PART 2
When the point was reached where Black people did not perform right or were not unavailable, you would get white people painting themselves black to continue playing those negative black roles.
This poster is an actual page that comes from the Johnson Catalogue showing Nigger make up.
This poster was circulated all across the country where white people could buy Nigger make up, burnt cork, paint their faces black, and then go out either to imitate their images of black people or play roles in movies about Black people.
It is a peculiar, pervasive, twisted kind of identification, a projection of certain kinds of qualities that are inside the person who is doing this to another group of people.
Remember the "projection of blame"; well this is another kind of projection.
For example, take what happens here.
A white actor on the left is dressed up in burnt cork to look black, but notice the role he is playing, that same role which the Black actors were playing.
He is also playing as this weak black male juxtaposed to the strong image of a white male .
Remember Al Jolson and the Jazz singers? Later Al Jolson made lots of money with his black face routine, using most black actors as background substitutes.
But what he did was to take it to different level by doing comedy routines that were based on these distorted black images.
There wasn’t much that Black people could do about this which eventually developed into something called minstrelry. Again notice the exaggerated caricature of Black people.
Here again is a white person, Al Jolson in the left photo, wearing burnt cork and is now in a position where he could project an image of who Black people are.
This was the most popular form of entertainment in America for 50 years. You don’t get soap operas that last that long, but why the fascination with the distortion of the Black image for 50 years as the most popular form of entertainment?
It may have been a psychological phenomenon that deserves to be investigated, but unfortunately our psychologists have not yet turned their attention to the psychology of racism, though it’s an important area because it’s a peculiar pathology.
From the movies you go to the radio where, for 32 years, the most popular programme was Amos ‘n’ Andy, characters created by two white actors named Freeman Gosden and Charles Corell.
After the programme had been popular on the radio for 32 years, it was later turned into a TV series, so now they had to find Black actors to play the parts of Black people who were invented by white people, which goes back to the question of the invention of the Negro.
This Stephen Fetchit character did not exist anywhere on the Africa continent. In fact, no one on the African continent acts like Amos ‘n’ Andy, so the kinds of things projected were not typical of Africans, but were the fabrications of the white mind at that time.
Later, Black actors began to get parts, but notice the Black actor on the right.
Look at what he had to do in order to get his part, he now has to do what the white actors were doing – a caricature of a caricature.
In other words you have the minstrel imitating the minstrel but that’s how they got work.
The images of Black females were also distorted in a similar way.
Usually the Black female had to be fat, loud and bossy, and that image has been present for quite some time.
This is one of the Shirley Temple movies.
Are you saying that this was and is calculated?
It’s calculated, but after a period of time it doesn’t have to be calculated anymore because if you grow up being fed these images and you become a TV producer, then these images are the only ones that you have to work with, so you’re only drawing on memory. Therefore, you have the results of calculation where you no longer have to sit down and decide that you are going to twist the image anymore; the twisted image is now the real image for you. That’s why there is a hunger in the minds of many white Americans for the images that they were raised up seeing, like Stephen Fetchit Beulah, Vashti and those types of early characters for example.
What was wrong with the real Black image that made white Americans want to avoid it?
It was and still is too powerful to handle and it has to be of interest to people who are insecure. When you look at the NBA and the NFL you see the preponderance of the power images of Black males. Therefore it may not be by accident that associated with the most popular TV programmes you would find the small Black males as in Different Strokes for example. This may not be an accurate explanation but it is hard not to draw the association between those two things. When you get into the history of Black people, it is so powerful that it definitely could not be handled by a population that had been trained to believe other things.
It’s been said over and over that Koreans, Japanese and Italians are able to come to the United States and get ahead. What is it as a psychologist about the African-American, the Black man, woman and child that makes white America want to control his and her development? Do they know something that we don’t know?
There are about 33 million Black people out of the total population of the United States of America which makes them the largest visible “minority group” in the country, and with unity and power, that represents competition. It is also true that if we take into account the continent of Africa, there are another couple hundred million people with wealth and resources, and when awakened would be a formidable competitor in everything that takes place in the world. Naturally people fear competition, especially anyone who knows the history of the role that Black people as a whole has played in the world, they have every right to respect the competitive and power capacity of Black people to perform on the world stage.
Here you had a situation during the time of slavery where the African was considered inferior, which was an image that was created, but on the other hand you institute laws forbidding him to read, so what’s so inferior?
That was calculated, and we go back to the psycho-dynamics mentioned earlier, suppression of memory, suppression of identity.
What do you mean by suppression of memory?
Using the computer as an analogy, if you can somehow empty the contents of the African mind (which you can’t do once people have things in their minds) which means his/her own natural memories either through isolation, being killed off, or waiting until they die out, then the children can easily receive a new programme without knowing the old memories.
