Blackface Stereotype

The Blackface Stereotype

Manthia Diawara

In the blackface myth, there is a white fantasy which posits whiteness as the norm.What is absent in the blackface stereotype is as important as what is present: everyblack face is a statement of social imperfection, inferiority, and mimicry that is placedin isolation with an absent whiteness as its ideal opposite. How, then, do we explainthe current resurgence of interest in blackface memorabilia ,with far more blackpeople than white becoming collectors? Moreover, young black artists, actors, andrappers embrace the stereotype as a source of artistic creation and self-expression.Even White artists defy the accusation of racism and find their artistic cutting edgeand the clarity of their politics in blackface caricatures.

To begin with, I must say that in this new fascination with the stereotype, I am lessinterested in the debates over positive and negative images. Instead of liberating AuntJemima, Stepin Fetchit, and other stereotypes from the grip of white fantasy, positiveimages tend to reinforce the immanence of these stereotypes in our collectiveimagination. That is, the insistence on positive images only strengthens the negativestereotypes in both the white and black imagination. I believe that our new interest inblackface stereotypes involves historical as well as political and aesthetic implicationsthat are more complex than allowed by the debates over positive and negativeimages. David Levinthal's work is important because it confronts us with theblackface stereotype, makes it speak to us directly, without an intermediary, anddemands a response from us regardless of our race, age, or gender. Levinthal, a whitecollector of blackface memorabilia and G.I. Joe toys, is a photographer who uses histoy collection to recreate original scenes of racism, genocide, and sexual fantasies. HisMein Kampf, constructed with toy soldiers and tanks, the Barbie Doll series, and nowthis blackface book blows up miniature toys into bigger-than-lifesize men and womenand sets them in motion with a cinematic effect, creating for the viewer immediatememories of the histories symbolized in the toys. This photo-cinema effect, whichprovokes an automatic reaction from the spectator, makes Levinthal's art special andrefreshing as far as stereotypes are concerned. The very presentation of Levinthal'sPolaroid pictures, closeups of blackface against a black background, places thestereotype in a dramatic situation and makes it signify. The blackness of the blackfaceemanates with all of its monumentality from the black background. It is hard not tothink of Orson Welles' Othello here: the stereotypes red lips, white eyes, and whiteteeth both emphasize its deformity and monstrosity. Levinthal makes us look at theblackface stereotype as it is caught in this play of colors and their symbolism in ourhistory and culture. Interestingly, by photographing the blackface figurines against ablack background,

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Levinthal makes us realize our own role in giving shape and content to thestereotype. For example, we look for the white eyes or the red lips first to determinethe shape of the head. The whiteness of Aunt Jemimas apron and head-tie and UncleBens servants uniform are the primary signifiers of their shapes, as well as theiridentification with the kitchen. Take, for example, Levinthals close-up shot of the faceof a popular figurine advertising a restaurant called "Coon Chicken Inn." The piece isinitially remarkable for the oversize mouth which dominates both the head aboveand the neck below. The next most noticeable features include the white teeth onwhich the logo "Coon Chicken Inn" is carved, the white bow-tie with black dots, andthe bulging white of the left eye. The other details are, however, no less caricaturaland symbolic: the head is much smaller by analogy to the large face; the blood-redlips and tongue are matched by the red ring of the hat; and the right eye, which, inshocking contrast to the left, is shut. While the top hat and the bow-tie signifymodernity, the red lips symbolize cannibalism, and the one eye, monstrosity. AgainstLevinthals black background, the skin color is only visible when shining against thelight, like a recently polished piece of leather or wood.

THE STEREOTYPE AND THE CONTENT OF HISTORY

I was looking at more than 150 prints of Levinthal's in my living room one day whenmy 13-year-old son came along and asked what I was doing. I showed him thepictures and explained that white people used to make these images to show thatblack people were inferior to them and to justify racism and segregation. I introducedhim to Aunt Jemima and said that white racists wanted people to believe that all blackwomen were fat and dressed in a white apron and a kerchief as a permanent fixtureof white peoples kitchens. Black people were also represented as porters andshoeshine boys at train stations. Those who rebelled against these portrayals ofthemselves and their race were depicted as Rastus, uppity niggers and called "ZipCoons." When we got to the image that associated black people with watermelons, heasked, "Oh yeah, why are they always smiling like that, with those big red lips?" I toldhim that whites used to malign black people as watermelon and chicken thieves. Theywould say that during the night, when it was pitch dark, black people would go to themasters field to steal watermelons, or, like foxes, to the chicken coop to steal chickens.But supposedly, these black people were always betrayed by their white teeth andwhite eyes which shone in the dark like lightning. So they could not hide, even in thedarkest of nights, even though they were so black. That was why their smiles were cutlike slices of watermelon and they were considered, like chickens, to be cowards. Myson laughed and remained pensive for a moment before resuming his mundaneactivities.

