Black Sambo 2.0? New Media Technology and the Persistence of Racist Representations

Black Sambo 2.0?

New Media Technology and the Persistence of Racist Representations

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

New media technology is changing the landscape of television.  At one level, the emergence of web-based television, along with platforms like YouTube, provides a space for historically ignored themes and silenced voices within popular culture.  I previously wrote about the potential during a discussion of The LeBrons, which “highlights how new media technologies provide modern black athletes (among others) tools to define their own image and message, partially apart from those ‘restrictive script,’ yet bound by the dominant discourse and accepted images.”

Reflecting on this cultural and technological shift, Aymar Christen Jean argues that the golden age of black television has ended.  He notes further that the potential afforded by new media technologies are significant in challenging the white hegemony of American television culture: “In this early stage, the writing and production values are uneven. But when you throw in social-networking possibilities online, the emergence of original Web programming can only be good news for black art and expression.”  Writing about the brilliant and rightly celebrated The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl, Britni Danielle highlights the transformative potential residing in Web 2.0.  “It’s official, the best shows featuring Black people are not on BET, TVOne, NBC, or any other TV channel. The best shows featuring interesting Black characters are on the web,” writes Danielle. “In times like these, when TV shows and films featuring interesting Black characters are missing from most mainstream outlets, it’s nice to see that many (and I do mean many) are taking matters into their own hands and making their own way.”  

While clear, from The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl, The New 20s, The LeBrons, Kindred, and Road to the Alter, that the web is emerging as the promise land for the production of black-themed shows and the dissemination of counter-narratives and representations, the frontier of new media technology is also littered with dehumanizing shows as well.

The advance of new media technology, whether on YouTube, I-Tunes, or the totality of the Internet provides a space for the dissemination of racist shows of yesterday, narratives, stereotypes, and episodes that artists fought long and hard to remove from public consumption.  William Van De Burg, in New Day in Babylon, documents the ways in which organizations, like the National Black Media Coalition and Black Citizens for Fair Media, fought the continued dissemination of racist imagery.  They, along with Asian Americans for Fair Media and others, worked hard to counter those racial images that represented “an explosive psychological force that warps human relationships and wreaks havoc on one’s personal dignity” (Wei, 1993; 51). While movements of the 1960s and 1970s were successful in challenging the presence of dehumanizing representations within network television, the advance of new media has proven to given life to many shows of past generations.    

On YouTube, you can find a number of cartoons from the mid-20^th century, some of which are explicitly labeled as racist (or banned/censored) cartoons, while others lack specific marking.  These cartoons bring into wide circulation the otherwise put into the grave racist televisual moments of yesteryear.  For example, on YouTube, “Southern Fried Rabbit” where bugs sings, “I wish I was in Dixie,” also depicts the South as a beautiful oasis in juxtaposition to the barren wasteland of the North. In this episode, Bugs Bunny is presented in blackface, ultimately impersonating a happy slave.  At one level, this particular episode is keeping “past” images and narratives alive (the happy slave is clear in circulation as evidence by “pledge”); at another level, it facilitates a space where commentators can rehash and deploy their own racial narratives and ideologies.  Claims about permissibility of racist images back then, that it was just entertainment, and simply kid’s stuff are commonplace on YouTube.  Likewise, in this episode and in countless others found on YouTube, the history of blackface, of imagining and depicting blackness through dehumanizing imagery is evident. 

Bugs Bunny is not the only example with terribly racist episodes of The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, and Popeye, some of which you can find on not only YouTube but iTunes as well.  For example, “Frigid Hare,” a Bugs Bunny episode that portrays Eskimos as bucktooth savages is available for purchase today.  Tom and Jerry is also available on iTunes, including “His Mouse Friday” where in an effort to defeat Tom, Jerry dons blackface only to see the “real savages” of the Island handle his nemesis.  Likewise, a number of Popeye episodes, including “You're A Sap, Mr. Jap,” “Scrap the Japs,” “I Yam what I Yam,”  “Popeye the Sailor” all which deploy dehumanizing stereotypes of Japanese, Native Americans and African Americans, representing them as the enemy, as savages, as foils to the heroism/ righteousness of Popeye, and ultimately as the Other.  Having recently purchased Popeye, unaware to the racist content several shows, I was horrified at the sight of my children watching a show that portrayed Native Americans as racist savages who threatened the civilization, goodness, and whiteness embodied by Popeye.  

The preservation of these shows via YouTube and iTunes demonstrates how new media is making available the very harmful and violent representations of yesteryear to future generations.  While defenders like to talk about these cartoons being sixty years old and that blackface, representations of Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, and Japanese as savages, and countless other racist tropes were all acceptable back then, the persistent availability of these shows illustrates how indeed these images and ideologies remain alive and well in the twenty-first century.   The continued availability of these shows counters those who dismiss Popeye, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry as a product of their times, and therefore insignificant today, given the continued consumption of these racist stereotypes.  Sure, these shows tell us something about the ideologies of race in the 1930s and 1940s during production, but also the ways in which race operates in 2011, the moment of consumption. 

To me, the willingness and desire to watch shows that dehumanize is telling.  It is disheartening as generations forward will continue to consume those overtly racist caricatures of people of color all while consuming the often more subtle, yet equally harmful, representations of our current moment, perpetuating white racial frames and stereotypes.  So next time the kids are searching for something to watch on YouTube or buy a cartoon from iTunes be aware because racist images are just one click away. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

Afraid of the Dark: The Forgotten Legacy of Nat King Cole

Afraid of the Dark: The Forgotten Legacy of Nat King Cole
by Mark Anthony Neal

The name Nat King Cole usually draws a reference to his famous daughter Natalie, who after launching her career in the mid-1970s as the heir-apparent to Aretha Franklin—a career threatened by drug addiction—later re-booted her career twenty years ago, with her cover of her father’s song “Unforgettable.” Many others might remember Cole for his signature Christmas carol “The Christmas Song” which is as synonymous with the holiday as is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” But when Cole died forty-six years ago, Ebony Magazine described Cole as “the most celebrated Negro to die in world history.”

