Perception

 

 

I used to live near Tampa Florida.

At one time, a group of people wanted to moor a replica the (in)famous slave ship, La Amistad, in Tampa's harbor.

The area black community would not allow this, so the ship was sailed north where is it moored at Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CT.

About the same time, someone offered a railroad box car once used to haul Jews to nazi prison and death camps to a Tampa bay area Jewish organization.

The Jews gladly accepted the box car and put it on display as a reminder to all – not just Jews – that history forgotten is bound to repeat.

Were Tampa's black wrong to reject the ship? Were the blacks of Mystic Bay wrong to accept the ship?

Were the Jews wrong to accept the box car?

The answer is, for the people involved, “No.”

Perspective.

When I was little, I learned about the Uncle Remus tales and saw Disney's Song of the South.

Little did I know that to some, Song of the South is racist. To me, as a small boy, Uncle Remus would have been great to have around, telling stories – fables just like the famous Greeks – using animal characters to make the point.

Dialect? We all have a dialect of some type.

It's a skillet to some, a frying (fryin') pan to others.

I used to first listen, and then watch Amos 'n' Andy. Maybe the radio show was racist, but only because white folk played the parts of the black characters.

I didn't see racism in the program. I watched it in Indianapolis where everything was integrated, but as a child I was more attuned to personalities and characters rather than the skin color of those personalities or characters.

This “rant” is prompted because I tripped over Nancy Green as I was looking for something else on the WWW.

Lots of people don't know who Nancy Green was, but they do know her alter ego, Aunt Jemima of pancake and now syrup fame. (The Aunt Jemima on today's label is not Ms. Green who looked like a woman who cared for you; today's Aunt Jemima is thinned down and “modern.”)

When I was a youngster, Aunt Jemima WAS pancakes.

Did I pay any attention to the fact that I was several shades lighter than the character on the box? Never occurred to me.

I never thought much about Uncle Ben, either.

Turns out, Uncle Ben actually honors slaves who taught white southerners how to grow rice.

Now I'm absolutely certain there are those “out there” who take umbrage over the use of Aunt Jemima (slimmed down and modernized not withstanding) and Uncle Ben, but neither of these characters were a Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (bit of trivia – he was born in Key West Florida) who played the degraded Stepin Fetchit in the movies or the sometimes resigned, sometimes with a smart reply Edmund Lincoln Anderson's Rochester . Nancy Green WAS Aunt Jemima, and by all accounts although born into slavery, she was no one's slave when she created the Aunt Jemima persona.

I don't like stereotypes of anyone, including husbands who of late always seem unable to get out of the rain without the wife calling to them. I didn't, and I don't, see either Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben as stereotypical.

That's my perception. But then I never was offended by Jewish comedians whose act used dialect and Yiddish, although I have neither the eastern European dialect nor Yiddish.

As someone wiser than me once opined, “it's all in the eyes of the beholder.”

I appreciated Aunt Jemima and Uncle Remus as a child and I regret that today's children in a “politically correct” home will miss out on Song of the South.

At least it was not scary like The Wizard of Oz (think about that) or some of the nursery rhymes (Rock-a-bye baby falling from a tree? Come on!)

Yohanon
Yohanon.Glenn at gmail dot com