Thomas Rice Playing Jim Crow in Blackface, New York City, 1833
Racist images, Jim Crow, and monkeys
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
There has been a lot of discussion recently on Daily Kos about racism, and racist imagery, relating to depictions and critiques of President Obama. Those discussions have continued, once again, on the Black Kos community front porch.
Clearly, the POTUS, his wife and daughters as the most high profile black family in the world are targets of this type of depiction, whether in cartoons, words, or objects, but it is important that we place this phenomena in an historical context—which is part of an unbroken stream of vile representations of blacks which continues from the roots of African enslavement in the New World to the present day.
Blacks are not the only targets of this type of racial imaging, and many of us are familiar with the same type of racism when it applies to Native Americans or, asians or latinos and other marginalized or "othered" groups, but my focus today is on African Americans.
Racism in the US is systemic, but those systems are shaped and maintained by stereotypes and characterizations which have become almost commonplace—which mold individually held prejudices, both conscious and unconscious.
No one can escape the effects of this relentless barrage. No matter their race, ethnicity or political persuasion. The impact on us as AA's can be psychologically devastating, as sideboth discussed in her diary, A colored girl and her love/hate relationship with her nose.
The push back against this phenomenon is not new either. Blacks and their allies have been calling out and objecting to vile imaging since the days of national protests organized by the NAACP against the film version of Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman" which we know as "The Birth of a Nation."
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, protested premieres of the film in numerous cities. It also conducted a public education campaign, publishing articles protesting the film's fabrications and inaccuracies, organizing petitions against it, and conducting education on the facts of the war and Reconstruction.
When the film was shown, riots broke out in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities. The cities of Chicago; Denver; Kansas City, Missouri; Minneapolis; Pittsburgh; and St. Louis, Missouri, refused to allow the film to open. The film's inflammatory character was a catalyst for gangs of whites to attack blacks. In Lafayette, Indiana, after seeing the film, a white man murdered a black teenager.
These
words ring in my mind
Whatever happened during Reconstruction, this film is aggressively vicious and defamatory. It is spiritual assassination. It degrades the censors that passed it and the white race that endures it.
A spiritual assassination. Those of us who are the targets feel spiritually assassinated and violated, day in and day out—not just by these images and objects but by the objective reality of walking, and breathing while black. And yet, we are told, time and time again, even by well-meaning liberals that we are 'too sensitive', or 'seeing racism where it isn't'.
Open your eyes. Learn to listen and listen to learn. You may never be able to walk in my shoes, but you can at least begin to identify and empathize with my feelings.
Yesterday I posted a comment which sparked this essay.
I suggested that people holding onto denial and defenses educate themselves. They should pay a visit to The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia "Using objects of intolerance to promote tolerance and social justice"
This is a fairly long video which gives the background of the museum and takes you on a tour of the exhibits.
A shorter clip is from episode four of "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates
Racist images in the Jim Crow era were used as propaganda to send messages that demeaned African-Americans and legitimized violence against them. , The images and stereotypes used to represent African-Americans changed with the times. As historian David Levering Lewis explains, white America's representations of African-Americans were quite different before and after the Civil War
.
There is a post on the museum website discussing blacks as simians:
A quick trip to the Jim Crow Museum will reveal evidence of the long and insulting history of simian representation of Africans and African Americans. There are postcards that show African Americans as almost indistinguishable from monkeys and apes. There are prints that show Blacks and monkeys romantically involved. There are dozens of other objects in the museum that link Africans and Americans of African ancestry to monkeys and apes. Material objects, of course, both shape and reflect beliefs. In the 1940s, for example many three-dimensional objects were produced in the United States that tried to link (in a negative way) Blacks to monkeys. In that same decade, Black soldiers faced stereotypes that demeaned their intelligence, loyalty, and bravery, and, remarkably enough, claimed that they had tails. The material objects reinforced the tales.
In the 21st century the cruel linking of Blacks to simians remains fairly common. For example, porch monkey is a slur against Black people who are believed to be lazy. A large Black person is sometimes called an ape or gorilla. Not surprisingly, simian representations of Blacks have found expression on YouTube videos. One CNN video discussed an advertisement by Japanese company Emobile which showed a monkey (representing Senator Obama) giving a speech about change. It’s possible the Japanese producers of the video did not know about the racist connections. However, Americans making similar videos should not feign such ignorance. There is a YouTube video called, Obama Monkey,” which shows a monkey representing a Black woman who is supporting the candidacy of Senator Obama. Another video (since removed by YouTube) had raw racism reminiscent of the 1960s Johnny Rebel segregation songs with such lyrics as: “Quit your bitching n..ger and just let things be; you’re messing up big time, take it from me. Quit your bitching n..ger or you’re get your due ‘cause the Ku Klux Klan will come a calling on you.” In another video Michele Obama Without Makeup, Ms. Michele Obama is racially caricatured as an ape.
