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Thinking back to those childhood days in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I was often in the living room propped in front of our oversized black-and-white television set. Many film and television images that would be deemed as offensive today were still a part of our everyday world in post-civil rights America. While Martin Luther King might’ve gotten us a literal seat on the bus and at Woolworth’s lunch counter, that didn’t stop American icons Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben from staring at us from supermarket shelves, or the occasional Warner Bros. cartoon that featured kooky Africans, a hell-dwelling Sambo meeting with Satan on a Sunday morning, and jitterbugging darkies dancing through the streets of Harlem. With titles that included “Uncle Tom’s Bungalow” (1937), “Jungle Jitters” (1938) and “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” (1943), these shorts were shown before the feature films.
After the advent of television, those same cartoons, mostly done for the jazzy Merrie Melodies imprint, were syndicated by local stations and shown across the nation. Although racist cartoons with negative images of Black folks were at one time a small part of a pop culture landscape, the most notorious of these cartoons, as I learned from reading Cartoon Research columnist Christopher P. Lehman’s series on racist cartoons, are referred to as “The Censored 11” and were pulled out of television syndication circulation in 1968. For better or worse, these negative images spilled over into black pop culture and have inspired various artists. We can see the tar brush strokes in the paintings of Michael Ray Charles, in the laced joint of Spike Lee’s bizarro Bamboozled, in Miles Marshall Lewis’ southern rapper minstrel short story “The Wu-Tang Candidate” (Bronx Biannual, #2) and, most recently in the animated video directed by Mark Romanek for Jay-Z’s provocative “The Story of O. J.” The clip shows the self-proclaimed King of New York has adopted the notorious Sambo persona, flipped it to an autobiographical Jaybo, and created a clip that was controversial for both visual content and lyrics.
In a Village Voice cover story essay The Politicization Of Jay-Z, writer Greg Tate reported that the video ticked-off the “Black cultural nationalists with zero tolerance for irony, who now want him tarred and feathered for portraying Nina Simone and Huey Newton as minstrel acts . . . everybody talks about the white gaze of white supremacy, but damn if he didn’t throw it up on the screen in buck-and-winging black-and-white.” As I read Tate’s words, I scratched my nappy head, took a bite of watermelon and wondered why someone didn’t contact my homeboy Darius James, author of Negrophobia, a novel as inspired by the bang-zoom zaniness of those cartoons as it was by the writings of Amiri Baraka and William Burroughs.
Published in 1992 by Carol/Citadel Press, Negrophobia was a wild romp through a racially charged dreamscape that zipped from one absurd scene to another so quickly, you didn’t have time to question the illogical logic as stereotypes Uncle Remus, metal lawn jockeys, African cannibals, and Little Black Sambo plowed through the pages. “Growing-up in the ’60s, I watched all of those cartoons, but I didn’t associate those images with me or any other black people,” James said to me last year from his home in New Haven, Connecticut a few days before Christmas. “Though I was aware that that was how white people might think of black people.”
https://catapult.co/stories/negrophobia-a-novel-by-darius-james
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