Left alone with Levinthal's pictures, I began to reassess the history lesson I had just


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given my son, his reaction with laughter, and his subsequent boredom with themeaning I said white people had put behind the blackface stereotypes.

Every stereotype emerges in the wake of a pre-existing ideology which deforms it,appropriates it, and naturalizes it. The blackface stereotype too, by deforming thebody, silences it and leaves room only for white supremacy to speak through it.Levinthal's photographs capture well the location of white racist ideology in theblackface stereotype and the deformation of black progress in history. By zooming inon the parts of the stereotypes body that are already deformed and exaggerated,Levinthals photographs reveal the way stereotypes work with pastiche, caricature,and symbols: that is, stereotypes always rob people of their history and shun theirrealism. It is in this violent and aggressive manner that the stereotype sends itsmessage ,which is automatically absorbed by the viewer/reader, and which replaceshistory. Kenneth Goings, in Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black American Collectibles andAmerican Stereotyping (1994), shows that the blackface stereotypes represent thewhite Souths retreat from the American Revolution, i.e., Reconstruction, the civilrights movement, and desegregation. In other words, the stereotypes help to maintainthe myth of the gothic Old South and deny the changes in our contemporary society.

To say that the stereotype is motivated by a pre-existing ideology is not only torecognize the limits of every stereotype in a particular history, but also to reveal howthe content of that history gives the stereotype its form. In this sense, it is interestingto see how the Mammy stereotype is tied to the myth of the South. Characteristically,the Mammy, used commonly as a cookie-jar, kitchen decoration, or houseware ,is arotund black woman dressed in a long robe with an apron on top of it, a headkerchief, and a big smile on her face. Sometimes, she is carrying a bowl or a whitebaby in her arms. Hattie McDaniel, the Mammy in the film Gone with the Wind, isprobably the most famous such figure.

This representation of the Mammy ,simplistic in artistic terms ,contains the ethos andessence of antebellum Southernness. The black woman is detached from her homeand history, and all that is left of her is the dress, the kerchief, and the smile. Theapron appropriates and naturalizes her as a permanent fixture of the white mansion.It is she, more than the Southern Belle or Southern Gentleman, who embodies theattributes of Southernness. The handkerchief denotes her as rural, her smile asunthreatening and hospitable, and her stout figure and her hand movements asstrong, hardworking, and generous. Most importantly, however, she is behind theSouth's pretensions to aristocracy, the sanctity of the white woman, and thegentlemanly breeding of the Southern cavalier. As a stereotype, the Mammy is themost powerful symbol of the South because she is the only one that is necessary andindispensable to the representation of the entire mythology of the South. To borrowan insight from Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), the Mammy is to the Southwhat the African soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris-Match was tothe French empire: she forms the identity of the South on the one hand and


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universalizes the Southern way of life on the other. Dressed in her long dress, apron,head kerchief, and big smile, she becomes as natural as cotton.

The interesting thing about the Mammy stereotype is its domesticity, which isopposed to the coons uncivilized nature or indeed any other stereotype relegated tothe black side of the tracks. On the other side of the Mammy, Aunt Jemima, UncleMose, and other docile servant characters who are pure products of the South, thereare stereotypes that stand for the savage nature of Africans, uncontrolled sexuality,and evil: oversexed tragic mulattos, Mammies who do not know their place and thinkthey are white, Rastus and Zip Coons. The Mammy comes in a uniform which revealsvery little of her body, only her smiling face and her forearm. To the degree that theuniform organizes and disciplines the Mammy's body, it is a measure of herdomesticity and morality.

