Bring Back the Blackface?

YouTube / <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UyJ42v-N-I&feature=related">CreditFeed</a>

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.


Over at The Root, John McWhorter, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, makes the case for re-issuing a trove of 1930s and 40s-era cartoons that are rife with racial stereotypes and outright bigotry. Warner Home Video plans to release polished-up renderings of some classic Looney Tunes offerings—minus the so-called “Censored Eleven,” which feature black characters bathed in full-on minstrelry. “Primly holding these 11 cartoons back in the vaults in 2010 makes black people look, frankly, weak,” he writes. Shorts like Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs and Clean Pastures (“pieces of black performance history in their way”), he argues, remain products of their tasteless time. And McWhorter compares “the lingo, butts… violence [and] gold teeth” to what you see in Dre and Snoop videos. Thanks to more diverse representations of black people on television and film, he says

—think The Cosby Show, In Living Color, Do The Right Thing, and The Wire
most people have moved on from Amos n’ Andy.

The shorts have been YouTube-able for some time. But for McWhorter, putting them out on DVD means symbolically coming to terms with an unfortunate (and inescapable) chapter of our history: 

Yes, there will be a flutter or two of protest from people who can’t take a joke even at 70 years’ remove. But the sky will not fall in, and the kerfuffle will only increase the profits on a DVD that will sell like hotcakes from minute one. And that will not be because the cartoons are racist— but because they are, in spite of themselves, one part history and one part just plain fierce.

Black people, he says, should be able to laugh away the decades-old ugliness that the cartoons represent. If something festers in the bowels of the zeitgeist long enough, McWhorter’s argument seems to go, we can just accept it as part of our embarrassing past and move on. But while the ugliness of the Censored Eleven may be seventy years old, the attitudes and carelessness that produced them persist. (Witness some of the anti-Obama placards held aloft at conservative political rallies, or tea party leader Mark Williams’ supposedly satirical screed against the NAACP.) To laugh all that away, you’ve got to have a healthy sense of irony.

No doubt, the cartoons are powerful and thought-provoking, challenging our own notions of acceptability and forcing us to relive an apsect of our past that many might prefer to forget. But let’s face it: not everyone’s ready for Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears. Especially racists.

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate