Title:
Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies
Patricia Turner
Publisher:
Anchor Books, NY, 1994
ISBN
0-385-46784-2

Patricia A. Turner is the author of I Heard It through the Grape Vine, a folklorist who brings her perspective as an African American to the study of folklore. In Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies she examines the role that white folklore has played in shaping black culture in the USA.

Can folklore create stereotypes, or does it merely promote stereotypes? What effect does folklore that promotes or creates stereotypes have on the cultures that it is stereotyping? Turner argues that white folklore about blacks promotes stereotypes about blacks, but that it is also creating stereotypes among blacks. This is a thesis that I argued against in the past, admittedly without hard evidence. Turner does not supply any hard evidence beyond her own anecdotes, but she does provide a different point of view.

Turner uses several types of text as illustrative examples of white folklore about blacks: the use of black images and icons as decorations and advertisements, the use of stories about blacks and their transfer into folklore, the use of stories about Africa, and the presentation of blacks on film and television. She divides the book up into two sections, presenting her discussion of iconography first.

Picture, Picture

Turner has a strong distaste for what she terms contemptible collectibles. I think most whites feel much as I do - the images are indications of an insensitive culture - but Turner sees them as carrying more significance. In her opinion the images are created to put blacks in their place. She does not suggest that a conscious conspiracy exists, just that white culture would permit no different treatment of blacks.

So how are whites to contend with the fact that sometimes these icons are treated by blacks with indifference? What of blacks who display a pickaninnie image or who own a mammie cookie jar? Turner doesn't directly acknowledge that her attitude isn't necessarily shared by all blacks, but she does tell her story from a very personal point of view, never claiming to speak for all African Americans. She also writes that in her opinion blacks have internalized the damaging opinions that whites hold of them.

...the merchants of popular culture have used these icons to shackle our psyches as deftly as enslavers once used real chains to shackle our bodies.
In other words, blacks are not conscious of the harm that is done to them, so the fact that some blacks accept these images as innocuous, or even desirable, has no bearing on Turner's thesis.

However, Turner's case is incomplete. While she presents a compelling collection of images that are insensitive, often offensive, she writes of them as if their import has been unchanged over the past century. She acknowledges that during the civil rights movement their popularity waned, and cites her personal observation of a thriving industry of making replicas to show that they are now as popular as they ever were. This, she suggests, shows that the attitudes of whites towards blacks have not in fact changed.

This is, in my opinion, not true. The images that she finds offensive - bucolic settings with stereotypically drawn blacks and the like - are also commonly populated with whites. While admittedly the images that depict people in a positive light rarely show blacks, those images that are intended to make light of human suffering don't seem to lean to a particular skin color. If a common thread could be found, it is much more likely to be that of poverty. This is not much of a surprise, and is in effect a more generalized version of Turner's point.

If white culture wants to keep blacks in "their" place, it goes without saying that the middle class - that economic group that is in fact buying these objects - wants to keep those of the lower classes in their place. Depicting bare footed, ragged children or cute rosy cheeked tramps is very much in keeping with the theme that Turner sees in wide-mouthed blacks eating watermelon or black children running from alligators. None of these images are particularly sensitive to the people or groups they depict. They seem designed to make palatable conditions that would otherwise appall.

The resurgence of the popularity of contemptible collectibles may be due not so much to a lack of sensitivity towards African Americans, but an attempt by middle class Americans of all color to assuage their consciences about the people that are left behind in an otherwise strong economy, and a political climate that will not allow the contemplation of our social conscience.

I have no idea what significance it has that in a day spent at the library here in Utah, searching for current examples of the items which Turner says she saw in any number of home decorating magazines in the mid eighties to early nineties, I found not a single one. Possibly it means nothing. Possibly people have once again realized that such items still (and maybe always will) rub a raw nerve.

Picture, Picture II

Turner mentions in her introduction how eagerly she and other African Americans of her acquaintance looked foreward to depictions of her people in the mass media. Blacks on TV or in the movies were rare novelties. Blacks on TV or in the movies playing major roles were rarer still.

It is not surprising that this treatment of African Americans by the white producers of films and television programs has left people like Turner feeling dissatisfied. Turner therefore proceeds to enumerate these deficiencies. As in the first section of the book, Turner proceeds to turn up many valid points. But these are quickly overshadowed by what appear to be mistakes, exaggerations, or just pickiness.

Turner's working thesis in this section is that whites are afraid to depict blacks as anything but stereotypes. When blacks break out of the stereotypes assigned to them by white culture, their images are suppressed and hidden. But why is it that to illustrate her point, she lumped her complaint about no depictions of virile black men in with her observations about Mapplethorpe's pictures. I seem to recall that the pictures were causing an uproar because they showed homosexuality, not because they included black men. Is my memory playing tricks on me?

Then there was her complaint that Danny Glover played a violent husband. That was only a couple of dozen pages following a complaint that Meryl Streep wasn't sufficiently fearful for her honor amidst her black porters. This is a damned if you do - damned if you don't scenario.

And what about her statement that black women were depicted as merely exotic, but not to substantiate the folk belief that "once you've had black you never go back"? Isn't this just part of a dirty joke? In what way does it help blacks to overcome racism to be set apart as too exotic to be safe?

I was incredulous over her treatment of the "Cosby Show". She complains that Theo was the only one of the kids who was academically inept. I couldn't think of a single example of a TV sitcom family that had boys and girls going to school where the boys did better than the girls, regardless of their color. And the fact that Cosby drew much of his material for the "Theo" character from his own son was totally lost on Turner, it seemed.

While she dismisses blacks who aren't school-smart as being caricatures of street-smart blacks, she disses those who are good at school as being of course too "white." I've never liked Urkel, but I don't think I recall a single white school smart TV show character who played the nerd quite like Urkel. (I may have missed Urkel's white counterpart in more recent shows, though.) Actually, I thought that the Urkel character is a lot more like Jimmie Walker's J.J. than like a "white-informed black." If I had a complaint, I would say that popular depictions of intelligent and capable, school-smart children are much too rare. Whether they are white or black, they are characterized as clumsy in most tasks, uncool, and socially inept. Urkel has no bearing on the relationship between whites and blacks, but on the USAn attitude towards "book learning."

The Frame

After writing I Heard It through the Grape Vine, Turner must have a good understanding of the folklore that is peculiar to the African American culture. However, the failings of Ceramic Uncles seem to show that some folklore, some folk beliefs can be so ingrained that they become invisible to those that hold them: Turner believes that white culture has a damaging effect on black culture, and that many African Americans cannot see the damage because it has already been done. I think that this is very likely something that many African Americans believe, and that Turner hasn't recognized to what extent her anger at whites is shaped by these beliefs. Even though she acknowledges in the beginning of her book that every chapter in it is informed by the story of the little black boy who wanted to grow up to be white, she makes no attempt to determine if the story is true, or if the premise provided by the story is true.

In terms of folkloric content, the book works on several levels. As a look at one USAn culture's folk beliefs, it is interesting, although seen from so deeply inside that culture that by itself it probably cannot lead to any useful understanding. As a look at white folklore about blacks, it is a curiously repellent collection of some of the most revolting examples, as well as some items whose provenance is implied, though not necessarily proved. As a discussion of the effects of folklore on cultures and the stereotypes that may be formed by folklore, the book doesn't even attempt to meet its burden of proof. I offer it an AFU bookshelf score of four.