It is therefore possible to read the other stereotypes, Rastus, Zip Coon, and the tragicmulatto, in light of their opposition to such domesticated stereotypes as Uncle Tom,Uncle Mose, Mammy, and Aunt Jemima. First of all, any black woman who fails to becontained in the Mammy's uniform is physically punished for it, or exposed to publicridicule for lacking decorum and decency. There is the black woman holding anashtray in the shape of a washing machine with her oversized breast caught betweenthe wringers. Ridicule is also reflected in making piggy banks in the shape of femaleand male busts, "Jolly Nigger Banks", in which the stereotype's mouth is wide open,waiting to receive coins from the empty hand. This toy for white children teachesthem economic frugality at the same time as they learn to treat black people as robotsor coin-swallowing monsters. Levinthal's close-up shots of two piggy banks, a femaleand a male, are particularly dramatic and fearsome illustration of this myth. Thesephotographs are frightening because the zombie-like characters seem to emerge outof the dark, with an unconscious motion which derives from their open mouths,vacant eyes, and distended hands. It is in this sense that the coin-swallowing becomesa metaphor for an appetite for human flesh, our skin. Several of the photographs inthis collection also reveal for the viewer the naturalization of punishment throughrecourse to stereotypes: an ashtray of a crocodile eating a black baby; a decapitatedblack persons head; or a black child being bitten by a dog as he climbs up a bone.

When the Mammys uniform is absent, it may also signify the black body as wild anduncontrollable, or as the essence of Africanism: half-human and half-animal. Thetragic mulatto stereotype is the most popular target for promoting the black body asthe site of unrestricted sex and evil. Unlike the Mammy, the tragic mulatto is oftenpresented naked or scantily dressed ,looking as if intoxicated by sexual desire: she isalways the girlfriend or the other wife. Black women who are depicted as theopposites of the Mammy are also dressed in grass skirts to emphasize their wildnature. This Africanism may also appear in the stereotypes in the shape of a trait thatsymbolizes evil. For example, the way a black female stereotype rolls her eyes orwears her bandanna in the shape of horns may give her away as a fake or an


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impostor who is trying to usurp the ways and manners of a white lady.

The stereotype of black men who do not fit the mold of the docile servant of themasters kitchen and mansion is equally rich in Africanist symbolism. For example,the disproportionately large upper torsos of the black men, with long faces andcheeks bigger than their heads ,are a sign that they are half-human and half-animal.They can fool nobody, even when they wear a suit, tie, and hat, because their lips arepainted with blood, which often spills over and creates a match with the tie. Red, as asymbol of cannibalism, is the dominant signifier here. In one of Levinthal's pictures, aman is standing at the intersection of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street. Given the playbetween the colors green, yellow, and red, he seems to be directing traffic. But whatreally grabs our attention in the picture, and which is made even more vivid againstthe black background of the photograph, is the red which is smeared all over themans face and matches the color of his suit. Thus, the mans cannibalism takes overand dominates other meanings suggested by the figure, such as the cosmopolitanismof the white shoes and gloves, the checkered pants, and the polka-dotted tie. The motifof cannibalism also circulates through the laughter of the stereotypes which revealtheir bigger-than-normal teeth, with wide gaps between them. Take, for example,Levinthal's photograph of the disembodied head of a woman. Her skin color is visiblein some places as a blueish reflection against the light, and totally invisible in otherplaces, forming one big dark spot with the black background. In fact, what gives thehead its shape is the red head-scarf with white dots which is in complicity with thered lips, separated by the exposed upper teeth that also resonate with the bugged-outwhite of the eyes. The viewer experiences an uncanny feeling of danger that isderived from the fear of being captured and destroyed by the overwhelmingwhiteness of the eyes and teeth.

The color white is deceptively dangerous here, because it is associated with black andred, the primary colors of Africanism. This picture, therefore, brings together all thequalities of the Freudian signifier in a dream. The imminent darkness and the redsymbolize our latent fear of cannibalism, and other awful things associated withAfrica. The white dots of the scarf, the eyes, and teeth constitute the deception in thedream. Finally, the relationship between the black, the red, and the white gives us thestereotype ,just as for Freud, the relationship of the dream to its latent meaning is thekey to an interpretation of the problem. For us, a key importance of Levinthal's worklies here: by confronting us with a dark background that subsumes and appropriatesthe blackness of the stereotypes, it dramatically brings to life the other colors, red andwhite, which are essential to making sense of the Africanist myth. Whenever thethree colors are present in a stereotype, or any one of them in an excessive manner,blood-red lips, tie, scarf, pants, jacket,i t is important to know that that stereotype isthreatened by Africanism. Even the Mammy is not above the threat. That is why, inorder to maintain her image as civilized, she has to remain desexualized, dressedneatly in her uniform, and just dark enough to be set apart from both the tragicmulatto and the jungle Africans.


