Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?


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We should understand that this Sambo "art" is the way that anti-black racism found its daily existence, drowning out the actual nature and achievements of black people, and it explains why so many black thinkers and artists embarked upon "The New Negro" movement between 1900 and 1925, starting with Du Bois' exhibition of photographs of middle-class Negroes at the Paris Exposition of 1900. As Du Bois put it in Darkwater, "One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginning with the slave-trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word 'Negro,' leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributing every bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modern profit which lies in degrading blacks—all this has unconsciously trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk are sub-human," "a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the meat of mobs and fury." 

Chromolithography and the American marketplace made anti-black racism a commodity, widely consumed in the most unconscious ways, reinforcing and reflecting the legalization of racism and the delimitations being systematically inflicted upon the rights of black citizens by the courts and Southern legislatures. As the historian Thomas Holt concludes in "Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History" (pdf), a brilliant analysis of the role of minstrelsy in naturalizing every day anti-black racism, "it is precisely within the ordinary and everyday that racialization has been most effective, where it makes race," a process "that fixes the meaning of one's self before one even had had the opportunity to live and make a self," "capable of communicating at a glance accumulated stores of racialized knowledge." 

To return to the question that Gail Deculus-Johnson poses in her brochure at Sable Images in Los Angeles—why should we collect these racist artifacts?—it would be good to turn to Du Bois for an answer. "In the fight against race prejudice," he explained in Darkwater, "we were facing age-long complexes sunk low largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge." And the shadow of these images still haunts every African-American's existence within American society, like ghosts of the Jim Crow past, because "it is at this level that race is reproduced long after its original historical stimulus—the slave trade and slavery. It is at this level that seemingly rational and ordinary folk commit irrational and extraordinary acts," as Thomas Holt writes. 


Friday, June 7, 2013, marks the 121st anniversary of a more immediate harm inflicted on a 30-year-old Creole man whose name would become associated with one of the most notorious cases in U.S. Supreme Court history. The reason he was jailed: sitting on a "Whites Only" car on a Louisiana railroad. His intention: deliberate. Even though he could pass for white, he announced he was black. In testing his state's Jim Crow law, he and the legal team behind him defied stereotypes. The legal opinions that followed reinforced them. Remember Homer Plessy and read about his case here.      



Racist Memorabilia and Lynching Postcards: Jim Crow's Strange Face
