The History of African American Self-Assertion, Essay Example

In Unit One, the link between Industrialism, the media, and African American social progression was introduced. However, one brief encounter is not sufficient to grasp the depth of the African American experiences and growth in America, experiences which occurred over the span of hundreds of years and generated a vivid chronology of change which is still accessible in many forms today. For example, Aunt Jemima- for better or worse- is a cultural icon that reinforces the importance of racial stereotypes in perception. Pancake mix mogul, Chis Rutt, knew that he needed a name and a face to build trust in his recipe, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Legend has it that his inspiration came from a black face comedy team known as Baker and Farrell and the traditional cake walk following their performance. One of the comedians was in drag, singing about Aunt Jemima the cook, and an image was born (Manring, 1995).

Industrialism and Reconstruction

Before the Civil War, most African Americans were born, lived, and died knowing nothing else but slavery. Some took pride in making themselves indispensable to their white masters, believing, as many of the traditional theorists did, that social contracts were the backbone of society. By accepting and even embracing their subjugation within white America, the slaves were essentially upholding an expectation that the established order was for the good of American society as a whole, according to Loche’s contract theory.  The contract theories of Hobbes, on the contrary, emphasized the individual’s perspective of right and wrong as a moral compass. Both of these theories encouraged the disempowered African Americans- who had known no life outside of slavery- to continue in their fulfillment of a contract to which they had not agreed (Pateman and Mills, 2007). Although Pateman and Mills did not support this interpretation of the contract theories, they did not speak with the authority of DuBois in Damnation of Women. He praised the black woman who resisted the antebellum interpretations of contract theory (Balfour, 2010). And the Civil War came and went.

After the Civil War, one of the Old South’s first recognitions of black domesticity and humanity was in the mother-like mammy figure, the outspoken former slave who ran the kitchens and the child-keeping. In author Charles Chesnutt’s (1901) The Marrow of Tradition he countered white literary depictions of plantation life as easy-going and optimistic. In so doing, he detracted from some of the understated heroism of mammy in an attempt to depict the harshness of the antebellum years and the progress of African American men since. Chesnutt himself was reputedly the grandson of a white slave-owner and his black lover (as cited by Manring, 1995). While many today would also agree that the “Mammy” is an unwanted reminder of slave-owning imagery, in the early years of Reconstruction it was a visible marker of change, of a monetary recognition of the humanity and usefulness of African American women in particular. “The mammy is not an exemplar of white values of virtues as much as a signpost that the race was passing on its way to more respectable roles, the racist-sexist stereotype sustained in the name of demonstrating a racial group’s class progress” (Manring, 1995, 33). Mammy was shrewd, realistic, and fiercely loyal to those she loved. Mammy did not have a statue to commemorate her glory and her everyday wisdom; she had a bandana and a smile plastered on a box of pancake mix made by a white man (Manring, 1995).

Ironic though it may be, the subtle homage paid by the nineteenth-century advertising sleuths is an enduring icon of social movement toward change. Her legend has shifted from questionable factuality of origin to an evolution of ever-expanding mythology. Just as (in Greek mythology) Zeus’s head spawned a more beloved member of the pantheon, the goddess Athena, the original mammy figure produced more immortal offspring, such as the recognizable images of Aunt Jemima and the aptly-named “Mammy” character of the Reconstruction-depicting media sensation Gone With the Wind. Ironically, just four years before the film’s 1939 release, a famous essay was published which condemned the very “Propaganda of History” which the monumental work of fiction perpetuated (Parfait, 2009).

Until the rise of industrialism was complete, sugar was among the most coveted resources. Naturally, this meant that as the New World island colonies produced increasing supplies of sugar to meet increasing demand, the slave trade was vital to the need for hard labor and the spreading imperialism of the privileged class of European descent (Bosma, Giusti-Cordero, & Mintz, 2010). Sugar was considered to be at the crossroads of rural agriculture and industrialism due to its “unstable nature… which required immediate, on-site processing” (Bosma et al., 2010, 8). In Sugarlandia Revisited:Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940, Bosma et al. (2010) wrote: “But from nearly every perspective, the history of sugar up until now has been viewed as a triumph of New World production, resting on the outset on the abundance of fertile land and the labour of coerced people, especially African slaves” (Bosma et al., 2010, 1).

Although a definite correlation cannot be established, the decreased availability of African American hard labor coincided with industrialization and the development of new technologies in an effort to maintain and improve the modern way of life. Would the development of technology have been received so enthusiastically or even deemed to be necessary without the African American emancipation and subsequent shortage of available laborers? The debate “between labour and technology focused on the contention that slavery… formed a significant (although not sole) obstacle to technological advance within the industry” (Bosma et al., 2010, 146).

It stands to reason, then, that the emancipation of American slaves was a multi-faceted move toward progress for all. In writer W.E.B. DuBois’ letter outlining his proposed thesis for what became Black Reconstruction, he stated that “with the Civil War, there started in America an extraordinary experiment in the uplift and education and development of mankind and of all mankind” (Parfait, 2009, 271). Note that he wrote that this experiment started with the Civil War. That was but one battle in the war against black subjugation- the war in which it was necessary to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. In the interview portion of The Contract and Domination, Pateman (2007) cautions against the humanistic left-wing approaches aimed at some utopian idyll, alluding to the morally-reprehensible actions of the left-wing activists after the emancipation.

