934), he was pushed, shoved, and verbally berated by Will Rogers; even worse, his character was barely intelligible, scratched his head in an apelike manner, and followed Rogers around like an adoring pet.

In black communities, Stepin Fetchit remains a synonym for a bowing and scraping black man. In 1970 he sued CBS unsuccessfully for $3 million, charging defamation of character for the way he was portrayed in the television documentary Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed (Rooney, 1968). "It was Step," he claimed, "who elevated the Negro to the dignity of a Hollywood star. I made the Negro a first-class citizen all over the world...somebody it was all right to associate with. I opened all the theaters" (Bogle, 1994, p. 44). That statement is hyperbole; however, Stepin Fetchit was a talented actor who added depth -- albeit, slight -- to the movie coon's portrayal.

What is his legacy? He was the first black actor to receive top billing in movies, and one of the first millionaire black actors. He spawned imitators, most notably, Willie Best (Sleep 'n Eat) and Mantan Moreland, the scared, wide-eyed manservant of Charlie Chan. In 1978 he was elected to the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. But he will always be remembered as the lazy, barely literate, self-demeaning, white man's black. He attempted a comeback in the 1950s, but it was unsuccessful; his coon caricature then seemed merely embarrassing. In the late 1960s he converted to the Black Muslim faith.

In 1999 Fetchit's name was again in the headlines. Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace (McCallum & Lucas) included a character named Jar Jar Binks. Critics claimed that Jar Jar, a bumbling dimwitted amphibian-like character, spoke Caribbean-accented pidgin English, and had ears that suggested dreadlocks. Wearing bellbottom pants and vest, Jar Jar looked like the latest in black cinematic stereotypes. Newspaper editorials and internet chat room discussions repeatedly invoked Stepin Fetchit's name. For example, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal described Jar Jar as a "Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen" (Fleeman, 1999). This incident suggests that Fetchit's legacy is to be remembered as a coon caricature: lazy, bewildered, stammering, shuffling, and good-for-little except buffoonery.

© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology

Ferris State University

Oct., 2000

Edited 2012

 

[Rasta.]

Usually just skim through your posts but great stuff in here.

 

[Mr_Vicodin81G]

I'm Messican and that shit ain't even right at all. That was mad disgusting and pitiful. Them craKKKaz are some devilz