As a result of the new programme they will behave inappropriately, which is basically what is happening to many of our children today, because as a group, we have taken very little of the initiative in determining the nature of the programme. We make sure that our children have access to the programmes that are provided, but we don’t question the character of the programme enough. As a result we lose the chance to rescue ourselves.
Do you see the kind of concern about what Black children are being taught? Most Black parents have this one goal in mind, “I want my child to get a good education”, without examining what good is.
Parents often make very poor judgments as to what a good education is. A good education would be like the one which Ron McNair received, the astronaut who blew up on the Challenger launch pad. He got a technical education, that is, he was one of the most brilliant laser physicists in the world.
That’s what he was doing up there in the capsule, it was a physics experiment, but he never forgot who he was.
For example, one of his hobbies was Jazz music, - our music - he liked it and he played in a Jazz band.
He was also a fourth degree black belt karate expert, and active in community service. In other words, he felt the sense of responsibility and obligation to his people This represents a person with a good education.
Now you can have another person who could become a laser physicist but who didn’t have the sense of social responsibility to his community, who rejected his cultural forms and decided that to be a physicist meant that he had to adopt western European culture and values. That would be a mis-educated Black person, and we have a lot of that around.
What about the person who took his learning and his knowledge of physics and used it for “Black people”?
I think that’s showing a sense of social responsibility, every group of people would do that for itself, every group of sane people, that is.
Nigger Hair Tobacco.
You could go into the store and buy, Nigger Hair Tobacco. These were actual products that were sold.Again to show this pervasive, manipulation of the images of Black people, look at the ring in the nose, this time it is attacking the image of the Black woman.
Nigger Head Tees.
You get ready to go and play golf, you make a stop at the pro shop to pick up some tees.Look again at the Sambo image of the Black male on the golf tee box.
Nigger Blues.
Let’s say you pick up a piece of sheet music in the music store.Again here is a distortion of the image of the Black people.
Darkie Toothpaste.
This is being sold by Colgate Palmolive Company in Asia. Here is the article published in the Atlanta Constitution on February 17th 1986 that talks about the sale of Darkie Toothpaste in the Far East. They made it clear that they will keep selling this product since they do not have any Black people in the Far East to object to it, neither does it have that meaning to the people there. So once again here we have in 1986 the projection of these same darkie images.
Here are some postcards that used to be sent through the United States mail. For a people who are on the bottom who need strength, but to turn to your culture for positive messages only to find these kinds of messages.
On the left image is a card entitled "A coon tree is a possum."
They used to call Black people coons, (short for racoon).
On the right image is a card entitled "In Dixie land", which is making fun of Black Nappy Hair.
Here is a picture of a little girl teaching her grandfather to read, but the way this artist drew the postcard, it gets projected to us as a negative instead of treating it as a positive, which you will notice in the upper right hand corner where it says “grandpa’s embarrassment,”.
The play on the stereotypical sexuality of the Black female as you can see projected on this card with the quote, “Love they say is wicked, bad and bum… but gee I wish I could find me some!”
If you put that in context with the stereotype of the Black female as just lusting after males, then it will justify her rape and attacks on her person among other things. Now over time you will begin to see that these were not innocent things.
Who were the perpetrators of lust?
We know that it was the white owners who did this; it certainly was not the Blacks. So again here you have that twisting, denial of reality, perceptual distortion, delusions of grandeur, projection of blame, in other words, a whole set of syndromes that can only be regarded as mental illness syndrome which is typical of racist behaviour.
Ten Little Niggers was a text book that was used in schools in 1896. Remember when I said pervasive, these images were and still are pervasive and no group of people in history has ever had this happen to them, never in the history of humankind can you document another period of time where one group was targeted with so many of these different kinds of assaults on the self image.
Here on the left, little Black boys are taught what they are supposed to do when they grow up; they are supposed to shine little white boys’ shoes.
On the left for example is a beautiful movie actress, Josephine Bailey.
This is what she actually looked like, but what I want to show here on the right is what she had to do in order to get work.
She has to dress up as a minstrel and then play those parts that were created and fabricated for Black people.
I went to a day-care one day and saw these children were looking at Buckwheat. People might not understand the damage that can be done through these images so they say what harm is that going to do?
You don’t see other people doing that to their children because it’s going to do a lot of harm. If there are comedy shows in the white community, they have other things to balance it off. In the Black community we have had almost nothing positive that you could turn to on TV until The Cosby Show came along. Those negative images do have an effect especially on the children, because they get imbedded in their minds.