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RESISTING THE STEREOTYPE

There is a hierarchy of stereotypes that organizes them and makes them markers ofthe complexity of the Southern ideology that gives the stereotypes their meaning.Because stereotypes have different contents, they first of all affect us differentlyacross race, gender, and class. To some people, the Mammy may be preferable to anAfricanized Zip Coon. To others, both may be equally offensive. However, thelongevity and the immanence of the blackface stereotype, in spite of the significantgains in civil rights and mobility for black people today, is a concern. Is the stereotypeso much more powerful and compelling than this new content of history, that itthwarts the artistic intentions of the younger generations?

Judging from the recent conflicts in the art world, the media, and institutions ofhigher learning over the impact of stereotypes on our society, it is clear that the issueis complex. It is also a clear sign of historical change that black collectors of blackfacememorabilia outnumber their white counterparts. Author Kenneth Goings, a majorcollector of blackface memorabilia, asserts that, while whites derive a "bonus of socialsuperiority" from collecting them, African-Americans such as himself becomecollectors to "demonstrate that this negative past that so many naysayers assert neverhappened really did; at the same time, as many other collectors also believe, I amrobbing these artifacts/ideologies of the power to hurt me" (The International Reviewof African American Art 14:5 [1997], 23; all subsequent quotes from this journal will bereferenced by page number). Goings believes, in fact, that the resurgence of blackfacestereotypes has coincided historically with white peoples perception that blackpeoples gains in civil rights were undeserved, and therefore stereotypes werenecessary to beat them back into the hole (Mammy and Uncle Mose, 88-106).

The perspective that white people and the media deploy stereotypes to counterprogress made by blacks informs a critique that lumps together as stereotypical,artists as varied as rap musicians, film-makers, and conceptual artists. Bettye Saar, arespected African American artist, has unleashed a polemic against Kara Walker forher rethematization of blackface stereotypes in art. In 1997, Walker received theMacArthur Foundation "genius" award for her innovative work. Saar believes thatWalkers instant fame is attributable to a "white backlash" against the rich tradition ofAfrican American art: "This is like closet racism. It relieves them of the responsibilityto show other artists. Here we are at the end of the millennium seeing work that isvery sexist and derogatory...Kara Walker Is Selling Us Down the River," (IRAAA, 4).

In the same issue of The International Review of African American Art, Michael Harrisargues that African Americans should turn the page on stereotypes and concentrateon positive and authentic images of themselves as derived from African art or fromtheir own communities. He invokes the work of black psychologists and the DuBoisian theory of double consciousness to assert that black collectors and artists of


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blackface stereotypes are haunted by a feeling of self-hatred: they are "holding on tothings that whites made to materialize their perception of our community" (IRAAA,19). Harris concludes his argument by stating that "[t]here are not enough affirmingimages in our environment for these negative images to ever be fully drained,controlled and mastered. They proliferate so much and there's so little to counterthem that you see acts of self-hatred, you see black-on-black crime" (IRAAA, 20).

In their differing ways, Goings, Saar, and Harris are united in their resistance to thestereotype. They have assigned to themselves the burden of representation. For them,black art should pursue the grand tradition of anti-racism, respectability, andrepresentation of positive images that humanize black people. For them, art mustavoid stereotypes or, if it addresses them at all, deconstruct them. Bettye Saar's art,for example, subverts our image of the Mammy as defined by her neat uniform andreassuring smile. She calls for the liberation of the Mammy by rendering her imagemore threatening and by arming her with weapons other than the broom. In one ofher thematic installations, 'Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Busy Bee,' the Mammy hasmechanical arms and holds a broom in one hand and a bullet in the other. The objectof the installation is to bring out a rebellious side of the Mammy, and bydenaturalizing her, to distinguish her from our notion of the Mammy in the blackfacestereotype.

