Racism and the Production of Whiteness in Popular Culture
Warning: This page contains offensive
images. They are reproduced here as part of the effort to criticize the
persistence of racism in popular culture.
Every attempt to teach
critically about stereotypes runs into this discouraging paradox: you have to
look at or reproduce the very images you hope to condemn and eliminate. Thus
analyzing stereotypes runs the risk of putting these images into circulation even
more, or of unintentionally causing hurt and harm. Anti-racist teachers need to
beware of this paradox, and spend considerable time on other images as well
(ask students to create portfolios of positive images drawn from the dominant
media, for example, an exercise whose frustrations can be enlightening).
Yet because racism so
intimately targets our visual senses, colonizes our eyes, and distorts what we
believe we see, learning to look critically remains an essential task. Many
artists of color have engaged in this work, teaching us to see through their
re-visioning of previously popular images, stereotypes, and conventions of
representations.
For
example, Mark
Steven Greenfield, a contemporary African American
artist, creates a series of works based on racist images
from the blackface and minstrel traditions. He puts these
back into circulation, however, with a critical difference,
marking them with phrases and redesigns that interrupt
and subvert their former meaning.
In this image, ("So Whass
Up With This Shit"), the viewer reads the message
of the eyechart and suddenly finds the photo defamiliarized.
This account from the Steve Turner gallery clarifies
the project:
"Since 2000, Greenfield has worked on
the Blackatcha series in which old photographs of blackface entertainers are
juxtaposed with text presented in the form of an eye exam chart. Greenfield
continues to produce works in this series and his newest works will be featured
in a one-man exhibition at Steve Turner Gallery
in March, 2004. A book on this body of work, also entitled Blackatcha, was
published in 2002 and can be ordered from the gallery for $25." (gallery
web site)
In his statement for the gallery exhibition,
entitled "Post Minstrel," Greenfield states: "At the beginning
of the new millennium, I took stock of the stereotypical images that have
haunted African Americans and concluded that I could not endure them any
longer. I began to study the effect blackface minstrelsy had on the American
psyche and drew parallels between that and contemporary appropriations of
African American culture. In my work I alter the context of the stereotype in
order to buffer the viewer's visceral reaction to its grotesqueness. I
challenge the viewer to suspend or embrace their emotional reaction long enough
to analyze what they are looking at. I acknowledge the viewer's indignation by
using text which is sometimes as counter culture as are the images. Blackface
minstrelsy became the dumping ground for everything the dominant culture
despised about itself and as such became it's shadow. Concurrently African
Americans projected every negative aspect identified with them on these images,
making these their shadow as well. I believe that we African Americans can
never fully exorcise that which we do not first recognize. Therefore, it is my
hope that recognition of this alter ego will be the key to removing it's
power."
Greenfield's series forces us to look, and
not look, at these disturbing images. As the viewer leans in to try and read
the sentence spelled out on the eye chart, the eye is taken away from the image
towards discerning Greenfield's satiric, biting, or angry rejoinders to them.
We can't look closely at the image without reading Greenfield's critique of it,
which in turns creates a self-consciousness about the racial gaze on the part
of the viewer.
Greenfield's work is featured on the web
page of NPR's
coverage of a two-part radio show on minstrelsy and contemporary American
culture.
convict reminds us, once again,
of the pervasive racism in American popular culture.
Incredibly, the judge's brother defended him in part
by pointing out that he himself was also in blackface,
as "Buckwheat" from the Little Rascals T.V. series.
This man's ignorance about the evil and
hurtful effects of such stereotypes unfortunately appears all-too-universal
among white people who think such portrayls are innocent fun. It seems as if
every month brings us yet another story of white people--kids, college students,
court judges--once more putting on blackface in a continuance of a racist
practice that has always reinforced white supremacy. It's no laughing matter.
Racist caricatures,
made popular by the "Jim Crow" figure and later
19th century minstrel shows, continue to pervade popular
culture's constructions of whiteness and blackness. Al
Jolson
was a vaudeville singer and "minstrel"
performer whose "blackface" renditions of American
popular songs captivated white America in the 1920s and
1930s. Jolson's performance of "Mammy" in blackface
became the centerpiece of The Jazz Singer, the first full-length "talkie"
produced in Hollywood. Critics argue that cultural practices
such as blackface are instrumental in the creation of
the illusion of racial difference and in the reinforcement
of white supremacist attitudes. Jolson was also the subject
of another of Greenfield's eyechart deconstructions:
the letters appear to spell out "Mammy Should Have
Whupped Your Ass."
Figures
such as "Amos and Andy" brought the tradition
into radio and then television. "Amos ‘n’ Andy was
the story of two black characters—the modest, pragmatic
Amos and the blustery, self-confident Andy—created by
two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll.
The characters first aired as Sam ‘n Henry on Chicago’s
WGN in 1926. In 1928, the duo went to rival station WMAQ
as Amos ‘n’ Andy" (source).
Gosden sold the rights to CBS, which launched the television
version of the show in the early 1950s using black actors.
Amos 'n Andy was first broadcast on CBS television
in June 1951 and lasted some two years before the program
was canceled in the midst of growing protest by the black
community in 1953. Thus just as motion pictures had gained
their initial popularity with race movies (Birth of
a Nation, The Jazz Singer, Gone With the Wind), so
televison became a mass culture industry in part through
once more recirculating African American stereotypes
that reinforced white supremacy. (See the work of Elizabeth
McLeod.)
potency
of these images.
Contemporary debates over the politics
of blackface cultural images are subjected to harsh satire
in Spike Lee's controversial
film Bamboozled, in which Damon Wayans plays a
black TV executive whose attempt to protest racist caricatures
backfires when his plantation revue becomes a hit. Its
stars, played by Savion Glober and Tommy Davidson, are
(like the historic Bert Williams) African Americans who
find themselves blacking up in order to make it in the
white-dominated culture industry.
For more information
see in particular Michael Paul Rogin's book Black
Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood
Melting Pot; Eric Lott, Love and Theft : Blackface Minstrelsy
and the American Working Class;
Nelson George, Blackface: Reflections on African Americans
in the Movies, and W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising
Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.
For a powerful
visual history of racial caricature in popular culture,
see Marlon Riggs's classic video Ethnic Notions.
More About Analyzing Stereotypes
1. The Race for Mascots?
American Indians adopt White
mascot in protest over racial imagery in sports.
Click here to read the story .
2. Making Whiteness by Making Blackness
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Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (pp. 9,11-12) |
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