Saturday, March 2, 2019

Blackface, Jocko, and Fantasia’s Centaurs




©2019 by John LaTorre

 In the early 1970s, I was working at a print shop in Baltimore, Maryland when an elderly gentleman came in asked us to print some copies of a children’s book he was publishing.  The book’s title was Jocko: A Legend of the American Revolution, and told a story that I had never heard before.

 Briefly, the story was about the origin of “Jocko,” the statue of a lawn jockey that was a common sight in the area in the last century. Rather than exemplifying a racist past, the book asserted, the statue memorialized a heroic volunteer who died during the Revolutionary War. He is said to have frozen to death while tending George Washington’s horses, and the good general decreed that a statue of the boy be erected at Mount Vernon, after which (as the story goes) it was copied by people who wanted to emulate our first President.

The man’s name, I learned, was Earl Kroger, Sr. I don’t know where he got the story and, apparently, neither did anybody else. He might have made it up of whole cloth, in an attempt to “repurpose” a racist image into one that African-American children could take pride in. While there have been efforts to trace the story’s origins, no evidence of its existence has surfaced from the records of Mount Vernon or in contemporary accounts. But that hasn’t stopped the story from spreading.

I was reminded of the book after the controversy erupted about a picture of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam taken during his college days. It showed two people, one in a hooded robe like the one used by the Ku Klux Klan and the other in a classic stereotyped blackface entertainer costume. The latter was presumed to be Northam, and there were calls for him to resign in the interests of cultural sensitivity.

It’s hard for people today to imagine just how prevalent these racist stereotypes were in that part of the country at that point in time, and how little attention they received. I’d lived in Maryland from 1952 to 1957, in Virginia from 1962 to 1964, and again in Maryland from 1966 to 1978, and I saw a lot of those lawn statues. In those days, “Negroes” were often depicted in drawings as black-skinned creatures with thick red lips, huge teeth, and googly eyes  -- not only in print, but in much of the animated art of the first half of the twentieth century. These cartoons were short subjects preceding the feature films of the day, and were later recycled as staples of the cartoons seen on Saturday morning television in the 1950s, when I first saw them. These caricatures even appeared in Walt Disney’s classic Fantasia, originally released in 1940. The sequence accompanying Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” portrayed black centaurs as nappy-haired “pickaninny” stereotypes shining the hooves of the white centaurs. (If you don’t remember this scene in the movie, you probably saw the reissued version of 1990, which panned away from the black male centaurs to the white female centaurs, or the 1969 version which deleted the scene altogether, causing a jarring gap in the musical score.)



This was the world that I grew up in, and that Governor Northam grew up in. We were so steeped in the culture of the vestiges of white supremacy that we seldom gave it much thought. There are no non-white faces in the picture above, of my second-grade class in Bethesda, Maryland. And the high school I went to in northern Virginia had less than a dozen non-white students out of maybe fifteen hundred students altogether, and none on the faculty itself. If I’d been asked to perform in blackface for a school skit, I might have done it, not because I wished to denigrate blacks but simply because I had been taught that this was OK in comedy, that it was expected, and that there would never be repercussions. And back then, it might have been true.

We’ve come a long way since then. Blackface is no longer considered cool, “Jocko” lawn statues are less common now, and those old cartoons are seldom seen anymore. Granted, we still have a long way to go. But by excoriating Governor Northam for what he did over thirty years ago, we are painting a false view of history, pretending that we were always as tolerant and open-minded as we are now. But history can’t be so easily edited. Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning role as “Mammy” will continue to be an integral part of Gone With the Wind, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s dance steps will hold up even when his caricatured costume doesn’t. If we edit out the stereotypes of the era, we also lose those remarkable performances. Nor will it do for us to re-write history, as Earl Kroger seems to have done, to make what was once disgraceful now seem heroic. That leads us down the road of dishonesty already marked by school textbooks that call slaves “indentured servants” and the Trail of Tears as a “voluntary migration” of Native Americans.

It would serve us better to admit that, yes, we were once blind to the issues of race and gender, and that we were doing the best we could with the culture we had ourselves inherited. Since then, we have learned what was hateful and insensitive, and taken steps to reduce the influence of those things and to no longer let them be a part of our culture. We also admit that sometimes we don’t do a very good job of it, and that there will be things in our past that we now look upon with repugnance … things that we wish undone. To be a product of our times is not something we look upon with pride, but neither should we be ashamed of it unless we continue to perpetuate the evils of those times. I would even submit that our repudiation of slavery and genocide and sex discrimination is a sign of hope, because it marks a profound shift in our culture. If there is opprobrium to be leveled at Governor Northam and his friend, it should not be at what they did back then, but at whether or not they regret it now.

I’ve written before about the need for a process of “reconciliation” for addressing the rising awareness of sexual intimidation and denigration. (The essay, if you’re interested, can be found at http://jayeltee.blogspot.com/2017/12/blessed-are-merciful.html ) South Africa used this approach to help repair the societal rifts caused by apartheid. The process of reconciliation acknowledged that there were whites who had committed crimes against native Africans, but provided a path to forgive their sins and allow to continue with their lives without further retribution. It was not a process of exoneration, but of acceptance; these things happened, and they shouldn’t have happened, but there is no way of undoing those things. Instead, we consign them to our past, and resolve that we can live together in a future society where these things won’t happen again. While the reconciliation process has hit a few bumps and hasn’t pleased everybody, most South Africans seem to think that it was worth doing.

I see no reason why we can’t extend the same forgiveness to Governor Northam and all the rest who have sinned against their humanity. If they have truly renounced the mind-set that prompted them to do these things, shouldn’t they be allowed to continue to do the good things they are doing now?

We have never expected our political leaders to be saints, but we can and should expect them to be imperfect humans who strive to reduce their imperfections and resolve to “sin no more” as Jesus is said to have commanded.  And let us also remember what Jesus said just before that: “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.” Not many of us would qualify for that prerogative, and that’s a good thing; people who have never sinned probably wouldn’t be much fun to be around. Give me imperfect people any day, as long as they hold perfection as a goal always to be aimed for, if not always to be met.

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