Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors
Stories from the Jim Crow Museum
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
All groups tell stories, but some groups have the power to impose their stories on others, to label others, stigmatize others, paint others as undesirables—and to have these stories presented as scientific fact, God’s will, or wholesome entertainment. Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors examines the origins and significance of several longstanding antiblack stories and the caricatures and stereotypes that support them. Here readers will find representations of the lazy, childlike Sambo, the watermelon-obsessed p********y, the buffoonish minstrel, the subhuman savage, the loyal and contented mammy and Tom, and the menacing, razor-toting coon and brute.
Malcolm X and James Baldwin both refused to eat watermelon in front of white people. They were aware of the jokes and other stories about African Americans stealing watermelons, fighting over watermelons, even being transformed into watermelons. Did racial stories influence the actions of white fraternities and sororities who dressed in blackface and mocked black culture, or employees who hung nooses in their workplaces? What stories did the people who refer to Serena Williams and other dark-skinned athletes as apes or baboons hear? Is it possible that a white South Carolina police officer who shot a fleeing black man had never heard stories about scary black men with straight razors or other weapons? Antiblack stories still matter.
Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors uses images from the Jim Crow Museum, the nation’s largest publicly accessible collection of racist objects. These images are evidence of the social injustice that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” Each chapter concludes with a story from the author’s journey, challenging the integrity of racial narratives.
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Sociologist and museum curator Pilgrim provocatively confronts racist stereotypes using objects from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which he founded in 2012, at Ferris State University, in Michigan. The array of objects he presents that caricature black people as simians, watermelon-lovers, mammies, and worse figurines and postcards, paperweights and ceramic plates, toys, T-shirts, sheet music, buttons, children's books, a ticket to a hanging brazenly exemplify racist notions. In their mundane variety, Pilgrim writes, they serve as "shorthand ways of saying that black people are others, specifically, Lesser Others." Pilgrim presents the objects as a sort of genealogy of stereotypes that he argues still persist today. For example, he notes the subtle differences between a "coon" and a "brute" (the former reserves his violence for other black people, a characteristic popularized in "coon songs" from the 1880s, which used black-on-black crime as a form of entertainment, while the latter characterizes black people as innately savage) and connects the stereotypes behind them that Black men are violent to contemporary culture: "Black men, like Michael Brown or the looters televised after his death at the hand of police officers... are still portrayed as brutes or beasts," he writes. The book draws on film, music, literature, social science, and ample history to survey how white supremacy operates, from 19th century minstrel shows to the Obama monkey memes of the past decade. The graphics featured throughout will likely cause more than a little discomfort, but that's clearly the point as Pilgrim boldly challenges readers to confront racist taboos. Color photos.