Saar's work here is resonant with the tradition of such organizations as the NAACP intheir organizing against and fighting negative images of African Americans in themedia. We are all familiar with the film The Birth of a Race (1916) made by NobleJohnson and the NAACP to counter D. W. Griffiths infamous Birth of a Nation (1915).W.E.B. Du Bois' idea of the Talented Tenth has also made African Americans aware oftheir duty to represent positive images of their race in society. African Americanshave always, therefore, been vigilant against the emergence and perpetuation ofstereotypes, whether created by whites or by people in their own communities.

They correctly perceive stereotypes as a violent form of advertisement in which themeaning travels faster than the perception of the fine print. As I have shown, with thehelp of Leventhal's photographs, what disappears -- when the blackface figurines areplaced against a black background -- is the blackness, and what appears is thedeformation of black identity. Thus, the complexity of an image will stand between itand its stereotypical rendition. To paraphrase Roland Barthes again in Mythologies,the stereotype always succeeds by disguising the biography of the real black person.The stereotype, because it prefers to work with pastiche and caricature, always stealssomething from black people.

EMBRACING THE STEREOTYPE

However, there is a problem with the notion of staying in the tradition, resisting the


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stereotype, or deconstructing it. One cannot resist the stereotype in representationwithout creating another stereotype. The point is that the language of resistance itselfis caught up in another form of caricature, symbolism, and pastiche that robs theblack person of his/her individual history. It is in this sense that one sees in the blackmiddle classs resolve to deconstruct the stereotype at all costs, a new reification ofblackness ,the blackness of black nationalists. Once again, the content of history isdeformed as tradition dictates to the individual the exclusive way of being black inAmerica.

I want to suggest that there is another way of approaching the stereotype, one whichis fluid and thus more attentive to the content of history. If the conflict between theBettye Saars and the Kara Walkers resides in anything, it is that one side continuesthe tradition of resistance against the stereotype, while the other has broken with thattradition, confronting the stereotype "not only as an external phenomenon but also asthe content of their own individual consciousness" (IRAAA, 3). It is this seeminglydiscontinuous art of the younger generation, in hip-hop, in the "hood" movies, and inso-called "neo-coon art," that bothers the traditionalists. Against the youngergenerations embrace of the stereotype, one can hear the traditionalists asking: howcan one accept the stereotyping of oneself by the white man, and surrender tocapitalism with such a sexual desire? The bourgeois nationalists share an anxiety thatthis generation does not fully realize how dangerous the stereotype is, and that theirony in the original stereotypes may be stronger and more insidious than any ironydeployed by the "neo-coon" artists.

In the so-called "neo-coons'" appropriation of blackface, however, the emphasis is nolonger on resistance politics, but on wearing masks that facilitate ones mobility in theworld. In he words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: "For artistic tradition to evolve beyondrealism to the meta-level of self-conscious, political, and formalistic commentary is asign of sophistication, self-confidence, self-awareness, and control. In the work ofthese sublime artists, the black object has become the black subject in a profound actof artistic exorcism" (IRAAA, 5).

The point now is to look at stereotypes with different eyes. The work of Kara Walker,Quentin Tarantino, Warren Beatty (Bulworth), and Chris Rock, for example, revealsthe stereotype as an object of desire. In Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons'art, the stereotype is a point of departure for an uncanny commentary on ourcontemporary society. For these artists, the stereotype is not only the victim of whiteracism, but also of black bourgeois nationalism, which has internalized the samehatred for blackface as white supremacists. Lowery Stokes Sims is right when shesays that our relation to blackface stereotypes, besides everything else, reveals "acertain fundamental resistance we had to the reality of how we looked as blackpeople" (IRAAA, 21). To embrace the stereotype in a sense that echoes Toni CadeBambara's "gorilla" in Gorilla My Love is therefore a subversive and critical actagainst bourgeois nationalists of different persuasions who are united in giving black


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men and women one single, ahistorical, and permanent identity. Additionally, itfocuses our attention on the stereotype itself, not on received ideas about thestereotype. It is then possible to maintain that the meaning and impact of thestereotype are delimited by history, that we can have a different relationship with ittoday, and that it can be used to say something new about art and society thatdisrupts our conventions.

