Ten Little Niggers in German

Well it certainly was not that the story of the 'Ten Little Niggers' end of the 19th Century in Germany as easy and without any particular motivation was racist assumed to be assessed as a nursery rhyme. For in the last decades of the 19th Century Germany was in the circle of the colonial powers and acquired overseas territories, mainly in Africa with all the associated problems with the local population. Cameroon, on which the book from Cameroon refers was from 1884 - 1919 German colony and was mainly in the interior only gradually brought under the control of the German colonial rulers. Conflicts with the indigenous population and uprisings, which was countered by military means were not uncommon. A similar situation was also in the other African colonies of Germany.

It was at that time in Germany, therefore, an immediate and time-date access to the theme of "Negro", which was not significantly different from that of other colonial powers. The two pictures above from the book From Cameroon reflect the attitude towards black Africans very much again. The text to the image on the left is: Eight Little Niggers, / They went and stole turnips; / The one hit the (very 'German' subscribed) dead / Bauer Since there were only seven.

 A small Negro boy / Participated in ' . ne Mama / Ten Little Negro Boys Are / soon as the last surviving black boy turns out to be 'civilizable', apparently married in church founded a family and lives in a bourgeois apartment - Bismarck looks from the wall.
[http://members.aon.at/zeitlupe/zehnkleine2.html]

Michael Parenti on the Racist Propaganda

Michael Parenti on the Racist/Imperialist Propaganda of Entertainment Media

Mother Arrested For Booing A Mammy Middle School Skit

From The Washington City Paper, an article, "Anti- “Mammy” Mom Could Face Time for Booing," by Maya Rhodan on 27 January 2012 reports:  Last spring, a parent in the audience at a middle school recital was so moved by the children’s performances that she couldn’t help but to stand up...and boo.

Jackie Carter, a local stage director, attended an April 29 production of the Bowen McCauley Dance Company held at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Va., where her daughter attends school, and was outraged by one of the group's skits, “Little Rabbit, Where’s Your Mammy?”

Innocent sounding, sure. But picture this: At a middle school dance performance, children act out a skit featuring an antebellum African-American wet-nurse, or “mammy.” For a black theater buff like Carter, it was too much to take.

And depending on the verdict of her trial that begins April 23, she may face up to a year in jail for doing so.

According to the Afro, the presentation was promoted as a “tribute to American folk culture traditions.” Apparently, folk traditions include finding entertainment in the perpetuation of slavery's finest stereotypes—such as that of the wide-hipped black women who joyously cared for the children of their slave masters.

After noticing the skit in the dance company’s performance, Carter says she reached out to the school principal and local officials about the performance prior to her in-show outburst, to no avail.

Carter returned for an afternoon performance the next day, passed out fliers, and booed the skit. She was later charged with disorderly conduct in a public place, a class-one misdemeanor usually reserved for drunken drifters and angry arrestees.

Booing a children's performance extreme. But that the skit didn't outrage, offend, or otherwise drive anyone else to action is shameful.

The school’s principal circulated a letter after the incident on May 2 of last year, stating that the term "mammy" is a “colloquial affectionate term used for mother or grandmother.”

Kind of like the way “dick” is a colloquial affectionate term used for male genitalia, we guess. [Washington City Paper]

Negrophobic Propaganda

Question: In Chapter 17 you write, “Just as American ideas about liberty and self-government had circulated around the world in the age of revolution, American racial attitudes had a global impact in the Age of Empire.” Would you elaborate on that?

Eric Foner: Well, we’d like to think, and correctly, of the world impact of some of our highest ideals—individual freedom, self-government, democracy—and certainly those ideals have inspired people in many other countries. But it’s also important that some of our perhaps less noble ideas and practices have also had a worldwide impact. In this period at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning of the twentieth century, American segregation affected the way the people of South Africa were implementing apartheid; American anti-Chinese legislation was picked up in Australia in what they called the White Australia Policy that they inaugurated in 1901 when Australia became self-governing. Canadians watched our efforts to restrict immigration from Asia and they adopted those policies as well. 

The failure of Reconstruction in the United States was seen in these white settler societies as indicating that nonwhite people were not really capable of self-government. People in other countries cited what happened in Reconstruction in the United States to say, look, we don’t need to give black people the right to vote because they tried that in the United States and it didn’t work. This was a distorted view of what happened in Reconstruction, but that distorted view affected racial thinking in other places. So as the American system of Jim Crow, segregation, disenfranchisement of black voters, Asian exclusion is implemented in this country, other countries are watching what we do and are learning racial policy from us as well.