Racist cartoons:
They also include a video of racist cartoon clips:
And pages of Anti-black imagery.
During the days of discussion here, Bob Johnson repeatedly posted this link to The Coon Caricature: Blacks as Monkeys, in an effort to get people to look at the history.
Another similar site is The History of Blackface.
For a more academic approach from a critical race studies perspective please read New Media-Same Stereotypes: An Analysis of Social Media Depictions of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, by Dr. Mia Moody, professor of Journalism and Media Arts at Baylor University, an extensive analysis of facebook representations including:
Animalistic stereotypes
Many Facebook hate pages focused on cultural narratives mentioned in the review of the literature. Animalistic photos depict Obama or his whole family as animals, particularly apes. One photo includes male and female apes holding an infant ape with Obama’s face superimposed on its face
From jump Jim Crow, and black face, to present day slurs involving "hoodies and thugs" to deny racism in the death of youngsters like Trayvon Martin, we have not shed the use of destructive imagery to re-enforce systemic racism as it plays out in legislative and judicial agendas, as well as in our electoral process.
On Sunday I was heartened to find this statement, by kos:
I won't justify my support for a new community driven rule of "don't draw African Americans like monkeys", with a healthy dose of "don't be that white guy telling African Americans what is and isn't racist" -- because really, the reasons are pretty self-evident.
Certain truths
are self-evident to those of us who know and understand history. If you don't know history, you won't understand the present, and you can't move to change the future.
Yes, racist images are painful. There are people who have objected to the existence of the Jim Crow Museum.
No, we do not live in a post-racial America, no matter that we have elected a black president.
For me, I find the pain of denial inflicted by those who are ostensibly allies, to be far more cutting than racial attacks from the right.
I hope some people will take a step back, and make an honest effort to gain a deeper understanding of what we still face, so we can move "forward together".
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The RNC recently informed me that Rosa Parks ended racism. So I'm confused how this happened? A police officer in downtown Rochester, New York arrested three teens as they were standing outside a store. Their crime: Waiting for a school bus. Gawker: Three Teens Arrested for Waiting While Black.
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The three boys — Raliek Redd, 16, Deaquon Carelock, 16, and Wan'Tauhjs Weathers, 17 — are star athletes at Edison Tech high school, and were waiting to be taken to a basketball game when they were spotted by an officer.
It seems the store adjacent to their pick-up spot was being monitored by police due to past complaints from the owner of teens loitering outside.
The officer asked the teens to disperse, but they explained that they were waiting to be picked up by a bus. The officer again asked the teens to disperse.
"We tried to tell them that we were waiting for the bus," Wan'Tauhjs told WHEC. "We weren't catching a city bus, we were catching a yellow bus. He didn't care. He arrested us anyways."
The three were charged with with disorderly conduct and obstructing the sidewalk.
While they were being handcuffed, their coach, Jacob Scott, arrived at the scene and attempted to reason with the cop.
"He goes on to say, 'If you don't disperse, you're going to get booked as well," Scott recalled. "I said, 'Sir, I'm the adult. I'm their varsity basketball coach. How can you book me? What am I doing wrong? Matter of fact, what are these guys doing wrong?'"
A school board member has since come out in defense of the arrested teens, saying this is not a new phenomenon.
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It's a crazy, joyous race at 2,300m above sea level in Addis Ababa, and it's the adrenaline as well as the altitude that leaves competitors breathless after the Great Ethiopian Run. The Guardian: The Great Ethiopian Run: in the footsteps of Haile Gebrselassie.
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I am standing at the start line of the Great Ethiopian Run: not only the biggest race in Africa but one of the continent's biggest talent-spotting contests. Officially there are 38,000 of us, all in yellow-and-green race T-shirts, jostling and shoving and staring down a line of police with batons. But hundreds of others have sneaked into line, with home-brewed kit, swelling the numbers still further. A marshal warns me, "Don't try to get in front when they start – you'll be trampled!", then there's the blast of a horn, a rising crackle of noise, and the police cordon sprints for safety. Ahead of me two men lose their shoes in the tumult – and don't return – and I wonder: what the hell have I let myself in for?
For others, however, this 10km race around the hills of Addis Ababa, at an altitude of 2,300 metres, offers the chance to follow in the footsteps of the great Ethiopian runners: Abebe Bikila, who won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome running barefoot; the revered Haile Gebrselassie, 10,000m gold medallist at the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics; and the current 5km and 10km world record holder Kenenisa Bekele. Previous winners in the race's 13-year history have gone on to win major marathons and Olympic medals. The race – which is shown live on Ethiopian TV – is not just a showcase for runners, but for the country, too.
