You could find them here and there, in the frayed, yellow pages of old magazines or among the cluttered tables of dusty pawnshops or stalls of buzzing flea markets across the U.S. South: anti-black, vintage racist advertisements, the visual defense and celebration of white supremacy, born in slavery and rearticulated with the dawn of Jim Crow in the twentieth century. One such ad among innumerable ones from the late 1890s, in the heyday of lynching and massive disenfranchisement of the African-American community, came from the Chicago-based N.K. Fairbank Company which specialized in soap. In the ad, a clean, blond white girl with rose-colored cheeks and a clean, checkered dress holds a white block of Fairy Soap, leaning in to ask a question to another child quite different from her. Staring angrily, the other young girl was black, wearing a dirty, tattered dress and no shoes. Below, the ad bore the white child’s seemingly innocent question: “Why doesn’t your mama wash you with fairy soap?” It’s one of many ads equating blackness with dirtiness and inferiority, all of them marketed to quench nostalgia for slavery and humorously comfort white racists in the steadfast belief that the system of racial terror they built and inherited was still the rule despite slavery’s defeat. Today, these are the kinds of ads that make white liberals shake their heads in disapproval, in “shock” and “disgust” that these ‘kinds of things’ ever existed. And shake their heads they should.
Indeed, that head shaking was the exact kind of response elicited by the leaking of a horrendously racist video of tuxedoed, white male members of a fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SEA), at the University of Oklahoma who were joyously singing a racist song in honor of their frat. Clapping to the tune of the popular children’s song “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” two students lead a chant featuring the lyrics, “There will never be a n***** in SAE,” and “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me.” It’s almost impossible not to slip into an Octavia Butler time warp while watching the video—you can catch glimpses of their slaveholding ancestors in the wrinkles of their smiles, the rotten smell of a dead corpse hanging in the distance. The reaction was harsh and swift. University President David L. Boren issued a praiseworthy public statement calling the students “disgraceful,” “racist,” and “bigots,” all before announcing that the University would shut down the frat (and later, expel the perpetrators). It was undoubtedly a breath of fresh air, especially in the face of such profound apathy exhibited by so many universities and administrators across the country that have encountered racism on their campuses and workplaces.
Yet, while I also applauded the immediate action and resolve of the University, I was left with a strange feeling that I couldn’t quite shake off. What did it mean that the SAE scandal produced the same kind of response as that of the Fairy Soap ad, that is, “shock” and “disgust” that these ‘kinds of things’ “are still happening” (or happened, in the case of the soap ad)?
And that is where the late 1890s Fairy Soap ad and the SAE video meet—they are both articulations of a vintage racism**—an explicit, anti-black kind of racism grounded in a historical, melancholic longing for white supremacy rooted in slavery and Jim Crow, directly utilizing the language and symbols of those times. After the Civil Rights movement, the public acceptability of vintage racism shifted into the private spheres of buses like the ones boarded by the SAE frat members when they sang their now-famous anthem. Like all forms of racism, this special brand needs to be called out. Yet, vintage racism is especially dangerous because it obfuscates structural racism.
The SAE anthem is the ugly veneer of the kind of institutional racism that led to the fact that over the past two years, the black residents of Ferguson accounted for 85% of all traffic stops and 93% of all arrests, as revealed by the latest investigative report by the Justice Department. Or the fact that, as Michelle Alexander has famously stated, there are “more African American men in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.” Or the fact that, as recently revealed by a report in the journal “Social Forces,” black graduates of top schools like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia have exactly the same shot at getting call-backs from employers than white graduates from less prestigious state universities (the names of the applicants being the only difference, and researchers used statistically common names of children from each race in New York). It’s the ugly veneer of the kind of deep racism that led to the fact that a black man is shot and murdered by police every 28 hours in the United States, revealed by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, or to Michael Brown’s lifeless body lying cold on the street for four hours after his assassination. Or the fact that the city of Cleveland claimed that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was responsible for his own death. “Black boys are never children,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates.
But maybe it’s a little more complicated than that. Maybe vintage racism doesn’t just lie in the shadows of private buses rented out by the SAE gang. At least that is what is patently clear in the Department of Justice’s report, specifically the section on internal emails sent by current municipal and police employees through their business email accounts during work hours. Involving police and court supervisors and commanders, these officials passed along messages like one mocking African-Americans through a story on child support with lines like, “I be so glad that dis be my last child support payment! Month after month, year after year, all dose payments!” Or another one that portrayed President Obama as a chimpanzee, or a 2011 email with a photo of a bare-chested group of dancing women from Africa, with the caption “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.” And these were sent and circulated—with no indication that the memos were deemed inappropriate or that the sender was disciplined—by local state officials. Of course, for many, this is no shock. It appears that this vintage racism is not (nor ever was) a mere veneer.
However, the larger point remains: what do we make of the comparable head shaking elicited by the Fairy Soap ad and the SAE video? In a recent article, Mic writer Zak Cheney-Rice makes a critical observation differentiating condemnation of racists as opposed to racism: “Racists are loud and obvious,” he writes, “Racists can’t hide; they trip and reveal themselves…Racism is a different matter entirely. Racism doesn’t pop up in bold letters, or in outraged headlines on cable news.” He’s right, but I must add the caveat that the only exception of a racism that “pops up in bold letters” is precisely the vintage racism cheerfully exhibited by the tuxedoed brothers of SAE. In other words, from a radical or even progressive, anti-racist perspective, that’s easy to call out. But the invasive, structural racism that led Cleveland officials to argue that a black child playing in the park was responsible for his own death, that’s another story. And that disconnect precisely demonstrates the dangers of vintage racism.
Yesenia Barragan is a PhD Candidate in Latin American History at Columbia University, where she is writing a dissertation on freedom and the abolition of slavery in nineteenth-century Colombia.
**The author would like to thank Melissa Valle and her friend Derrick Philip, for the inspiration to use the term “vintage racism.”
1 Comment
The original article has a bad link – try http://www.businessinsider.com/20-ads-that-changed-how-we-think-about-race-in-america-2013-2?op=1