Tintin's Racist Past

Traveling in a hammock, Belgian Congo [Photograph taken or provided by Émile Gorlia (1887-1966)] Hammocks carried by African porters were an important means of transportation for Europeans during the colonial period. Some African leaders also used palanquins and other carrying devices as symbols of their status.

From Forbes Magazine, "Tintin's Racist Past," by Lionel Laurent, on 23 July 2007 --LONDON - When British lawyer David Enright opened the pages of a comic book entitled Tintin In The Congo while in a shop with his wife and two young boys, he was probably expecting a benign adventure story full of fun for all the family.

Instead what he found was a "highly offensive" collection of racist caricatures of Africans, from superstitious natives to incoherent simpletons, and in a letter of complaint he demanded that the Borders bookstore in his hometown of St. Albans stop selling the comic book.

Tintin is Belgium's most famous export, with over 200 million copies of his adventures sold worldwide. In May Variety even reported that co-founder of DreamWorks Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were planning a Tintin trilogy, no doubt tempted by the $3 billion gross raked in by Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Could one angry British lawyer derail the reputation of a true comic book hero?

The incident has snowballed into a very British scandal, with the Commission for Racial Equality backing Enright and demanding that all Borders stores take Tintin's Congolese adventures off their shelves. Now even the police are involved, with the Hertfordshire police deciding to record Enright's complaint as a "racist incident."

Borders' response has been to move all copies of the comic to the "adult graphic" section of the store from the childrens' section, but the book seller refused to stop selling it outright.

It's not the first time accusations of racism have been leveled against Hergé, the late Belgian cartoonist who created the iconic orange-haired reporter known as Tintin. When the character first appeared in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets at the end of the 1920s, he stood for conservative, Catholic values, showing up the godless credo of communism. It is no accident that in his second adventure in 1931, Tintin In The Congo, the intrepid reporter is saved from the snapping jaws of angry crocodiles by a bearded Catholic missionary dressed in white.

But Hergé himself regretted his early work, as well as his personal attachment to a Catholic abbot with fascist sympathies called Norbert Wallez. In an interview released in 1983, the artist said: "The fact is that while I was growing up, I was being fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me. It's true that Soviets and Congo were youthful sins. I'm not rejecting them. However, if I were to do it again, they would be different."

Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian Congo) - Kuba King "Dr. William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927), an African American missionary for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, who later became an outspoken critic of King Léopold's regime, was the first overseas visitor to reach the kingdom's capital in 1890. The Kuba, famous for their arts, subsequently attracted many visitors, ranging from anthropologists to photographers, who sought to depict the legendary kings, the visual splendor of the royal court and important chiefs, among them Chief Ndombe of Bieeng. Casimir Zagourski, who traveled through the royal capital in the 1930s, took a classic, often-published portrait of then ruler Kot Mabiinc (ruled 1919-1939), who was paralyzed. Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973), an American photographer who worked for Life magazine, followed in Zagourski's footsteps in 1947, creating evocative portraits of Kot Mabiinc's successor, Mbop Mabiinc maMbeky (ruled 1939-1969). Photographic encounters in the capital became commonplace and orchestrated--grand performances for the cameras of the Westerners. Kuba kings used the opportunity to further the reputation of the Kuba as the foremost artists in central Africa." (flicker)

Tintin In The Congo did not even make it to the U.K. until 2005, over 70 years after its first appearance in French, because of the controversy surrounding it. When the publisher Egmont finally released the English version, it billed it as an "essential volume for collectors," making sure to wrap a label around the comic that warned readers of its potentially "offensive" content.

And the huge divide between post-colonial Britain and Belgium in the 1930s, when the kingdom still owned the Congo, adds to the shock of today's reader discovering Tintin's adventure for the first time. The story is filled with witch doctors, lazy natives who need to be put to work and over-the-top violence against animals.

According to Mark Rodwell, representative of Moulinsart--the firm that manages Hergé's estate--this explains why children ignorant of the past don't have the same reaction.

"The criticism is that it's not suitable for children," he told Forbes.com. "But it's the adults that have the problem with it. It's a book of its time." (source: Forbes)

Revisiting The Human Zoo Phenomena in Paris

From the BBC News Paris, " Human zoos: When real people were exhibits," on 27 December 2011, by Hugh Schofield--An exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display as article of curiosity.