That it takes place at all is down to Gebrselassie, who many see as a future president of Ethiopia. Invited by Brendan Foster, the founder of the Great North Run, to come over to Newcastle, Haile responded: "Why don't you help me to start a Great Ethiopian Run?" So Foster did.
"The whole country is running," says Gebrselassie, offering Ethopian coffee so strong you suspect it partly explains the speed of the country's athletes. "We try to rise up the people to do something. Sport has just one language, and when you encourage people through sport you encourage every sector, whatever their job. One religion, one culture, one language – and that is running."
More than 38,000 runners hit the streets of Addis Ababa for the Great Ethiopian Run, Africa's biggest race. Photograph: Dan Vernon
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When I was first introduced to BioLite’s technology a little more than a year ago at an outdoor goods showcase in lower Manhattan, I was equally enchanted and dismissive. BusinessWeek: Can a Camp Stove (That Charges iPhones) Save Millions of Lives?
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The founders of the Brooklyn-based startup had devised a portable, cylindrical wood-burning camp stove that recharges electronic devices through a USB cable. Cool, right? No need to carry gas canisters—or worry about running out of fuel—on an overnight hike. And if you use your smartphone as your camera, here was a way to break camp with enough juice to capture every pano-view and secure photo evidence of that fearsome bear on the opposite ridge. Soon after, I bought one for the one person I could imagine really using it: my friend Claire, who spends much of her year helping to staff a medical clinic in a remote part of Panama where brownouts are frequent (and that’s in areas that have any electricity at all). Yet thinking of Claire confirmed my sense that this was a niche, even superniche, gizmo. A gift for the backpacker who has everything.
The BioLite CampStove, it turns out, was the prototype—and revenue stream—needed to develop and launch a larger, though still compact, stove for homes. The founders, Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond, met at Smart Design, a New York consulting firm, about 10 years ago and bonded over a shared obsession with efficient, sustainable design. Cedar’s an avid outdoorsman, and the two focused first on the recreational applications of thermal energy as a way to eliminate reliance on batteries and fossil fuels. By the time they had a working prototype of the camp stove—and well before the BioLite CampStove became a surprise hit at REI—they had their eyes on a much larger prize: replacing the sooty, wood- and coal-burning stoves many in the developing world use when they cook their meals.
According to the the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, half the world cooks on “open” fires that are confined in some way, trapping smoke and gases that eventually degrade the health of those around them, especially the women who cook over them. In 2011 the World Health Organization reported that 2 million die prematurely every year from medical issues related to stove pollution. That dreadful toll rose to 3.5 million in 2012 after the Lancet began including indoor air pollution as a factor in cardiovascular diseases.
The breakthrough of BioLite isn’t the low-tech/high-tech magic of charging an iPad with a fire suitable for s’mores. It’s the combustion. The fuels in the BioLite canisters consume 10 times the gases and particulate matter of a normal wood fire. According to the company’s data, the BioLite HomeStove eliminates 90 percent of the typical emissions, or pollution, as it heats your dinner.
The BioLite HomeStove launched two months ago and is now being sold in three countries: India, Ghana, and Uganda. BioLite is eager to discover what people will be willing to pay, and considers a cell phone a decent benchmark (around $45 to $60). “No question [the stove] represents a significant investment for most of our potential buyers,” says Erica Rosen, BioLite’s marketing director. “But if they’re in a nonelectrified community, they’ll make back the cost in four to eight months months on the cost of fuels they’re using now.”
Courtesy BioLite
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Missed this story last week, very very sad (and a reason we should all be thankful for what we got). Slate: Boat Capsizes Killing Dozens of Haitian Migrants.
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A 40-foot sailboat thought to be carrying more than 100 Haitian migrants capsized Monday night off the coast of the Bahamas killing at least 30 people. The boat, which ran aground, had been at sea for 9 days when it capsized leaving survivors clinging to the side of the boat for hours awaiting rescue. A Coast Guard helicopter first arrived at the scene, according to the New York Times, and had this report:
Ten bodies in the water could be seen from the helicopter, along with 30 people in the water and up to 60 clinging to the boat. Thirteen people were hoisted onto the helicopter. During the night, the Coast Guard dropped food, water and eight life rafts.
By late Tuesday afternoon,
according to the Associated Press, the Coast Guard had rescued about 110 people. The accident, the New York Times reports, is “the latest in a series of shipwrecks involving Haitian migrants, who pay smugglers to ferry them across dangerous waters to the United States in boats that are often unseaworthy.”
In this handout image provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, approximately 100 Haitians sit on the hull of the 40-foot sail freighter.
