So I’m reading the Home and Garden section of the SF Chronicle this morning, trying to take a little break from the ugliness of the world, and what do I get? Only a front page entirely devoted to issues of race, led off by an article entitled What’s Cute About Racist Kitsch? It’s a great article and, wow, did it ever strike a personal chord.
The author, Wanda J. Ravernell, talks about the sick feeling she got when she was recently confronted with reproduction ethnic memorabilia.
When I flipped to the page in the catalog, I wasn’t sure I was seeing right. It showed exclusive replicas of antique Mammy figures: cookie jars, salt and paper shakers, and tea towels decorated with pictures of pickanniny-like children eating watermelon. I read the copy, waited for my feelings to settle and looked again.
Perhaps I was taking this too personally; perhaps enough time has passed since the Urban League and the NAACP campaigns of the 1950s that made it politically incorrect to market these stereotypical images of the caretaking Mammy and the subservient butler.
No one had ever told me that these images were demeaning. In post-World War II urban areas, in the heyday of the Freedom Marches leading up to the black militant era, I never heard anyone talk about them. But I knew it when I saw it. Viewing the catalog, my stomach pitched and clutched while I tried to get a grip on my reason.
But no rationalization allowed me to deny what I saw and what went whirling through my head.
Well, it’s funny, but I understand her emotions far better than I ever could have, say, a couple weeks ago. Over at that other site, I saw several people post comments in which they compared their feelings to those of African Americans being confronted with watermelon-eating stereotypes. That analogy was pretty roundly dismissed as being over-the-top. But was it?
Ravernell goes on to say:
“Not all of the objects depicting black people from this period were violent or ugly. … For decades after Emancipation, these things enabled their white users to experience the psychological satisfaction of holding blacks in a kind of symbolic slavery. Indeed these gentler images may have been the most damaging of all, for their message was insidious — couched in “harmless” humor that invariably reduced blacks to generalized stereotypes. The black images were intended to amuse, serve and entertain; they were never shown as intelligent, competent, autonomous humans, equal to whites and worthy of respect.” (Bold-face added)
Hmmmm, change a couple of words there, and you have — oh, well. So is this where we’ve found ourselves at the dawn of the new millennium, ethnic minorities and women alike, fighting battles that we thought we had won 40 years ago AND losing ground in them? Damn. I have to say, folks, I am mightily discouraged.