Today, as artists like Hammons' stereotype the stereotype, they draw our attention tothe distance as well as the similarity between the old blackface and the new. ChrisRock's posing in blackface on the cover of Vanity Fair, or playing a naive black childready to be eaten up by crocodiles on Saturday Night Live is a new stereotype thatsteals from the old. True to the function of every stereotype, stereotyping a blackfacestereotype corrupts it by giving it a new reified content. By giving the impression ofsurrendering to the old stereotype ,through referencing some of its distinctivefeatures, the artist addresses a new historical content. The new blackface is thereforethe criterion of transtextuality: an artifice which enables the performer to fill all thespaces that the old stereotype occupied and to be the star of the new show. If the oldstereotype is the projection of white supremacist thinking onto black people, the newstereotype compounds matters by desiring that image, and deforming its content for adifferent appropriation.

David Levinthal's photographs bear evidence of this new appropriation. I willconcentrate on his Amos-and-Andy and watermelon photographs. I have alreadymentioned Levinthal's mise-en-scene, in which the blackness of the blackfacedisappears in the dark and the whiteness emerges dramatically to the surface. Byrepositioning the blackface stereotypes in close-up photographs, Levinthal destroystheir original effect, which is antithetical to close reading and analysis. As I have said,stereotypes convey their meaning quickly by connecting an image to a received idea.It is usually this idea that dominates the stereotype and gives it its form. Levinthalbreaks this ideological and aesthetic contract by repositioning the image andweakening its identification with the intended original meaning.

My own favorite in this process of distantiation is a photograph of a blackfacefigurine setting a dining table. The setting is elegant, with scintillating glasses,candlelight, an ice bucket for wine, and a towel. The server himself is impeccablydressed in a white suit and bow-tie. Paradoxically, the elongated face with its red lipsand bulging eyes does not connote the danger of Africanism usually associated withblackface. Instead, there is an analogy between the face and the long fingers thatcreates an affinity between this figure and the cartoon figure of Donald Duck. Thebug eyes and red lips become Donald Ducks eyes and beak. The whole scene iscomical, whether one perceives it as a blackface Donald Duck as a server or as DonaldDuck/blackface setting a romantic dinner-table. The animal motif associated withAfricanism is still there. But what is interesting is that the photograph, byaestheticizing the stereotype, breaks the illusion of identification with the image,


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makes us pause and scrutinize it in detail, and exposes the ideology of the oldstereotype as naive and boring. The Amos-and-Andy figurines undergo the same kindof transformation in Leventhal's photography. Here, the artifice which finds whitecharacters stereotyping black people is framed at a time when the actors seem to betired of their roles. A close-up of Andys face, with the perennial cigar between hispursed lips and his hat, betrays a white face which is obviously painted black. Andylooks more like a tired clown on his way home from the circus. His sad face connotesmore a dejection with the profession of acting than the faux pas of a black manpretending to be white. In fact, this close-up shot, by restoring Andy to the actingtraditions of vaudeville theater, renders it ridiculous and distant from the blacknessof todays homeboys. Acting is also an issue in the photograph of a black boy trying towrap his arms around a watermelon that is bigger than he is. This image steals fromthe stereotype because the boy does not in fact look like one. He does not have rollingwhite eyes, nor does he exhibit other signs of Africanism. He seems to be posing,stereotyping the stereotype. The embrace of the watermelon therefore mobilizesironic turns that remind us of the contemporary works of Kara Walker and MichaelRay Charles. In contrast to this image, there is one traditional photograph of twojubilant black kids, "pickaninny motifs, " getting ready to bite into a large slice ofwatermelon. They have beady hair, rolling white eyes, and red lips that match thecolor of the watermelon. This is a typical image of black kids used as salt-and-peppershakers, hot-pad holders, and postcards selling somebody's product.

I must have been going through these stereotypes of black kids and watermelons atthe moment my son asked me what I was doing. For, a few days later, he brought tomy attention two white kids on the cover of the Summer 1998 issue of Health Diary, aUnited Healthcare magazine. Each kid has a slice of watermelon in his hands and islaughing with satisfaction. The hat on the head of one of the kids, their bare feet, andtheir self-abandonment in the presence of watermelons, all stereotype the stereotypeof black people. By bringing the image to my attention, my son made that much of anassociation. But his act is also challenging me to stop being the custodian of thesestereotypes, to distance myself from them, and to begin to enjoy the humor in them.Only then will I, like him, become an individual and modern.

copyright 1998 Manthia Diawara

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