AAS 375 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Kerchief, Tyler Perry
Document Summary
Caricatures created this idea of what blacks looked like and how they acted so it made other races feel like they were true. The sambo docile and full of laughter, carefree and lazy, but full of food, dance, and song. Jim crow: dance rice started performing in theater because it was an outlawed dance on the plantations. Minstrel era took off during abolitionist era because it provided the idea that being slaves was paradise for blacks. Zip coon: attempt to imitate whites but are actually dumb and don"t know what to do with freedom; trickster figure. Was presented as controller of her own people and males in society. Strong, ugly, and asexual (not desired by men) Black menace: brute negroes who pursued white virgins (created during reconstruction) and gave them a reason to kill people in the black community. Animalistic and aggressive because they didn"t know what it was like to be enslaved.
