Question

The majority of the images of African Americans produced in the United States in the 19th century drew heavily on certain stereotypes. Describe these stereotypes, and then discuss how they were used to promote certain ideas about this group of people. Indicate also the realities of this group that the stereotypes failed to represent.

Answer 1

• Common stereotypes:-
• African Americans are largely the descendants of slaves—people who were brought from their African homelands by force to work in the New World. Their rights were severely limited, and they were long denied a rightful share in the economic, social, and political progress of the United States. Nevertheless, African Americans have made basic and lasting contributions to American history and culture.
• As African Americans moved to northern cities during the Great Migration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were kept out of many areas and squeezed into increasingly crowded, poorly maintained neighborhoods.
• In city after city in America, in the 1920s, white resentment of the growing black population boiled over into race riots in which white citizens and police attacked, beat, and killed black residents, damaged black businesses and burned black homes and institutions.
• African Americans were forced, as a defensive strategy, to leave the scattered mixed-race settlements that they lived in and retreat into large all-black neighborhoods that could provide some measure of protection from marauding whites and dangerous forces of law and order.
• In the 18th and 19th centuries, many prominent whites in Europe and the U.S. regarded black people as mentally inferior, physically and culturally unevolved, and apelike in appearance .
• Not only were blacks thought to have thicker skin and thicker skulls than whites, but partly as a consequence of these presumed anatomical differences, they were thought to be less sensitive to physical pain and less able to think abstractly (characteristics which, it was argued, naturally suited them to slavery).
• It appears that many early white Americans viewed blacks as unevolved,inferior beings; that is, as less than human, physically impervious to pain, and mentally unfit for abstract or creative thought.
• Compared with white women, black women were also thought to experience relativelyJittie pain in childbirth.
• Andrew Johnson likewise spoke of a "great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics", and Theodore Roosevelt stated categorically that, " As a race and in the mass [the Negroes] are altogether inferior to the whites.
• Early minstrel shows of the mid-19th century lampooned the supposed stupidity of black people.Even after slavery ended, the intellectual capacity of black people was still frequently questioned. Movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915) questioned whether or not black people were fit to run for governmental offices or vote.
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