You don’t see Jewish people running around making fun about the holocaust, or encouraging everybody to wear the prison uniforms that they used to wear just for the fun of it. There is nothing funny about that, so why should the pain of Black people be funny to us and to others as well, but least of all, our pain should never be funny to us.
Some may argue, but that was way back in the old ages. What about the 80’s? This was an article that was done in one of the magazines that asked the question, does TV have a secret formula for Blacks? Look at who they are looking at here, Jefferson and his wife, which in my opinion was one of the worst shows on TV in terms of Black image.
This is an assault on the Black image of the middle class. Here is a man who is supposed to be at the top, so you give him a little dinky apartment in New York and a couple cleaning establishments but he is a complete clown.
That’s the Black middle class in the eyes of the secret formula people, but how do you even get seven cleaners acting like a clown? It takes very bright people to accomplish that, but they never project any image of him as a bright man.
The secret formula question hits at something that’s very important in television, because here the writers who write the stories and create the shows on most prime time TV for Black people are generally not Black people. It has only been recently that they had a measure of control over Black images on TV with shows such as The Cosby Show where Rafael Toussaint and Bill Cosby together had a good degree of editorial control over the show.
These are the types of images those writers think are funny when they see The Jeffersons.
Our needs are not being met through their images; however, their needs are being met while they repeat these images of degraded Black folk.
Until the Cosbys came along, the only effective father for a Black child on TV was a white father, as for example in the popular show
Different Strokes.
Here little Arnold, who was adopted has his white father and this type of image was supposed to be the positive male image for the Black child.
Look at the subliminal message that was being sent out to the whole Black community at that time.
Here is flipwilson which became very popular. Flip Wilson lasted as long as he would dress up as Geraldine and he became very bizarre. These are the kinds of images that the white writers liked.
Left to right: Flip Wilson: Globe Troters as a comedy: Sanford and Son: J.J. Walker - Good Times
You could see how happy they were. Remember Stephen Fetchit, what’s the difference? These were the images of the 70’s and 80s that were still given to us.
The point being driven home is that these images were not innocent, because if you go back in history you will realize that if you allow people to twist the images of any group or population, it becomes easy to manipulate dominate populations to do negative things, such as what happened during the height of the Ku Klux Klan era.
We can therefore see from these pictures that they were very serious matters indeed as can be seen in the burnings and lynchings that became rampant.
Then we ask the question about television, what are our children doing?
They are learning while they are laughing.
But what are the lessons that they are learning. Here is an example, Celebrity Dolls. Look at the dolls that our children are picking up. Remember those TV shows we just looked at? Notice the Fred Sanford and J.J dolls. In other words, children take these images from TV and they will become their real life images.
There are some people who spend their time doing academic analysis of media and messages like Dan Shore for example, who gives a WARNING in this article on the left, that even in the news the messages may be mixed, so we must be careful. This applies to everybody and not just to Blacks.
There are people who have written books about this, especially the TV medium. Subliminal Seduction would be a case in point. On the cover of this book for example, the word SEX is written in the ice cubes on the glass appearing as shadows and is subliminally received but not directly.
How does the mind work with something like that, can you explain it?
They must have known about 20 years ago or more how you could easily influence people to lean in the direction of certain information, by flashing subliminal images on the TV screen fast enough to be picked up by the brain, but not with the eyes, so that you could get the message without realizing where it had come from or even that it was received.
So is the subliminal message more powerful at times than the obvious, the overt?
It may be more powerful than the actual message, because people are not aware of what’s being fed into their brains. This means that we have to educate a whole generation about this, especially if someone has the capacity to manipulate images consciously and also has the history of having done so intentionally.
It then becomes critical that the people who are victimised by this most, become critical viewers, and you can only become critical viewers by being aware of it.
Remember your mind cannot be programmed if you are aware that someone may be trying to programme your mind.
Look at some of the images that we get just by contrast for white males. Try to imagine anything by way of comparison for a Black male. See Gary Cooper, we don’t have a Black Gary Cooper that’s popular.
Gary Cooper
Marlon Brandon
They even have a white female Tarzan, her name is Sheena and so with women’s liberation, white women now get to go over and do to Africans what Tarzan did.
This type of ‘liberation’ ought to raise some questions about what true liberation is to which we have to make the strong commitment, but we cannot be mislead by people who have a commitment to what is really just pseudo liberation.
Here again is the summation of this whole section in this one picture, Are Black Children Using Only Half a Brain? Here we have the gaze at this superman image which is what is being projected for other populations, with the degraded image of Black people being projected.
What does a young Black child who has not been in the old world have to feed on so as to nourish and programme the mind? We then begin to see the danger and the reason it becomes necessary to have works like this one available to share with you, which will show the corrected version of the history of African, African-American and Black people as a whole.
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