Essay 3013

From The New York Daily News…

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EXHIBIT A: RACISM

NEGATIVE IMAGES OF BLACKS REVEAL HATE'S LONG HISTORY IN AMERICA

By ERROL LOUIS, DAILY NEWS COLUMNIST

This weekend, an exhibit opens at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture that will shine a penetrating, much-needed light on our nation’s shameful Jim Crow era, the period after the Civil War when demeaning and degrading caricatures of blacks were a staple of American culture.

For the first time in its 80-year history, the Schomburg will exhibit dozens of racist images and artifacts that were plastered on everything from toothpaste tubes and movie posters to children’s books, postcards and paintings.

The hard-hitting exhibit, “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes,” couldn’t arrive at a better time, given the current national battle to halt a rising tide of commercialized cultural contempt aimed at black Americans by everyone from hip-hop minstrels to hate-spewing nitwits like Don Imus.

The mad swirl of grotesque, popeyed subhumans so popular in the 19th century bear an unmistakable resemblance to today’s parade of cartoonish pimps, strippers and gunmen used by Madison Avenue to sell sneakers, CDs, movies and booze.

But in a stroke of genius, the Schomburg curators set aside a room next to the virulent, dehumanizing images and stocked it with pictures and paintings from the same period — the 1890s through the 1950s — depicting blacks getting married, gathering in church, marching for civil rights and generally living every dimension of the American Dream.

The juxtaposition makes clear that the depiction of blacks as less than human was always a conscious choice that could — and can — be rejected. The exhibit’s most moving images are those of black families who chose to sit for portrait photos less than a generation after slavery’s end, projecting grace and dignity even as the country was flooded with caricatures.

“At first blush, you look at this stuff with a certain sense of disbelief, then a kind of rage,” says Howard Dodson, the Schomburg’s director. “Then you realize these are figments of white imagination.”

According to Dodson, the use of black caricatures like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to sell pancakes, rice and other products is key.

“These caricatures actually become brands, so customers don’t have to look at people as individuals — you just see the skin and hair and the reaction is automatic,” says Dodson. “Interestingly, things don’t change until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when companies discover that black families represent a growing market themselves, who obviously would not buy such images.”

What images we will or won’t buy remains the question of the hour, which Dodson poses by placing a mirror at the end of the exhibit. Visitors are invited to look at one last image and ask themselves what kind of person they — and the rest of the world — see.