Saturday, December 17, 2016
Racist iconography
I thought this article was interesting for showing the modern day collectors of these racist figurines/toys, that these people have, really, a variety of backgrounds. The article title is "Confronting Racist Objects."
Like we talked about extensively in class, making racism so obvious you can't look away pretty controversial. But the issue with toys is that kids see them as harmless, so putting a racist toy on display to acknowledge as distinctly wrong is how some of these collectors use them.
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This is a really interesting example of something like cultural reappropriation, and as with anything cultural, context is important. There seems to be a world of difference between the role of such objects in the household depicted here--where their meaning is rewritten in terms of the family's history and culture, and viewed within an explicitly historical context--and their presence as a part of everyday life in a middle-class white American household during the Jim Crow era. This family seems to treat them more in the way that the Museum of Racist Memorabilia approaches such artifacts.
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