Organic Name Reactions for the students and aspirants of Chemistry12th.pptx
Mass Communications Media Culture Analysis 2017 SNHU daria_smith_giraud
1. Com126 Media Final featuring
HOW HOLLYWOOD CREATED BLACK STEREOTYPES
IN POPULAR CULTURE
early history of Film
and its effects on the
black culture and social
image in America
Daria Smith Giraud
2. The problem
Who created the Black Stereotypes we
see today?
Eddie Murphy in the SNL
Comedy skit (above),
Buckwheat , Little Rascals
character
“At various points the tom,
the coon, the tragic mulato,
the mammy, and the brutal
black buck were brought to
life respectively by Bill
“Bojangles” Robinson, Stepin
Fetchit, Nina Mae McKinney,
Hattie McDaniel, and Walter
Long (actually a white actor
who portrayed a black villain
in The Birth of a Nation and
later modernized by such
performers as Sidney Poitier,
Sammy Davis, Jr., Dorothy
Dandridge, Ethel Waters, and
Jim Brown. Later such
performers as Richard Pryor,
Eddie Murphy, Lonette
McKee, Whoopi Goldberg, and
Danny Glover also found
themselves struggling to turn
old stereotypes inside out.”
(4)
3. Thesis
“If Hollywood invented the “new
Negro” it meant it had invented
the ‘old Negro in the first place’”
(Van Peebles) But what was the
old negro and why was this new
negro being created in the first
place?
Does Media Reflect Culture or Does Media
Create Culture?
How did Hollywood contribute to creating the
Black Image and Persona?
Were Black stereotypes already created in
Culture?
Is there a symbiosis between the Media’s impact
on Culture and Cultures impact on the Media?
Early Hollywood films perpetuated the
negative stereotypes of Blacks creating
“Black Characters” or “New Negro” who
impacted the movie industry, society and
consciousness.
4. The Legacy of Black Stereotypes
But just where did these stereotypes come from?
And why are they still part of the African American Legacy in Hollywood?
“When I first became aware of movies messing with my mind, I must have been around 12 or 13
years old, it was around the end of the second world war. Oh, they had been messing with my mind
before that I just wasn’t aware of it. No that’s not right, I just wasn’t able to put a name to what I
was feeling when I’d leave the triple feature on Saturday afternoon at the National Rat Alley, that’s
what we c all the cinema in my neighborhood. I learned what emotion was, it was called ’shame.’”
(Van Peebles)
5. Black Stereotypes in Hollywood –
Females
the Tragic Mulatto, the Jezebel, the Mammy, the Sapphire (the Angry Black Woman)
Female Stereotypes
6. Black Stereotypes in Hollywood –
Males and Children
Male: The Uncle Tom, the Coon, the Brute, the Dancing Entertainer, the Criminal. Children: the Pickaninny, the Sambo
Male Stereotypes & Children Stereotypes
7. Blacks Struggle for Equality under
Hollywood’s Black Stereotypes
The “New” Hollywood Actors
Struggle for Unbiased Recognition
Quality Roles and Narratives
Stories that represent all dimensions
of the black life and history
Where they are not consistently seen
as thugs and criminals, buffoons,
servants and maids, slaves, sexually
objectified, lazy and slow-witted as
some stereotypes depicted
8. Exploring the Media of Film
Film is a powerful media “Stories are sites of observations about
self and society” (Baran, 15).
How did Hollywood film companies of yesteryears contribute to the legacy of negative stereotypes still
present today?
9. Early Films
Historical Overview of Cinema
Early film historical perspectives such as Edison’s
Watermelon Contest (bottom left), and W.C.
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (far right), and later Al
Jolsen’s, The Jazz Singer (1927) (bottom right)
Oscar acclaimed musical
“The American movie industry’s view of the black prior to The Birth of a Nation is what one scholar
called an “unformed image.” (Leab, 20)
10. III. Media Reflects
Culture
Social construction of reality theory argues that people who
share a culture also share “an ongoing correspondence” of
meaning (Baran, 337)
Culture Creates Media
11. Blackface Setting into
Motion the Black Icon
The minstrel shows – whose
performers appeared with faces
blackened by sooty burnt-cork
makeup – followed an elaborate
ritual in their burlesque of Negro
life in the Old South. Already well-
established before the Civil War,
they succeeded in fixing the black
man in the American
consciousness …”
(Leab, 8)
Blacks were not permitted
by law to participate in
these theatre shows to
correctly represent
themselves in lieu of these
stereotypes
This American theatre ran
from late 1800s to 1960s
The blackface icon was
used in early Hollywood
films
Thomas D Rice’s, Jim
Crow Jubilee (bottom
right), (Jump Jim Crow)
influenced the Rise of Jim
Crow Segregation Laws,
Topsy and Eva (right) were
characters from Stowe’s
”Uncle Toms Cabin”
12. Mainstream American
Stereotypes for the
Black Family
How could anyone look at the real black person, of
any period or station, and not see the shameful
discrepancies between her or him and show black
people, en masse, were portrayed in Jim Crow’s
American under the slanderous archetypes of
“picaninny,” “Tom,” “Sambo,” “coon,” “Jezebel,”
“tragic mulatto,” and “mammy”?
