On the Persistence of Memory: The Legacy of Visual African-American Stereotypes

IThe image was not that large: about 3" x 4." Nevertheless, it demonstrated a calculated intent. The pristine white wall on which it appeared was 20' x 8'-newly erected inside of the university's painting studios. The image was dead center. At first, the drawing appeared crude. Yet, the deftness of the strokes revealed a trained hand. This was the work of someone who had studied art. An amateur would have boldly tagged the wall, but a student of visual art would know that less is more: a trenchant, concise mark would have a more intense impact than an impulsive gesture.The image was painful for older members of the faculty, who could remember it from other contexts-a bad memory, one hoped, consigned to the past. The black, chubby-cheeked face with bulging white eyes and thick red lips was immediately recognized as the minstrel era character Sambo, who was widely depicted in popular culture between 1850 and 1920 (Harris, 2003). However, Sambo had not faded from the American consciousness with the demise of the minstrel show. The shuffling, slow-witted, character mutated like a cancer and found new life in film (Griffith, 1915/1991), radio (Correll & Gosden, 1926), animation (Avery, 1937, 1941; Clampett, R, 1940, 1943; Disney, 1941, 1945), and television (Ely, 1991). Even after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, professed sympathetic portrayals of contemporary AfricanAmerican families-such as the character JJ from Good Times (Lear, 1975)-continued to traffic in the coded visual iconography of Sambo. Consider the minstrel era stereotypes present in the 2005 Nike ad campaign built around the athlete LeBron James (Nike, 2005).Just weeks before the Sambo image appeared in the painting studios, this resilient racial stereotype had arisen in another context. For my course on contemporary aesthetics, an African-American student brought to class a new, commercially released DVD on Shirley Temple. We sat in stunned embarrassment watching the film short Kid 'n Africa (Hays, 1933/2002), in which Sambo-type children ineptly attempt to torture the intrepid heroine-Shirley Temple-until the Tarzan-style, diapered boy rescues her. The depth of racial stereotyping and unwitting hurtfulness-now digitized and repackaged for new childhood audiences-was unsettling to watch, not simply because this film was made in 1933, but because in the 21st century commercial film distributors believe there is a new market for this "entertainment." Racial condescension is adoringly presented. Aren't the misanthropic aesthetics of hate alluring? Now a new generation of children can absorb it. Pick up the DVD at your local retailer.Their seeming charm makes African-American visual stereotypes genuinely sinister. Even now, these objects and images, some made 100 years ago, ingratiate-as Spike Lee (2000) so cunningly demonstrated in the graphics promoting Bamboozled. In their original context, popular culture images of African-Americans were visually designed to be cute or benevolent-such as in the case of smiling black children happily eating watermelon (Harris, 2003). These images were considered humorous, even heart-warming (while also conveying a message of indolence in need of white guidance). The images seemingly evoke an idyllic, innocent world while subtly reinforcing the racist conception of African-Americans as infantile and subservient.Fred Wilson has argued that African-American artists, such as Spike Lee, Kara Walker, and Michael Ray Charles, collect or incorporate into their own artwork these demeaning images of African-Americans as a means of taking psychological control over their hateful subtext (Harris, 2003). Undoubtedly, it is appropriate to understand Nike's LeBron James advertisements in this context. This is an ironic inversion of meaning (Harris 2003). Since irony denies an object has fixed significance (Rorty, 1989), it permits us to invest any object-no matter how regressive its origins-with new meanings of our choosing. …