Photo by U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images
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Simple acts like this could raise cultural consciousness and promote positive self-esteem for girls of color. The Root: Why It Matters That Angelina Jolie’s White Child Plays With Black Dolls.
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ngelina Jolie is known for her unconventional family, which includes three biological children with longtime partner Brad Pitt and adopted children from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam. Her multiracial and multicultural family has generated headlines, most notably when critics have felt the need to weigh in on her Ethiopian daughter Zahara’s hair. Some challenged Jolie’s ability to style and comb it, while others had a problem with her daughter wearing braided extensions.
But the Jolie-Pitt family should be commended for their efforts to be culturally conscious, particularly when it comes to their diverse brood. Pitt once acknowledged using Carol’s Daughter products on Zahara’s hair and recently explained why he declined the role of a cruel slave owner in 12 Years a Slave, which his company produced, saying, “I didn’t want my kids to see me in this role.”
A recent photo of the Jolie-Pitt kids seems to reinforce that Jolie and Pitt may be more conscious of racial and cultural diversity than the average parent. The widely published photo captured the couple’s biological daughter Vivienne carrying a black doll with short, tightly curled hair. This may not seem like a big deal but it is.
Dolls have long been a source of angst when it comes to the self-esteem of girls, particularly young girls of color. The role of dolls in serving as symbols of beauty, racial stereotypes and racism is so significant that dolls played a key role in one of America’s landmark civil rights cases, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Angelina Jolie and her daughter, courtesy of Radar Online
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Prison Industrial Complex insists that it is a growth industry; and it's hard to argue with that assessment. With the building of ever more prisons, both by Government and Private Industry, with mandatory sentencing and inflexible drug laws; the resonant cadences of chain gangs past can be heard echoing from sea to shining sea.
It is presumed that Drug Prohibition began with the Harrison Act of 1914, but California enacted the Nation's first anti-narcotics law in 1875 in response to anti-chinese sentiment. Ostensibly enacted to crack down on opium dens, the law was used to incarcerate or banish Chinese nationals deemed as unfair competition with white workers. When several boatloads of Punjabi Sikhs landed in San Francisco in 1910, it sparked an uproar of protest from Asian exclusionists, who pronounced them to be even more unfit for American civilization than the Chinese. Immigration authorities capped the influx at little more than 2,000 in the state, mostly in agricultural areas of the Central Valley. Even so, the Sikhs remained a popular target by racists of the times; and were accused of many crimes, all while under the influence of hashish or marijuana. In the 1920's and 1940's, when Braceros and other workers from Mexico were no longer needed, even harsher laws were enacted to hasten their exodus. Anti-narcotics laws were also enacted in the South to intimidate the black population and used as an excuse to deny them the vote.
To ignore the racial animus that drives the Prison Industrial Complex, is to ignore the obvious; it is to ignore the history of our nation.
Divide and Conquer is a strategy used by military and political professionals alike. If people can be divided by culture and race, the job of the General or the Oligarch runs smoother. It runs smoother still, if the divisions extend within those very cultures and races, as well.
A Fable
Once upon a today and yesterday
and nevermore there were 7 men and women all locked
up in prison cells. Now these 7 men and women
were innocent of any crimes; they were in prison
because their skins were black.
Day after day, the prisoners paced their cells,
pining for their freedom.
And the non-black jailers would
laugh at the prisoners and beat them
with sticks and throw their food on the floor.
Finally, prisoner #1 said,
“I will educate myself and emulate
the non-colored people.
That is the way to freedom
c’mon, you guys, and follow me.”
“Hell, no,” said prisoner #2.
“The only way to get free is
to pray to my god and he will deliver you like
he delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,
so unite and follow me.”
“Bullshit,” said prisoner #3.
“The only way
out is thru this tunnel i’ve been
quietly digging, so c’mon, and follow me.”
“Uh-uh,” said prisoner #4,
“that’s too risky.
The only right
way is to follow all the rules
and don’t make the non-colored people angry,
so c’mon brothers and sisters and unite behind me.”
“Fuck you!” said prisoner #5,
“The only way
out is to shoot
our way out, if all of
you get together behind me.”
“No,” said prisoner #6,
“all of you are incorrect;
you have not analyzed the
political situation by my
scientific method and historical meemeejeebee.
All we have to do is wait long enough
and the bars will bend from their own inner rot.
That is the only way.”
“Are all of you crazy,” cried prisoner #7.
“I’ll get out by myself,
by ratting on the rest of you
to the non-colored people.
That is the way, that is the only way!”
“No-no,” they
all cried, “come and follow me.
I have the
way, the only way to freedom.”
And so they argued, and to this day
they are still arguing;
and to this day they are still
in their prison cells,
their stomachs
trembling with fear.
-- Etheridge Knight
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