Over four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human "specimens" shipped back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the crowd.

What started as wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical evidence for their theory of races.

Finally, in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited "human zoos" created as part of the great international trade fairs.

Here they could watch whole villages of Kanaks or Senegalese, with real-life inhabitants paid to act out war dances or religious rituals before their colonial masters.

The story is told at the Quai Branly museum in Paris until June 2012, mainly through the display of paintings, old photographs, archive film, posters and postcards.

The aim of the exhibition is explicit - to teach how Western societies created a sense of "the other" in regard to foreign peoples, thus legitimizing their eventual domination.

The information allows people to understand why there are still fault-lines in society based on the colour of our skins."”

Ex-footballer Liliane Thuram

"What we tried to do is conduct a kind of archaeology of the stereotype," says curator Nanette Snoep.

The display, entitled "Inventing the Savage", was the inspiration of the Caribbean-born former international footballer Liliane Thuram, who today heads his own anti-racism foundation.

"I have long been interested in slavery because of the way my own family was affected by it," says Thuram.

"It became clear to me that racism was above all an intellectual construction. And as such, it was also susceptible to de-construction.

"That's what we are trying to do with the exhibition: putting on display the information that allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."

At the start, all was relatively innocent. One of the first paintings is of four Greenlanders brought to the Danish court in 1664 by a Dutch sailor. They stare out with a look as bewildered as those that must have been on the faces of their captors.

"What is fascinating is that on top of the painting are written their names. In other words, at this early stage they are seen as individuals. Exotic yes, but people," says Snoep. "It is later when the names disappear that the relationship deteriorates."

Another early portrait is of the Tahitian man called Omai, who was brought to the court of King George III in London by the explorer Joseph Banks.

In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes describes Omai as "quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks… were much admired in society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies."

But describing this same portrait, Holmes adds: "It is not clear if [Omai] is Banks's companion or his trophy."

Guest or specimen? If there was room for ambiguity in the early days - when explorers and explored often found each other mutually intriguing - this disappeared with the new certainties of the colonial epoch.

The saddest emblem of the coming era was the South African Saartjie Baartman, later to be known as the Hottentot Venus. Born around 1780, she was brought to London in 1810 and put on display.

She had the genetic characteristic known as steatopygia - extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia - which evidently delighted the cabaret-goers of the British capital.

Can it teach us anything about modern attitudes to race?

Later she came to Paris, and was analysed by the budding racial anthropologists. According to the exhibition catalogue, one scientist described her as having the "buttocks of a mandrill".

When she died in poverty, her skeleton was put on display. It remained on show in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa.

"Baartman marks the start of the period of description, measurement and classification, which soon leads us to hierarchisation - the idea that there are lesser and greater races," says Snoep.

The climax of the story comes with the imperialist high noon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

A European public fed on notions of Christian evangelism and cultural superiority was titillated by re-enactments of life in the colonies which became a regular part of international trade fairs.

Entrepreneurs put on travelling stage shows featuring Hindu rope-dancers, Arabian camel-herders, Zulu warriors or hunters from New Caledonia. Whole African villages were recreated to allow Europeans a glimpse of "primitive" living.

The most famous impresario was "Buffalo Bill" Cody whose Wild West shows - according to the exhibition organisers - were another example of racial stereotyping.

Some 35,000 people are reckoned to have taken part in the displays. Most were paid.

"They were shows. Public entertainment. The villagers from Africa or India were acting out a role. Significantly there were barriers between the public and the performers, to reinforce the notion of separateness," says Snoep.

These ethnographic displays died out after World War II. Oddly it was Hitler who first banned them. The last was in Belgium in 1958.

The organizers of Inventing the Savage claim that these "human zoos" were seen by 1.4 billion people overall - and that they therefore played an important, and so far unacknowledged, part in the development of modern racism.

"What is left of this incredible story today?" intones the voice-over on a film which is part of the exhibition.

"A view of Africa and its people that is still contemptuous. A certain way in the West of believing oneself superior. Above all the story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races."

Inventing the Savage provides plenty of food for thought, and there is no-one alive today who would for a minute defend the practice of human ethnographic exhibitions.

The show has been well-received but has come into some criticism for what some see as its heavy-handed didacticisim - as well as a kind of historical cherry-picking that leaves out what does not fit the message.

There is no mention for example of what the human "exhibits" themselves thought when brought to Europe. They are presented as victims, nothing more. Nor are the reactions of the audience explored. Maybe these were more complex than mere colonial self-satisfaction.

