Negrophile points to an Indianapolis Star profile of a collector of black Americana. I’m not sure what Negrophile’s stance is (the weblog itself is primarily a news aggregator of sorts), but the news article does outline some of the positions on the worth of racist memorabilia (mammy jars, pickaninny dolls, etc.).
I have to say the issue seems surprisingly complicated to me. I find it highly distasteful when white collectors buy and trade these items, and if you want to see something dispiriting, go to Charleston’s Slave Market, where stands sell these items. At its most benign, the collector culture makes a fetish out of these objects, at its worst it views them as a positive heritage.
That said, I don’t think it does our culture any favors to keep them from seeing the light of day. The irony of the article’s anecdote of the woman who bought an item just to smash it is that such actions simply drive up the collectibility of racist memorabilia — they’re collectible in large part because a generation thought it was a bad thing to display mammy clocks (and it is) and got rid of them. (By the way, I think there’s a social history to be done on the reason why black Americana appealed to the white middle classes at the end of the 19th century — Richard Ohmann’s book Selling Culture, for instance, tracks the racial appeal of advertising in that time).
More importantly, the best way to fight racist representation is not to destroy it but to use our historical distance to it as an opportunity to learn and teach why and how these objects were racist. This is especially true for film. I think it’s a shame the Bill Cosby kept Song of the South out of circulation. When I taught it in a postwar film class, I was surprised to find that among my mostly white, mostly liberal students, the stereotypes were not readible as such in themselves. "After all, Uncle Rebus is happy," they’d reply. Simply showing the film more would not have changed that, but we have created a situation in which the non-circulation of certain racist representations have engendered a non-familiarity among whites with arguments on why those representations were racist.
I think there’s a fear that film representation is so powerful, so propagandistic that it overrides our views and drives viewers irrationally. If you watch a Nazi propaganda film today with an audience, though, you’ll realize that historical and political distance does a lot to distance the spectator from the representation. Of course, racism is a far more pervasive ideology than Naziism; at any case we still face it today. But I’d argue that 1968 pivoted such a shift in racial representations, that the racist tropes mark a new and different challenge than the stereotypes of old Hollywood and the early 20th century. It may be easier to fight them with historical perspective than without.
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