SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Monday, September 13
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
Final drafts of essays: You can just edit the draft document into final form and let me know when you’re finished, you don’t need to create a whole new document. We will meet to discuss the final drafts, between Thursday of this week and Monday of next.
Building on information in the Black-Face.com Web site.
These stereotypes have been integrated into lots of things beside theater, e.g., advertising, for example Aunt Jemima is a Mammy caricature, and Uncle Ben an Uncle Tom. That means the advertising images are more than just a happy Black face, they also carry all the racist connotations of the underlying minstrel caricatures.
Interestingly, African American performers also used blackface makeup, sometimes because they couldn’t perform otherwise, but also sometimes because they chose to.
These caricatures are extremely persistent, changing detail slightly but maintaining the general stereotype up until today.
Do these or similar caricatures appear in “The Gold Bug”?
Jupiter’s dialect mirrors the “plantation dialect” mentioned in the web page.
Jupiter is the ideal docile, loyal, servant, i.e., the Uncle Tom caricature.
Many of his uses as comic relief play on his inability to understand upper-class White language, a la Zip Coon. The fact that he is a free Black also connects him to Zip Coon.
These caricatures are particularly pernicious in how they propagate racist stereotypes.
By being more or less plausible (for example, one wouldn’t expect a slave or ex-slave to be well educated), they lure White audiences, particular in the northern United States where there would be relatively little exposure to Black people, to think they’re seeing a fictionalized but more or less accurate portrayal.
This is reinforced by the fact that the caricatures tap into “what everybody knows” about Black people. In nineteenth century America and Europe, the view promoted by scientific and religious leaders was that Africans, and their descendants outside of Africa, were a less-developed kind of human than Europeans and their descendants; thus, again, Whites watching minstrel caricatures would have found their simplicity and lack of intelligence consistent with White expectations, and that consistency subtly reinforces the beliefs behind the expectations.
The same mechanisms for propagating racist stereotypes also operate today. We’ll look at examples of “what everybody knows” in action in the Broadway play “The Book of Mormon.”
There’s no reading.