In
Cleveland Ohio there is a place called The
African-American Museum. In it there is a
hall of stereotypes it’s mostly old
Americana:
Bucktooth kids
black-as-coal eating
watermelon,
iron banks featuring a
bizarre hybrid of
man and
monkey (indented to be a
back man, I guess) who will put a penny in his
big black mouth when you push the lever. All of these
monstrosities are old and worn, part of a
dead age that needed
myths of racial inferiority to keep the
guilt for keeping
slaves from rising up. It’s comforting to look and laugh and know that that day is gone.
Well, not quite. I just discovered the wonderful world of
anime. Some fantastic animation and even movies with a
political consciousness on occasion (like
Night of the Fireflies) but on some I’ve come across those
old images.
Coonfaced niggers just like in the
bad old days,
hulking black women who don’t seem like women at all, a
short-witted character with misshapen
nappy hair.
What is going on!
Now it’s especially peculiar if you consider the fact that there are almost no
black people in
Japan. There’s no
slave trade that needs justifying. In fact, most
anime has almost no black characters at all. (and that seems about right considering that people make stories about what they know.) How then did fragments of this
old American myth of the
dark,
stupid,
muscular,
sub-human savages make it over the
pacific?
Maybe it has something to do with Japan’s effort to become a
western-style world power during
world war I and II. My
theory is that the western
stereotypes were
imported during that time and never really left.
Maybe if
Japanese people had more opportunities to meet
real black people there'd be more understanding. It could help all us black folks out too. Until I was about 8 I though that people from Japan were all named ‘
Chang’ and had were glasses because there eyes were so slanty. (And Chang is a
Chinese name anyway, WFT?!) But after
travelling at bit I purged all that
crap from my system. I bet I picked up my racist stereotypes from the lingering residue of
WWII propaganda in
America.
I’ve sent some stills from the anime to the
African American Museum in Cleveland for the
hall of stereotypes.
May they collect dust.