Perceptions of African Americans After Reconstruction

After Reconstruction, much of the African American journey for acceptance has been comprised of a search for identity. Unsurprisingly, identity was often expressed through one’s appearance and the materialistic possessions accrued (Chambers, 2006). For newly-freed black citizens, consumerism was a novelty and a brave new world of possibilities for individualization and self-expression. The art drawn from the African heritage of their people was now exotic, an insider’s creation of low art (Chambers, 2006). Even in their success in the areas of art, music, philosophy, and literature, African American contributions were informally segregated into designations which maintained the perspective that the black experience was destined to be subjected to the civilized white culture.

Sweetbacks

As black success began to grow, white supremacist groups balked. Some equally-radical African American groups formed- but would not have the cultural longevity that emerging Harlem philosophy would. A black renaissance of sweetback style would drag black women under to pull black men up. Still, this was the latest evolution in the African American struggle to remain “politically volatile” (Knadler, 2002, 900).   The drag queen sweetback was a Bohemian reminder of the pizzazz of their African homeland and the emerging freedom, sexualization, and passive protest against mainstream white culture and naïve stereotypes. Other critics of the sweetback called the constant satirization of homosexuality in the typically hypermasculine African American community an attempt at creating their own subculture to ridicule and for some, to mask, their own homosexual self-hatred during the 1920’s (Knadler, 2002).

“A Propaganda of History”

After the first world war, the masculinity of the black man was restored, and black culture began to flourish and gain a limited acceptance into American mainstream philosophies and entertainment. One man represented the culmination of black empowerment and art; one man wrote moving accounts of The Souls of Black Folks. That man was W.E.B DuBois. His essays and books were poignant and well-written accounts of the untold Reconstruction skeletons in the nation’s closet. Namely, white historians and authors had depicted the Reconstruction as a time in which there was corruption, ignorance, and vengeance from slaves and white Republican Northerners alike (Parfait, 2009). The Reconstruction continued until the Northern and Southern states came to an uneasy understanding; white America’s spirit of reconciliation did not extend to its former slaves.

White Americans continued to publish their skewed version of Reconstruction-era history well into the twentieth century- fostering a mutual racial line of hostility and distrust. The inaccurate Reconstruction-era literature of the times propagated the stereotypes which subjugated African Americans to the role of hateful, primitive persons. The 1929 release of the “history” of The Tragic Era, written by Claude Bowers, furthered the academic climate which assumed that these facts represented the whole truth. DuBois believed that righting the historical misapprehensions of the masses would affect political and social change in a nonviolent and globally-beneficial way (Parfait, 2009).

Wastefulness

White Americans predominantly continued to believe that African Americans who lived during the Reconstruction were strong but lazy, ignorant, and wasteful (Parfait, 2009). In the aptly-named essay, Equal in Every Way: African Americans, Consumption and Materialism from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, Chambers (2006) defended the possessive nature of early black materialism, writing that the novelty of ownership was new and exciting to former slaves who had recently been considered property themselves. Unlike white Americans, black men and women did not have well-established norms of fashion. While such bright palettes may have been viewed as garish by the white citizens of the time, it was a natural celebration of color and freedom.

Conclusion

Regardless of the baseness of the intentions of some, the manifestation of African American strength has never ceased to be silently recognized. Their forced physical labor held the weight of an evolving world while maintaining a gusto that Atlas certainly never had under the same pressure. The black community did not cave, did not wither, did not run. It prospered. Today the presence of black pride is not completely isolated from the mainstream consciousness. Magazines like Ebony and Essence display the differences and similarities of strong black people and of women in particular (O’Barr, 2010). In the spirit of Du Bois’ Damnation of Women, African American females turn their former sexual exploitation on its head and build a new history unto themselves (Balfour, 2010).

References

Balfour, L. (2010). Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois’s “Damnation of Women” in: Rabaka, R. ed., W.E.B. Du Bois. Surrey: Ashgate.

Bosma, U. Giusti-Cordero, A. and Mintz, S. (2010). Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800-1940 (International Studies in Social History). Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. (Peer Reviewed).

Chambers, J. (2006). Equal in Every Way: African Americans, Consumption and            Materialism    from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement. Advertising &     Society Review, 7 (1). New York: The Advertising Educational Foundation, Inc.

Knadler, S. (2002). Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Renaissance. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48 (4), 899-936.

Manring, M.(1995). Aunt Jemima Explained: the old south, the absent mistress, and the slave in  a box. Southern Cultures, 2 (1), 19-44.

O’Barr, W. M. (2010). Multiculturalism in the Marketplace: Targeting Latinas, African- American Women, and Gay Consumers. Advertising & Society Review 7(4).  DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0101.

Parfait, C. (2009). The Publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Rewriting History, 12.

Pateman, C. and Mills, C.W. (2007). The Contract and Domination. Cambridge, UK: Polity. (Peer Reviewed).