Wednesday, August 10, 2005

The Pickaninny Problem


By JOELLEN COLLINS
Express Staff Writer

If the title of this piece, "The Pickaninny Problem," offends you, then you are probably, like me, a person who tries to be politically correct in language usage. Language, of course, reflects the mores of its time. The epithet "Jap," prevalent in World War II America, is no longer considered even minimally acceptable. My beloved Aunt Linnea, about whom I have written before, was born in 1910. I would like to think she was free of offensive language or prejudice, somehow removed from her generation's racial terminology. However, even in the 1990s, she still used the word "colored" to refer to the nurses in her convalescent home. I also recall her pointing out black children to me when I was a child, saying, "Look. Isn't that pickaninny cute?"

What would Mark Twain do today with his portrayal of Jim in "Huckleberry Finn?" He accurately captured the existing dialect and terms of his time, but today that vocabulary is considered so offensive that some have suggested the book should be banned.

I cringed the other day when I was cleaning out my cupboard and found two objects. One was a book I am attempting to sell, along with many other children's books of the 20th century. It is a typical anthology of its time, an illustrated book intended to give children a wide range of early reading experiences to accompany their MacGuffy readers. About six pages into the book, there is a five-page spread with the "And then there were none" rhyme. Unfortunately, this one started with the following: "Ten Little Nigger Boys went out to dine" and continued the countdown to "One Little Nigger Boy." I can hardly bear to type the direct quotes and I truly don't think I have ever used that particular epithet, even as a child whose favorite book at one time was "Little Black Sambo."

While the subject of the poem is shocking, the illustrations are worse. Every single black child portrayed in the drawings looks like an actor in a blackface minstrel show: very dark-skinned, with huge white lips, kinky hair and an expression of Step and Fetchit stupidity. Why, someone might call them "pickaninnies!" Although from another era, these images haunt me and make me feel ashamed in some unaccountable way. I didn't draw these mockeries, but maybe the fact that I am white and have lived successfully in a society which accepted them is enough.

I traveled when I was only 19 to Ecuador on a summer work project composed of 24 students from all over the United States. One of them was Jim, a tall black student from Tuscaloosa, Ala. He and the rest of us worked side by side all summer, building playground equipment in nine Andean villages under the shadow of Mount Chimborazo. We lived simply, sharing the small bucket of water we were allotted each day. On the way home, we spent two days in Florida reviewing our accomplishments for our sponsors. I was aghast when Jim and I went out for a break and found separate drinking fountains, one marked "Colored," the other "Whites Only." I cringed then, too.

Laws and customs have changed since those dark ages, and I hope that the day will come when we truly don't acknowledge color any more than any other physical feature. So I was dumbstruck when, in my cleaning process, I also came upon a toothpaste box I brought home from Thailand some 13 years ago. Tawatchi, my next door neighbor there, was a dark-skinned Thai who was ashamed of his deeper flesh tones, yet he brushed his teeth every morning by the water jug outside his house with the toothpaste this box contained. It is called Darkie toothpaste and sports on its cover a grinning and grossly caricatured black man, a grown-up version of a "pickaninny!" I saved it because I was shocked then and, in a shabby instinct, must have wanted to show it to some of my fellow Americans to say, "See? We are not the only ones who wear blinders!"

I have some quarrels with overly fastidious efforts to be politically correct, like saying "humankind" instead of "mankind." There are also problems keeping up with currently appropriate group appellations. For example, I have just used the word "black" instead of "African-American," a term preferred by some. Ultimately, I just hope that deep inside I have corrected the built-in societal bias that instigated offensive labels and will never view anyone with a pickaninny perspective.




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