Articles

For Blacks, Caricatures Jab at Old Scars: Foreign Images Revive Debate on Racial Attitudes

By Mary Lou Pickel
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
July 27, 2005

Just a few weeks after Mexican President Vicente Fox blundered by saying Mexican immigrants in the United States do work that "not even blacks" will do, the country came out with a postage stamp touting a 1940s-era comic book character of a black boy with ape-like features, reviving a debate about racial attitudes.

The Mexican stamp featuring "Memin Pinguin" has sold out, going for about $30 or $40 on eBay, even though the stamp has a face value of about $3.50 in Mexico.

The postage stamp has created the latest furor over Jim Crow-era images of blacks abroad. Such derogatory images remain alive in the United States and many other countries. Copies of "Little Black Sambo" flew off the shelves of large bookstores in Tokyo this year. "Darkie Tooth Paste" was a popular brand in Asia until a few years ago. Golliwog dolls of blacks with wide eyes and red lips are popular among the British on eBay, and "Black Pete" is Santa's sidekick during Christmas in Holland. In the United States, some antiques fairs specialize in black memorabilia, much of it from segregation days.

In countries with small black populations, there's little consciousness or open discussion of the harm that such images do, experts say.

Memorabilia collectors say they acknowledge that mammy cookie jars and lawn jockies are racist, but there's no point in denying or ignoring the past.

Experts agree that foreign pop culture and images of people of African origin are strongly influenced by messages coming out of the United States, a leading exporter of movies, cartoons, music and entertainment.

"Disney's images were blatantly racist," said Michael Harris, associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a consultant for the High Museum in Atlanta.

"The black characters had big lips and eyes. The accents you hear on the crows are black, Southern accents," Harris said. A catalog of such images is contained in Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled."

"You keep going back to the minstrel show, which was the foundation of vaudeville, and those images were exported around the world," Harris said.

The Mexican stamp and other derogatory images of blacks in many instances are linked to humor.

The caricatured black figure "doesn't even need much explanation," said Alison Blakely, a professor of European and comparative history and an endowed chair in African-American studies at Boston University. "Once people see that, it puts them in a certain mood. It's a powerful form of communication."

Andrea Barnwell, director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, says there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the relationship between degrading images and human experience.

"It's so easy to say this is just a character, just a cartoon figure," Barnwell said. "It's charming and cute. They don't think about it as being offensive ? but then they go and put these same kinds of labels and expectations on real human beings."

Boston University's Blakely has studied black images in Europe, in particular "Black Pete," Santa's sidekick in Holland.

Black Pete hands out sticks and coal to bad children, and Dutch parents warn that Pete is a bogeyman who will take them away if they're not good, Blakely said.

"It's a controversial figure now in the Netherlands because of the rise in the black population over the last couple of decades," he said. "There are now objections to the deeply rooted, cherished cultural image who the Dutch insist is a wonderful figure.

"It's similar to the Mexican stamp. What the Mexicans are saying is they love their figure just the way he is. They're saying, 'We're not being conscious racists, so it's not racist.'

"Unconscious racism is more harmful," Blakely said. "If you know it's present, you can deal with it. You can try to remove it. But if it's just there, and it's just accepted and not even thought of as an issue, we can't rid ourselves of it."

Japan's concept of African-Americans is "bipolar," said Toshi Kii, associate professor of sociology at Georgia State University.

"There's no middle ground almost. On the one hand, there's a tremendous admiration for very stereotypical types of things like sports and music," he said.

Jazz is popular in Japan. African-American jazz players want to go to Japan because they can command a lot of money, Kii said. Bob Sapp, a former football player in the United States, has become popular in Japan as a K-1 martial arts kickboxer.

Blacks' Intellect Unrecognized

"On the other hand — and this is coming directly from the United States — there is the idea that African-Americans are basically not intellectual," Kii said.

As for the popularity of the "Little Black Sambo" book, which tells the tale of a black Indian boy who outwits tigers, Japanese don't understand the offense. They think it's "cute," Kii said.

"They've read the history of African-Americans in the United States, but they really do not know the concept of what slavery was. "They say, 'Yes, I've seen 'Gone With the Wind.'

"The reason is because we are not exposed to any African-American artists or intellectuals," Kii said.

In fact, from the beginning of U.S. contact with Japan, people of African descent were linked to laughter, said Spelman's Barnwell.

Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy opened trade with Japan after more than 200 years of isolation under the shoguns. He held a party celebrating the Treaty of Peace and Amity in 1854, Barnwell said.

"For the finale, you had white sailors performing in blackface. The Japanese commissioners were ecstatic," she said.

While black images abroad may seem exotic, in the United States the history and significance of such images is well-understood, especially by African-Americans.

Yet, collecting black memorabilia has become more popular among blacks.

Lindsey Johnson has been the promoter of the Black Memorabilia & Collectible Show in Washington, D.C., and the New York area for the last five years.

The majority of his vendors and customers are African-American, he said, although there also are many whites who sell and collect black memorabilia.

His last show, in April, had 95 vendors from 19 states and drew about 1,000 customers.

Johnson's shows include negative and positive images from the African-American experience. The memorabilia include slave shackles, Mr. T dolls, Black Panther Party and Buffalo Soldiers artifacts, Jim Crow mammy salt shakers, depictions of watermelon-eating boys and the like.

'You Can't Ignore It'

"It reflects our experience and how we were viewed and how we were treated," Johnson said. "You can't ignore it. Other groups who have had bad experiences have created museums."

Roger Lewis, 70, of Maryland retired from the insurance business and now is an avid collector of black memorabilia. Many of the figurines he has seen were made in Japan and Austria in the 1940s for American companies, he said. A lot were sold in Florida at tourist shops.

"In the Old South, they always like to have a black smiling from out behind a piece of watermelon," Lewis said.

"It's the old, I hate to use this term, 'redneck' ideology," he said.

Lewis is familiar with the British golliwog doll, although he doesn't sell them much.

"The golliwog was a little black boy with big wide eyes who was on the jar of Robertson's Jam," he said. "Because of the high influx of people from the former British colonies, the company discontinued the golliwog on its product." Golliwog dolls, magnets and other memorabilia still sell on eBay in Britain, however.

Closer to home, Lewis had a collection of cookie jars that nagged at him.

"I kept looking at these cookie jars. Why are all these black women portrayed as mammies, with bandannas and aprons? I told a friend of mine, 'This is a bad image of a black woman.' "

So Lewis created his own line of cookie jars featuring civil rights activist Rosa Parks and performer Josephine Baker. He made 300, and they sold out.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more information, visit www.ajc.com.

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