Racial Stereotypes in American Entertainment

The documentary film 'Ethnic Notions' played on American Public Television in the late 1980s and quickly sank into the limbo reserved for fine works of broadcasting that happened not to have stirred some sort of splashy attention. Curiously, in a supposedly post-Gutenberg era, the moving images intended to convey important ideas as printed texts never could have done are quickly lost from the view of all but 'media' specialists. This is a particularly sad fate in the case of 'Ethnic Notions' because not only was it a neat piece of television but also it remains a sharp teaching tool.

This hour-long history of black (exclusively so, despite its title) stereotyping is a marvel of coherent, linear argument in a medium not known for its linearity, of pungent generalization by historians not given to speaking in the byte-sized unit made obligatory by TV editing, and of well used artifacts from Jan Faulkner's collection of black icons of popular culture. Marlon Riggs pulled together a coast of San Francisco Bay notables - historians Lawrence Levine and George Frederickson of Berkeley and Stanford, respectively; Barbara Christian of Berkeley; America's hidden national treasure, the mime Leni Sloane; the nation's oldest active black filmmaker, Carlton Moss (he wrote the Signal Corps film 'The Negro Soldier' in 1943); and others - all held together by Esther Rolle's voiceover.

Without resort to academic cant and nonce-words, 'Ethnic Notions' shrewdly introduces its general audience to the complex ideas of the 'Frankfurt School' of media critics, particularly T.W. Adorno's assertion that popular culture always serves the interests of the status quo by formulating the terms under which they oppressed agree to tolerate their oppressors. As Rolle says, stereotyping provided a graphic mediation between the two facts of American life, 'the profound contradiction' of the coexistence of slavery and freedom. Later, during Reconstruction, after the terms had changed, 'the old stereotypes adapted to new politics' the stakes of which were the making of new social controls to replace the slave-system. Black typology readily opened to include a benign Negro-as-minstrel as well as 'Negro as beast' in need of white dominance as a check against lapsing into savagery and committing 'offense[s] against civilization.'

Riggs draws the aural and visual evidence that carries the argument from all sorts of casually-wrought popular culture: vaudeville and minstrel shows, traveling 'Tom shows,' movies from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1903) to the energetic cartoons of World War II, advertising logos, postcards and souvenirs, mechanical toys, and sheet music. The most magically compelling sequence, however, is an excerpt from Sloan's own homage to minstrels in which he honors the memory of the black mime Bert Williams and struggles with the 'irony' (he says) of black minstrels for whom black face was their only 'doorway' into the 'theatrical workforce.' He delivers a tragicomic monologue (as Williams) as he puts on the makeup that transforms him from courtly gentleman into grotesque clown, liver-lipped, pop eyed, imprisoned, and weeping under his paint.

Almost as touching is an editor's contrivance which conveys the notion (already established by Levine's speaking of World War I as a black 'watershed') that major events cause change, even in deeply embedded ideologies and the stereotypes that provide their casual rhetoric. Ethel Waters, toiling over a washtub, sings 'Darkies Never Dream,' intercut with stills of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. In turn, this progressivist bit of cutting is reinforced by a sequence of evolving Aunt Jemima logos in which her visage on pancake flower boxes grows from mere grimace into maternal smile.

'Ethnic Notions' fails only as a result of the unremitting demands of its medium. Already rendered too busy by too many talking heads, it could not take up subtleties such as audience-reception. To take only one instance in 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915), when a white maiden leaps to her death rather than face the advances of a black officer, the film follows the lead of generations of critics who presumed the sequence a rape rather than a humble proposal of marriage that ends in suicide because of her racism rather than his assault, a good moment to show how every portrayal carries an added burden, a back story in the form of audience expectations created by past racism. We could also do with a detailed credit crawl - visual footnotes for the generalist.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review by Thomas Cripps that was originally published in Cineaste (Vol. XVII, No. 1, April 1989, pp. 21-22). 'Ethnic Notions' is available on DVD from California NewsReel and a transcript of the audio is available here.]