Writing in the left-wing newspaper Libération, columnist Marcela Iacub detects in the show "the frankly conservative role… of militant anti-racists and the consensus that they seek to create."

The spirit of the exhibition, she says, is a kind of "censorship, accompanied by the promotion of pedagogical, uplifting messages that will eradicate in us all those dangerous ideas that survive."

Iacub says it is ironic that it was just that kind of misguided moral superiority - the need to improve the unenlightened - that led to Europeans colonizing Africa in the first place.

"In the eyes of the militant anti-racist, we are all violent, easily manipulated, barbarous, bloodthirsty, and incapable of thinking without the aid of people to teach us. In fact just like the 'savage' of old!" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16295827)

Drug Propaganda: American Gangster

"American Gangster, American Stereotype," NAM, Commentary, by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, on 7 Nov 2007"

Editor's Note: "American Gangster" is brilliant cinema that unfortunately gives the wrong impression that blacks are the main players in America's drug problems. NAM Associate Editor Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is "The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African Americans and Hispanics" (Middle Passage Press).

"American Gangster" is a big, brash and brilliant cinema tour de force. But it also reinforces a glaring stereotype one of America's most enduring stereotypes that the drug problem and drug kingpins come with a black face.

There are two telling scenes in "American Gangster" that drive that point home with a tormenting vengeance.

The first is near the end of the film when intrepid cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), whose sole mission is to nail black drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), faces off with the busted Lucas in a police interrogation room. He indignantly lectures Lucas that his dope peddling has spread death and destruction that wrecked and ruined hundreds of lives. In the second scene there is a fleeting glimpse of a white soldier shooting up heroin in a servicemen's hangout in Bangkok, Thailand. Other than that scene and a quick look at a white junkie getting whacked by Lucas, there's no hint that the drug racket and the gangsters that run it bribing cops and politicians, and putting an army of small time dealers and bagmen and women on the street are anything but African Americans.

Washington invests in Lucas a chilling mix of charm, business savvy and raw brutality. That further reinforces the notion that a black man can be bigger, smarter, and more audacious than the organized crime racketeers that in decades past ran and still largely run the drug trade in America. They are the ones who hold an iron grip on the foreign growers and suppliers, the transport, street distribution, and the network of banks that launder the dirty money.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's survey on the sex and drug habits of Americans last June further tossed the ugly glare on who controls and uses drugs in America. The survey found that whites are much more likely to peddle and use drugs than blacks. Non-Hispanic whites had a higher percentage of using cocaine or street drugs (23.5 percent) than blacks (18 percent).

Other studies have found roughly equal rates of drug use by blacks and whites. But what made the CDC survey more eye-catching is that it didn't solely measure generic drug use, but singled out the use of cocaine and street drugs the kind of drugs depicted in "American Gangster."

The findings fly in the face of the conventional drug war wisdom that blacks use and deal street drugs while whites use trendy, recreational designer drugs, and that these presumably include powder cocaine. That once more calls into question the gaping disparity in drug sentencing between whites and blacks.

More than 70 percent of those prosecuted in federal courts for drug possession and sale (mostly small amounts of crack cocaine) and given stiff mandatory sentences are blacks. Though the Supreme Court recently agreed to review the disparities in drug sentencing, it hasn't ruled yet and won't for many months. The majority of those who deal and use crack cocaine aren't violent gang members, but poor, and increasingly female, young blacks. They need help, not jailing.

But that's the morality tale theme that heavily underpins "American Gangster." If you're black and you use drugs you'll either die, become a walking zombie, or rot behind bars. And more than likely the guy that sells the junk will skip away scot-free, live a princely lifestyle, retire with fabulous wealth and, if unlucky enough to get popped, cut a deal to rat out crooked cops or competitors. Lucas did just that and, considering the very real death and destruction that he spread, he waltzed away with a relative hand slap sentence. Then he gives the supreme self-serving rationale for the dirty dealing by wailing that if he didn't do it, somebody else would.

However, the real drug boss rarely looked like him. In fact, Lucas and his black competitor Nicky Barnes (who has a cameo role in the film and is the subject of a recently release documentary, "Mr. Untouchable") are the rarest of rare birds. In the movie, Lucas is portrayed as a black drug boss who supposedly topped the mafia for control of the drug business in Harlem. Through cunning and dumb luck, he found an opening in the Vietnam War, a willing, strategically placed accomplice among the black soldiers in Vietnam, and a supplier to get him the drugs and help with the transport.

