SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Wednesday, September 15
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
(No.)
Thanks for telling me when your final “warm-up” essays are ready for me to read. Don’t forget to schedule 20 minutes to talk to me about them sometime between Thursday (tomorrow) and Monday.
Does contemporary entertainment still uses the “what everybody knows” move to propagate racist stereotypes?
For example, “The Book of Mormon” musical (by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone) from 2011.
The musical is about Mormon missionaries in Africa trying to convert a village.
…At least what the typical American thinks they know from popular media.
(Needless to say, these statements are a gross misrepresentation of actual Africa, but they capture a lot of how Americans see the continent.)
The missionaries arrive in Uganda, and promptly have their luggage stolen by soldiers working for “the General” (suggesting violence, warfare).
The missionaries’ hosts then meet them, and quickly get into a song about the troubles they live with, notably including AIDS and FGM. (This song also involves repeated blasphemy, at least from a Christian perspective, maybe suggesting that the Ugandans feel some rebellion or resentment towards previous Christian missionaries.)
Then the missionaries learn of a Ugandan who tried to rape a baby in order to cure his AIDS (i.e., disturbing sexual superstitions and practices). Someone suggested that maybe by this point the portrayal of Ugandans is overly centered on sex.
A later scene opens with a Ugandan excited to have bought a “texting device” in the local market. That device is a typewriter. (Africa lagging behind and ignorant of Western technology.)
Later, the General appears in person and demands the villagers’ loyalty. He describes his fear/hatred of the clitoris (more sexual superstition), and demands that all women in the village be circumcised. To drive home the point, he pulls out his gun and shoots a villager in the face (more violence).
While the play is using American racial stereotypes about Africa, and not challenging them, it’s at least not endorsing them.
But maybe simply reminding audiences of these stereotypes without challenging them reinforces a sense of “yeah, that’s what I’ve heard Africa is like” in those audiences and thereby does propagate the stereotypes.
Does the fact that the stereotypes are being used humorously, for satire, make them less offensive or dangerous? Not really.
What if the authors didn’t intend to advance a racist message? That’s probably better than if they did, but what matters more is what audiences take from the play, i.e., what it does to their beliefs about Africa and Africans.
As a counter-example to the treatment of most stereotypes, the play mocks Elder Price’s hope that Africa will be like “The Lion King” by simply showing that he thinks of it that way, and then having him recognize later how wrong he was. Simply having a White character hold but then reject a stereotype of Africa can powerfully make that stereotype look foolish.
Jupiter’s use of language is one of the things that Poe uses to make him seem unintelligent/uneducated and clownish in “The Gold Bug.”
Look at a modern, real-world, analog to this.
Please read Taylor Jones’s introduction to African American Language at https://www.languagejones.com/blog-1/2014/6/8/what-is-aave