(Gates, VI)
13. IV. Media Creates
Culture
The Effects Debate, “ Media content has limited
impact on audiences because it is only play or
entertainment”… “it is only make believe”
(Baran, 319)
Culture Creates Media
14. BLACKFACE
HOLLYWOOD
Al Jolsen’s
Hollywood
Success and
Blackface
Legacy in the
Motion
Pictures
How could America set itself
up as the bastion of Liberty
and equality on one hand
and treat its colored citizens
so shabby on the Silver
Screen, and get away with
it?” Well, this brings us to the
peculiar plight of the Negro
in America.” (Van Peebles).
“How could
Hollywood
operate with
such impunity?
Al Jolsen’s Plantation Act
(1926) and Cotton Watts
Minstrel Comedy Show
15. Blacks in Hollywood under Black Codes,
Jim Crow and Segregation
Oscar
winner, Hattie
McDaniel, and Uncle
Remus, Disney’s
Song of the South
(far right), Mae West
and Maid, the Little
Rascals, Buckwheat,
Comedian Bert
Williams (far left)
16. V. the Symbiosis:
Culture
Symbolic interaction, “cultural symbols are lr4eaned
through interaction, and that meaning controls their
behavior”
(Baran 337)
17. There is a symbiosis of existence between the media and culture, their
exchange and impact. American culture greatly
influences media and media is derived from culture.
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18. VI. Conclusion
“media hold a funhouse mirror to society and distort what
they reflect. Some things are overrepresented, others
underrepresented, and still others disappear altogether.”
(Baran 320)
19. Nothing is free from cultural influences.
(Baran, 9) Historically culture has always
affected media and yet it would seem that the
powerful medium of film perpetuated and
imprinted these negative stereotypes upon
the minds of American culture.
Early Hollywood films perpetuated the negative
stereotypes of Blacks creating “Black Characters” or
“New Negro” who impacted the movie industry, society
and consciousness.
Nothing is Free from Cultural
Influences and yet…
21. Timeline
1667-the Slave Codes were enacted
modeling the Virginia Codes- Reduce
influence of Free Blacks
1820-Ethiopian Delineators as Blackface
Entertainment
1837-Virginia Minstrels
1840-1850 First Black Minstrels
1850-Fugitive Slave Act
1852-Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life Among the
Lowly by Harriett Beecher Stowe
1857-Dred Scot vs Sanford case,
mandated slaves are not American
citizens
1861-Civil War
1863-Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation
1865-Civil War ends, Lincoln
Assassinated, 13 Amendment ratified,
Start of Reconstruction Era
1866-Black Codes – Low Wage – Debt
financial system set up for Blacks in
America
Vagrancy Laws – Jailed newly freed
slaves or Freedmen and young children for
minor infractions into labor camps that
profited off city and state contracts for
free black labor
Congress passes the Civil Rights Act,
conferring citizenship on African
Americans and
granting them equal rights to whites.
The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Tennessee.
1868-14th Amendment ratified, Dred Scot
overturned
1870-White Entrepreneurs bought most of
the Black Minstrel Companies
1870-The 15th Amendment is ratified,
giving African Americans the right to vote.
1877-End of Reconstruction, Hayes turns
back Civil Rights for African Americans
1879-Blacks Migrate (escape) the South
1881-Tennesee passes the countries first
Jim Crow Law
1896-Plessy v. Ferguson case: racial
segregation is ruled constitutional by the
Supreme Court.
1954- Brown v. Board of Education case:
strikes down segregation as
unconstitutional.
1964-The Civil Rights Act is signed,
prohibiting discrimination of all kinds.
• *Time line courtesy: African American History Timeline.
(n.d.). Retrieved from
https://www.nps.gov/saga/learn/.../African%20American%2
0History%20Timeline.pdf
Let’s take a look at American law as a basis for this time line
22. Resources
Baran, S. (2014). Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture
Updated Edition (8th Ed). McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions.
Bogle, D. (1992). Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of
Blacks in American Films. New Expanded Edition.
Cox, K. L. (2013). Dreaming of Dixie. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Daniels, M. (Director). (1998). Classified X. [Documentary]. France: Centre National de la
Cinématographie (CNC).
Crosland, A. (Director). The Jazz Singer. (1927). [Film]. USA: Warner Bros.
Hurt, M. (1954). Old Time Radio Show. Beulah, Fibber McGee & Molly series [Radio
Broadcast Recording]. Retrieved from https://www.otrcat.com/p/beulah
Leab, D. J. (1975). From Sambo to Superspade: The Black experience in motion pictures.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lhamon, W. T. (2003). Jump Jim Crow: Lost plays, lyrics and street prose of the first
Atlantic popular culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The Little Rascals - (Good Old Days) Theme Song Our Gang Comedy [Video file]. (n.d.).
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkM0m-fB2Uw
Null, G. (1990). Black Hollywood: The negro in motion pictures. New York, N.Y: Citadel
press.
Ottley, R. (1944, March 12). A New World A-Coming. Retrieved from
https://www.otrcat.com/p/new-world-a-coming
Pilgrim, D. G. J. H. L. (2015). Understanding Jim Crow. Oakland: PM Press. Retrieved from
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/lib/snhu-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=4306903
Sperb, J. (2012). Disney's Most Notorious Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Turner, P. A. (2002). Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images & Their
Influence on Culture. Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Press.
Ottley, R. (1944, March 12). A New World A-Coming. Retrieved from
https://www.otrcat.com/p/new-world-a-coming