Nat King Cole’s career and legacy has been recalled with the recent release of four episodes of the groundbreaking Nat King Cole Show on iTunes, which plans to release 30 of the original 64 episodes of the show. The first national television show hosted by an African-American, the Nat King Cole Show ran from 1956-1957.

Though the show had a solid audience, it was never able to attract national sponsorship. With the post-Montgomery Civil Rights movement still in its embryonic stages, many national advertisers were fearful of backlash from Southern audiences. Indeed as one White station manager in the south admitted to Ebony Magazine in 1965, “they told me that if [Cole] came back on they would bomb my house and station.” Perhaps even more interesting than the reasons why the Nat King Cole Show was canceled after its year-and-a-half run, is Cole’s ascent to a status that allowed him to have a show in the first place.

Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in 1919, Cole was raised in Chicago in a religious household. Cole’s father was a preacher and the father and son regularly butted heads as the younger Coles was more attracted to the sounds coming from the Jazz clubs than the music he heard on Sunday mornings. Cole found a balance by playing the organ in his father’s church.

An accomplished pianist, Cole was influenced by the music of pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, and by his teenage years was fronting a band with his brother Eddie. After high school he headed out west with a traveling show, Shuffle Along, a musical which featured the music of the Black songwriting team Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. The show closed in Long Beach when a stage hand ran off with the gate receipts, but Cole stayed out west working the chitlin circuit—LA’s Central Avenue—with his trio The King Cole trio (dropping the s from his name).

Though the band played instrumentals, as legend goes, one night a patron demanded that somebody sing “Sweet Lorraine.” Cole reluctantly complied and his a career as a vocalist was born. Signing a contract with Capitol Records in 1943 (the same label his daughter Natalie would later sign with in 1974), Cole’s first big hit was “Straighten Up and Fly Right” a song he wrote as a teenager after hearing one of his father’s sermons.

With songs like “Route 66,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Nature Boy,” Cole was one of the country’s most popular balladeers in the 1940s and 1950s, rivaled only by his label-mate, Frank Sinatra. But whereas Sinatra could imagine a future that was limitless—movies, the biggest and most lucrative venues, headlining in Vegas—Cole would always be challenged by the realities of race.

These challenges were as personal as they were professional; when Cole and his family moved into an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood, racist signs were often left on their lawn. When a neighbor complained about not wanting undesirables in the neighborhood, Cole famously replied “neither do I, and if I see anybody undesirable coming into this neighborhood, I’ll be the first to complain.”

Though Cole was a lifetime member of the NAACP and in the years before his death performed benefits for Civil Rights organizations, some Blacks were critical of him for his willingness to perform in the South in front of segregated audiences. Cole often remarked—like Michael Jordan would decades later—that those audiences in the South were also fans of his music.

No doubt Cole believed that his willingness to perform in front of Southern audiences would help humanize Blacks to those audiences. Such was not the case when Cole was attacked on stage in 1956 while performing in Birmingham, AL, in what was later revealed as a (terrorist) plot by one-hundred and fifty men to kidnap Cole.

Yet publically Cole remained the very definition of cool and restraint becoming the epitome of crossover Blackness for the generation just prior to the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement. Standing six feet tall, dark-skinned, and with a deep baritone voice (think a better singing Brian McKnight), Cole would have been a major sex symbol had he emerged 30 years later. Indeed one could imagine that Cole was many of the Black male role models that Barack Obama studied to find his own pitch as the most well known living Black man in the contemporary world.

A chain-smoker (Phillip Morris was his cigarette of choice), Cole kept many of the professional and personal sleights directed towards him, to himself. When he suffered an ulcer in 1953 that led to doctors to remove half of his stomach, it was clear that the pressures of crossing over were taking a significant toll on him. It is part of the reason he took the lack of advertising support of his show in stride, though he was clear-eyed when he suggested that “the ad agencies are afraid of the dark.” He was prescient, when he told Ebony Magazine in 1959, “I realize what TV is doing. I know they are freezing the Negro out.”

Ironically Nat King Cole, was midway through a thee-year, $ one million dollar contract with the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, when he was diagnosed with the lung cancer that he would succumb to at the young age of forty-five. Cole died two months after Sam Cooke (his professional heir apparent) and six days before Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik el Shabazz) was murdered in Harlem. The stature of both Cooke and Malcolm X increased exponentially after their deaths, as Nat King Cole seems the forgotten man. Cole was content working from the inside, so its not surprising that his legacy doesn’t shine as bright forty-six years after his death.

Nevertheless, Cole was a model for Motown founder Berry Gordy as he sought to break the label’s flagship acts on the supper club circuit. Marvin Gaye, for example, recorded a tribute album to Cole for Motown, nine months after his death, beginning what would be a career like fixation with recording a classic pop balladeer recording that Cole did in his prime. The Vulnerable Sessions, released after Gaye’s death was the product of that labor.

Thanks to iTunes, audiences can now see one of the great Black crossover stars at his peak—a man who in so many ways set the pace for the Michael Jacksons, Oprah Winfreys and Lebron James that would emerge after his death.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is the host of the weekly webcast, Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.