It all adds up to one thing: The public scapegoat of blacks for America's drug problem during the past two decades has been relentless, and the at-all-costs hunting down by Richie (Crowe) of Lucas (Washington) in "American Gangster" is a stark testimony to that relentlessness.

The greatest fallout from the nation's hopelessly flawed and failed drug hunt for scapegoats is that it makes it easy for on-the-make politicians to grab votes, garner press attention, and bloat state prison budgets to jail more black offenders, while continuing to feed the illusion that the drug war is winnable. Unfortunately, "American Gangster" won't do anything to change that illusion. (source: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a2edb50c78631dd445454a00ce410d87)

The Mythical Stereotype of the "Mammy"

In an article entitled, "The Mythification of the Mammy Figure," One of the earliest fictionalized versions of the mammy figure was Aunt Chloe in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Patricia Turner explains in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies that the difference between this character and subsequent caricatures is the presence of a world away from the white family: "Stowe's decision to portray Aunt Chloe in a cabin feeding her three children while Uncle Tom and George Shelby looked on did give Aunt Chloe something future mammies often lacked--an implied sex life."(1)

Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe at home.

As the mammy moved into the twentieth century and became larger than life (in more ways than one), the personal time was sacrificed to the demands of the white majority that mythologized the figure. Even memoirs, which consistently mentioned mammies from the 1890s to the 1920s (2), downplayed the black woman's relationship to her own family. Cheryl Thurber notes in her essay, "The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology":

[T]here were several passing comments that mammy had done a better job of raising her white children than she had done with her own, who frequently disappointed her. Consistent with this viewpoint is the suggestion that, after the abolition of slavery, she chose to remain with her master's family. Loyalty and affection were tied together.(p. 100)

Since mammy's loyalty to her white family caused her to neglect her own flesh and blood, when the time came and she had the opportunity to choose who she would stay with, the mammy opted to be a key part of the better family. These myths were perpetuated in the early twentieth century with Thurber noting that descriptions of the mammy in memoirs peaked between 1906 and 1912 (p. 96). Well after the mammy was supposed to have been a key figure in the southern American family, the culture invested a good deal of time and effort into developing her image:

“I want my Mammy” - Eddie Cantor - Sheet Music 1921

References to mammy in the Confederate Veteran magazine, American popular songs, memoirs, and fiction confirm that more was written about mammy at the turn of the century than during the antebellum period, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, the New South movement, and the later phases of the Confederate Lost Cause movement. (p. 95)

In Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, Patricia Turner compares the proliferation of this stereotype to a similar event occurring in American advertising:

Like Aunt Jemima and her turn-of-the-century literary counterparts, these mammies were happily ensconced in the households of white employers. Implicit in each rendition was the notion that these thick-waisted black women were happy with their lot, honored to spend their days and nights caring for white benefactors. (p. 51)

The people promoting this nostalgia, however, were selling something much more than pancake mix. Catherine Clinton, author of The Plantation Mistress, explains the origins of the caricature:

The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum era, and to embellish it with nostalgia in the post-bellum period. In the primary records from before the Civil War, hard evidence for her existence simply does not appear.(3)

As social and racial demographics changed in the North during the twentieth century, southerners held fast to the myth of the mammy as a way to define themselves and their relation to their northern contemporaries. Cheryl Thurber explains:

With the growth of black migration northward, the North was having its own difficulties with race relations and was ready to believe that the South had solved its racial problems. Certainly the ideal of a loving and faithful mammy contributed to the illusion of peace. With the expression of pious devotion and support for mammy, proper southerners could convince themselves and others of their own goodness. In a sense they were attempting to redeem themselves for the wrongs that had been done because, "I loved my old mammy."(4)

To borrow Snead's terms, it seems southerners were interested in emphasizing the importance of the mammy in their lives because of the omission of other kinds of positive inter-racial relationships. The harsh reality, however, was often much different. Thurber turned to the former slave interviews documented in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in order to understand the extent of some of the exaggerations:

Very few former slaves mentioned any older relatives who had the role of mammy in antebellum times. In fact, they more commonly mentioned former slaves as having been raised by the white mistress as opposed to the adult black women who took care of the white children.

The few references to mammy by former slaves usually include a story about the special protection the role provided, or the continued concern shown by the white folks toward their former mammy....

