An Exhibit of Distortions - "Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind" exhibit at Berkeley Art Center

I've been to countless cultural exhibits during my life, but I'd never felt such a mix of anxiety, dread, and fascination as when I entered the Berkeley Art Center to see "Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind." This was not a display of "what's-it-supposed-to-mean?" abstract expressionist paintings. The meaning behind the images in this exhibit is all too clearly understood.

"Notions" is a collection of more than 200 items that, as the center notes, "depict the ways in which the black image has been distorted and black people misrepresented over the past 200 years, in order to reinforce existing power relationships."

"No people have felt the sting of the cartoon more than we," wrote John Henry Adams Jr., in a 1906 edition of the small Atlanta-based publication Voice of the Negro. "Almost in any direction can be seen great wide mouths, thick lips, flat noses, glaring white eyes, and to wind up the thing, there close behind the caricatured is the familiar chicken coop and out beyond that is the rind of the `dervastat'd watah million.'"

Jan Faulkner, whose extensive collection comprises the "Ethnic Notions" exhibit, has been fascinated by these images since she was an undergraduate at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. One day, Faulkner, a former psychiatric social worker turned collector, came across a postcard in an antique store. The image was of a black man with an exaggerated, gaping mouth, and the caption read: "Dares mo laak dis bak home."

"I'd never seen anything like that," Faulkner told me in a recent interview. "I was certainly aware of racism, but had never had an experience where I could touch it and hold it and look at it. It was more in surprise and awe and wonderment that I started looking for this type of thing."

Robbin Henderson, executive director of the Berkeley Art Center, was stunned when seeing Faulkner's collection for the first time. "I walked into her house and was totally shocked," she told me. "I had no idea such things existed. My first thought was, `My God. This stuff belongs in the Smithsonian.' This really needs to be seen."

The collection was first presented to the public at the Berkeley Art Center in 1982, and it was a revelation for visitors as well as those who worked at the center. "I was really struck by the amount of it, the variety and the breadth of the imagery from item to item," Henderson said. "The thing I found particularly striking was there were so many toys. This was imagery young people were exposed to."

Eighteen years later, the powerful effect of the collection was still very much in evidence. Occupying a single large gallery room at the center, the exhibit in its second installment was nevertheless overwhelming. Each item seemed to top the next: a box of Nigger Head golf tees (from the 1920s), a produce label from a crate of "Coon, Apricots" (1940s), an ashtray that depicts a black Mammy wailing in pain as her breast is caught in the gears of an old-style wringer washing machine (1953), a can of Nigger Hair smoking tobacco (1910), and a seemingly endless collection of spoons and other household items portraying impish black people--especially babies (known as pickaninnies and golliwogs)--being chased and eaten by alligators.

"Much of the subversive power of such objects comes from the fact that they are regarded as acceptable and their utilitarian function renders them unremarkable," writes Henderson in the exhibit catalog. "The attitudes and values they convey subtly invade our consciousness, and we reflect on their meaning as little as we would upon a kitchen appliance."

Aunt Jemima and the benevolent cook on the Cream of Wheat box were warm and familiar black faces in my family's house. (I remember preferring Aunt Jemima to Log Cabin syrup because the bottle was shaped in the image of a black women.) But as I saw those faces and product labels in the context of Faulkner's collection it became much easier to connect to the ways that the mammy and servant images had been used to narrowly define and limit the lives of black people. On the surface, Uncle Remus may have looked like a simple, old black man on the side of a syrup can, but what message did the added caption "Dis sho am good" send out to those who bought it?

"Contained in these cultural images is the history of our national conscience," said the late filmmaker Marlon Riggs in his brilliant 1986 documentary Ethnic Notions (which beat Spike Lee's Bamboozled to the punch by fourteen years). "A conscience striving to reconcile the paradox of racism in a nation founded on human equality, a conscience coping with this profound contradiction through caricature."

The exhibit also details the role that newspapers played in distributing and promoting these stereotypes. Publications like The New York Herald included free sheet-music supplements with their Sunday editions, and on one cover was "My Watermelon Boy," with its image of a barefoot, wide-mouthed, happy coon kickin' back on some hay bales and cradling a big slice of watermelon. Others, like the San Francisco Examiner comics page, told the story of "The Tragic Fate of Seven Little Niggers," who are mysteriously killed off one by one. Throughout are the familiar themes of watermelons, laziness, chicken coops, and straight razors.

Some African Americans question whether it might not be a better idea to bury these psychically and spiritually damaging images rather than put them on display.

After screening Marion Riggs's film Ethnic Notions, San Francisco Mayor (then state assemblyman) Willie Brown wrote a letter saying, "Upon seeing the film, I question whether it will hurt more than help. The academic analysis of the history of racial caricature provided in the film was for me an ineffective counterbalance to the power of such negative imagery."

Novelist Alice Walker sees things differently. "Inside each desperately grinning `Sambo' and each placid 300-pound `mammy,' there is imprisoned a real person," she wrote in an unpublished letter that appears in the catalog for the latest exhibition. "We can liberate them by understanding this. And free ourselves."

Faulkner, who has faced many questions and criticisms of her collection, says simply, "I don't allow people to make me defend this collection. I'm just the custodian."

Editor's Note: The exhibit is now over, but Faulkner and Henderson have just published a book entitled Ethnic Notions that covers some of this same ground. For more information, contact the Berkeley Art Center at 1275 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709, call (510) 644-6893, or visit its web site at www.berkeleyartcenter.org.

Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of the "Morning Show" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.

COPYRIGHT 2001 The Progressive, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group