The Legacy of Racism in American Media

As a student of film and television, I often confuse my friends with the movies I find racially offensive. Movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany's, Blue Streak, Men in Black and Shrek top my list. People may not understand why Men in Black, which features Will Smith running around screaming next to a cool and collected Tommy Lee Jones is so much more offensive than Chevy Chase making a fool of himself in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. To understand the difference, one has to understand the history behind the movies and their racial imagery. While all minorities have suffered at the hands of the entertainment industry, in light of Black History Month this article focuses on African Americans and the offensive racial images that still for a large part dominate American media.

In order to understand why these images are so offensive it is necessary to understand where they came from. Before there was film or television, live shows dominated the American entertainment landscape. From the mid-19th century until the 1920s stage shows became the first mass entertainment medium. To satisfy popular demand, the majority of these shows were comedies, and white audiences delighted in the mockery of other races by the actors on stage. Minorities of all races, but particularly African Americans, were the victims of degrading jokes that served to spread racial stereotypes across America.

One of the most popular types of these comedies was the minstrel show. The minstrel show was born in the 1830s when a white actor, Thomas Darthmouth Rice, borrowed a song-and-dance routine from a young African American he had seen performing on the street. Calling himself "Daddy Rice," the actor blackened his face with burnt cork, wore tattered clothing, and performed his "Jump Jim Crow" routine for audiences from New York to London. Soon after, a white business man, Edwin P. Christie, launched an entire show based on caricatures of African Americans portrayed initially by white actors in black face. Later, when the laws were changed to allow African-Americans to perform onstage, the actors in the Minstrel shows were African-Americans, but they too had to perform in blackface.

Minstrel shows were completely based on stereotypes of African Americans and their cultures. They had titles such as De Magic Coon, Dark Faces an' Bright Eye-deas, and De Scared Niggers an' De Lost Punch, titles that were supposed to represent the poor English spoken by African-Americans. The shows revolved around incompetent characters as dumb as dirt, speaking poor English and lazing around instead of working. Often the characters would get themselves in a mishap due to their stupidity, and the audience would laugh at their inability to survive in reality.

With Thomas Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope 1889, the motion picture was born. Minorities again were the victims of white entertainment, as many of the first films centered on stereotypes for humor or minorities as the evil antagonists against the white heroes. Most notable of all the early films was the epic Birth of a Nation. This film, released in 1915, was the first true full length movie to be released in America. It glorifies the Klu Klux Klan as the true American heroes while vilifying blacks as brutal and inferior to whites. The absolute undisguised racism and disgusting disparagement of African Americans in this movie is painful to watch.

As Hollywood began to take shape, the dominant images of African Americans began to change. Now the movie landscape was filled with images of African Americans as happy servants, mentally inferior and content to be subservient to their white counterparts. This was the era of Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland, and of Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. Television fared no better in its treatment of African Americans. The first show with an all-Black cast, Amos 'n' Andy, debuted in 1951. It began as a radio show in 1929 with white actors imitating African Americans. When it made the transition to television, the actors were now black but the racism was the same. Amos 'n' Andy focused on two incompetent African American males with no ethical values or employment, and was finally pressured off the air by civil rights groups in 1966.

These images, particularly the minstrel image, so prevalent in the early days of film and television, continue to haunt our media. By far the highest grossing films starring African American actors are movies such as Rush Hour and Men in Black. Rush Hour was billed as "The fastest fists in the East [referring to Jackie Chan], meets the biggest mouth in the West [referring to Chris Tucker]." Chris Tucker, who spends the entire movie running around as an incompetent joker, reminiscent of a minstrel, is now the highest paid African American actor in Hollywood, collecting over $20 million a movie. By contrast, serious actors such as Denzel Washinton and Morgan Freeman who do not take minstrel roles are not as highly paid. Men in Black featured a calm, cool, collected Tommy Lee Jones set against a screaming, wise-cracking Will Smith, who incompetently handles the weapons (such as the tiny gun "The Cricket") and situations. Television shows are just as bad; The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was a very popular situation comedy that aired for many years. This sitcom starred Will Smith in a minstrel role, wearing loud clothes, flaunting unrefined speech, and engaging in comical antics that consistently backfired.

It is important to understand why these images of African Americans are not harmless. These images date back to the days of slavery, and have been used to entertain white people and subconsciously reinforce their sense of superiority for over one hundred years. Movies starring African Americans in comic, often inferior roles continue to be the dominant and most popular images of African Americans in the media, evidenced by movies such as Men in Black and Rush Hour 2 grossing totals of over $225 million, while movies such as Malcolm X only total $48 million. With the continued survival of the minstrel image in current entertainment, the media continues to abuse the dignity of African Americans. In the compilation Developing Distinctive Bahá'í Communities, the NSA assures us that:

As is well known, since at least the middle of the last century significant numbers of Americans, both black and white, have long labored, often with immense resourcefulness, to counteract the baleful legacy of racism in their country, in all its complex dimensions, structural and otherwise.

This legacy of racism in our popular entertainment is one of the dimensions of racism that we must continue to fight against.

(all content Copyright National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, 2000-2003, do not use without permission)