There are numerous instances where the devotion of the white children to their black mammy was mentioned, including their care for her as she grew older and after slavery times. But the continued support was inconsistent at best.....
It is likely, however, that mammies did exist in the antebellum period, but in much smaller numbers than the mythology would indicate.(5)

Not only were the number of mammies smaller than imagined, mammies themselves were probably smaller too. Patricia Turner explains that the conditions of slavery rarely allowed for such large old women to be in the position of taking care of their master's children:

Like the field hands, those black bondswomen who worked indoors were unlikely to be overweight because their food stuffs were severely rationed. They were more likely to be light as dark because household jobs were frequently assigned to mixed-race women. They were unlikely to be old because nineteenth-century black women just did not live very long; fewer than 10 percent of black women lived beyond their fiftieth birthday.(6)

Regardless of the facts, however, the belief that white owners loved their mammies became ingrained in the American culture. Some people went as far as erecting a statue as a testament to this fictionalized in a place worthy of a president--the Mall in Washington, D.C. Cheryl Thurber notes that "From about 1910 on, suggestions for memorials to the mammy made their appearance culminating in 1923 with a United Daughters of the Confederacy proposal to erect a monument to her memory in the nation's capital. After extensive and bitter controversy, the bill was finally killed in the House of Representatives." (p. 99)

While Patricia Turner attributes the actual petition of Congress to the Daughters of the American Confederacy (DAC) (p. 53), the point remains clear: many Americans felt so strongly about this mythologized woman that they were willing to erect a statue in the nation's capital as a testament of their love.

One particularly interesting assessment of just how far this love could go comes in the form of Lillian Smith's 1948 description of southern society in Killers of the Dream. In "Race, Region, and Gender in a Reassessment of Lillian Smith," Roseanne Camacho writes:

As Smith's best-known and some would argue, best-written book, Killers of the Dream is the confessional literature, distilled from her magazine's editorials [from issues of Pseudopodia] and her memories of a segregated childhood in northern Florida. It converted Smith's childhood into an allegory of the reproduction of white supremacy in each generation, and aimed to move white southerners to a symbolic confession, a recognition of the evil of segregation.(7)

At one point, Smith addresses questions of race in terms of the mammy. Of particular interest regarding one possible interpretation of Mammy in Gone With the Wind comes in Smith's account of the relationship between a boy and his nurse:

In the old days, a white child who had loved his colored nurse, his "mammy" with that passionate devotion which only small children feel, who had grown used to dark velvety skin, warm deep breast, rich soothing voice and the ease of a mind is tender the touch of a spirit almost free of sex anxiety, found it natural to seek in adolescence and adulthood a return of this profoundly pleasing experience....

Sometimes he found what he sought and formed a tender and passionate and deeply satisfying relation which he was often faithful to, despite cultural barriers. But always it was a relationship without honor in his own mind and his personality. Yet with it was always the old longing, the old desire for something that he could not find in his white life.(8)

By playing on the aesthetic and virtuous qualities of the black female, Smith demonstrates the cruelty of a racially unjust world but she also adds to the mythification of the mammy. Just as notions of the "self" and the "other" transform into communal questions on the movie screen, Smith's representation of the white boy becomes an argument about all white men. Therefore, the virtue of the black woman translates into the enduring virtue of all black women.

The power of the mythic mammy is later established in the relationship with the children, their white mother, and the mammy who raises them:

Of all the painful and humiliating experiences which southern white women endured, the least easy to accept, I think, was that of a mother who had no choice but to take the husk of a love which her son in his earliest years had given to another woman. She valiantly made jokes about it, telling her friends that her child preferred Mammy to her and that was fine, wasn't it, for it gave her so much more time to attend to all she had to do! (p. 134)

Part of the mythification that occurs on screen--particularly in Gone With the Wind--is due in part to the role of the mammy as a surrogate mother. This, we shall see, occurs in Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. Before Hattie McDaniel's Mammy is addressed, however, we must first look at her predecessor in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

(source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA99/diller/mammy/fiction.html)

A clip from the documentary _Ethnic Notions_ by Marlon Riggs. The film details the history of popular cultural representations of African Americans from the 19th century into the late 20th century. It focuses, in particular, on stereotypes and how they have changed over time and in response to circumstance. Here we see the example of the "Mammy" character, an ante-bellum construction that was used to demonstrate blacks' contentment with, indeed, need for, white mastery. Because _Ethnic Notions_ understands these stereotypes as social constructions that shift over time, it is an excellent example of how "racial formations" operate.

The stereotype of the "Mammy"