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

I've found that there are few subjects that USAns as a group are more sensitive about than the relations between the races, and specifically between people of African descent and people of European descent. Certainly many whites I've talked to will express the attitude that enough has been done to normalize relations, and that blacks should be ready to be more self reliant. Blacks, on the other hand, continue to point out that there is much left to do in the USA to even the balance between the races. Patricia Turner, who has already written an impressive book on folklore in the African American culture (I Heard It through the Grapevine), has added her voice to those who see inequities in the present situation. In her 1994 book Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies, she enumerates many aspects of white culture that seem calculated to limit the opportunities available to blacks.

Turner starts by examining certain images with which some whites decorate their household objects. She calls "Mammie" cookie jars, pickaninnie images, and miniature black house boy "hitching posts" contemptible collectibles. After pointing to a resurgence of their popularity since they fell into disfavor during the Sixties, she argues that they consistently show blacks in the unflattering light of servitude to whites. Many of the images, she says, enforce common stereotypes about blacks. How can blacks ignore those stereotypes if they are confronted by them continuously? In fact, she suggests, these images are so insidious that they are interfering with the ability of black people to rise to their full potential.

After discussing the way black stereotypical images are depicted on everyday items, she spends the second part of the book discussing the depiction of blacks in the stories that whites tell. She shows how the admirable character "Tom" from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin has been turned into the despised traitor of his race, "Uncle Tom", and lays the blame at the feet of whites who used the book that was written with the best of intentions to profit from the miseries of black slaves. Other forms of entertainment are also examined, culminating in a discussion of the roles that blacks play in movies in the present day.

I read Turner's book with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I could not deny her the right to her feelings of outrage at the harm done to her and her people. She writes with great anger, I think, and the anger is palpable on most pages. As a white person, living in the USA, I am in no position to truly empathize with her point of view, but I think I can understand her. I certainly sympathize.

When she describes the insensitive use of black people as icons for marketing schemes, or the theft of black history in movies like "Mississippi Burning" or "Ragtime", I have to agree that she has a legitimate grievance. While caricatures of whites have been used, the overwhelming bulk of images of whites shows the dominant ethnic group in this country in a consistently favorable light. No such balance is struck for blacks. And while stories about white history contain countless inaccuracies, the inaccuracies are generally designed to cast whites in an even more favorable light.

But on the other hand, I felt that many of her points seemed rather fine, almost belabored. Some of her accusations of unfairness seem almost ridiculous. For example, she points out on several occasions that black men are rarely allowed to play parts that show them as physically powerful and virile. Blacks who are older, maybe have gray hair, are preferred over young and handsome actors, she says. But the stereotype of violent blacks is also undesirable. So when Danny Glover plays a violent husband, that is not acceptable. But when Meryl Streep beds down amids her black porters, demonstrating that she need not fear being violated by them, that, too, is not ok.

There are several examples like this. They do not contribute to her thesis. What is worse, the underlying assumption of her book, based on a story she once heard, is never examined, and Turner makes no attempt to do so. This is a major failing of the book. I do not believe for a moment that there isn't tremendous room for improvement in how whites and blacks interact in the USA, but I think that her book tries too hard to find fault where the evidence is much less compelling. While it doesn't invalidate her thesis, it doesn't help prove it, either. I believe that her book is best seen as an exemplar of one half of the cultural gap that still divides African Americans from their more fair-skinned neighbors, a gap that cannot be bridged through any one-sided effort.