Racial Stereotypes

Reading about the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia reminds me of a craft booth I saw yesterday in a local arts and crafts festival here in Louisiana on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain. The vendor, who was white, had created all these "Mammy" items and had them proudly displayed for sale. I don't know if anyone bought anything. I quickly walked past the display, startled and shocked--though I shouldn't have been shocked. Maybe I should have stopped and asked the vendor a few questions to try to discover her reasons for using such stereotypes in her craft or to discern whether or not she even realized these were racist stereotypes. But I just didn't have the heart at the time for any kind of confrontation.

If you're white, and especially if you're from the South, confronting racism in others dredges up so many uncomfortable memories and experiences. Suddenly you're confronted with your own racist past and with the struggle you might have had to try to get beyond it. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, a church whose hierarchy and congregations sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War. As a child, I thoroughly took to heart the hymn we sung about Jesus loving the little children...all the little children, and I struggled to harmonize the beauty of that belief with the reality of our worship. My childhood church had an all-white congregation; the only time African-Americans attended our church on the Gulf Coast of Texas was during Vacation Bible School or a community gathering at Thanksgiving. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention finally got around to apologizing for its racist past, but by that time I had already left the church.  I might have left sooner had I not gone off to college and joined a large university church with a more liberal-minded pastor.

If you come from a family that didn't have much to pass down to succeeding generations, it's a little easier to wipe the memory slate clean concerning any racist past. All the bad stuff gets edited out in the oral stories of the family: until one day, someone lets slip that a great-grandfather fathered a child or children with an African-American woman--yes, I was recently told this, but I don't know the accuracy of the story--and suddenly you're questioning your family's past and whether or not one continues to be responsible for that past, for the actions of others long dead. Are there cousins the family didn't or won't acknowledge? Should you try to locate them? Would they want you to or care?

If you come from a Southern family that kept records in letters and memorabilia, however, it's more difficult to ignore those records that detail racist attitudes: the description of theatrical events where great-grandmother dressed in black face and wrote and recited poetry in a Southern black dialect; the high society programs describing the wait staff at such events as "sons  of Ethiopia"; the recipe booklet from a great-grandmother's collection with its "Mammy-shaped" cover.

What do you do if this is your family's past? If you are like me and my husband, you recognize and acknowledge that past. You cannot deny its existence and the corrosive power of the its values, but you repudiate those values. And you do your best to pass on different values to your children.

In his collection of items that reflect the Jim Crow era of the South, David Pilgrim reminds us that we are so very little removed from our racist past. It stares back at us every day, from the products on our supermarket shelves to the crafts on a table at a local festival.