Black audiences divided over racial caricatures based on political stance toward whites.

Evidence

Black critics struggled to condemn King Kong, but they had no trouble launching an attack on NBC’s radio comedy program Amos ‘n’ Andy. More than 40 million White and Black listeners tuned in nightly in the 1930s to hear “The Perfect Song” from the score of The Birth of a Nation, and then Amos and Andy came on. The stereotypical characters included Coons, Toms, Mammies, and even a nagging, assertive, emasculating Sapphire—the first major media representation of an angry Black woman. While racist listeners laughed at the characters, antiracist listeners laughed with them, especially the profoundly likeable and imperfectly human main characters played by two White minstrel-show veterans, who shared the relatable troubles, fears, frustrations, and restrictions of urban Black life in the Great Depression. Those African Americans who turned up their noses at Amos ‘n’ Andy usually also despised Hollywood’s first Black celebrity: Stepin Fetchit, who played a series of roles depicting the “laziest man in the world.” Stepin Fetchit starred in Hearts in Dixie (1929), the first studio production to boast a majority Black cast. He was clever, for in all of his laziness, Fetchit’s characters hardly ever did any work, and the exasperated White characters were compelled to do the work themselves. Antiracist Blacks loved Fetchit’s character. He was a trickster of racists, harkening back to slavery’s tricksters. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 863

Categorization

• XREF: The reader’s goal of placing arguments into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist scheme maps directly onto how the book is already sorting Black media audiences; the trickster reading of Fetchit parallels how the reader thinks about the antiracist position.
• QUESTION: Kendi’s reading of Fetchit as a subversive trickster reverses the conventional understanding; worth testing whether the ‘antiracist Black viewers read him as resistance’ claim is historical documentation or sympathetic retrofitting.