Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (52 page)

HIS SIX MONTHS
of cultural sightseeing, of learning about the political economies of Germany, Japan, China, and Russia, came to an end. In the second week of January 1937, W. E. B. Du Bois set his eyes on San Francisco Bay from the deck of the
Tatsuta Mara
. He once again entered the United States, where Franklin D. Roosevelt had forged a commanding coalition of liberals, labor, enfranchised northern Blacks, and southern segregationists to win the most lopsided presidential election in history. Fearful of alienating segregationists, Roosevelt did not use his power to ram the anti-lynching bill, which was still on life support, through Congress. “If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo resounded on January 21, 1938, in opposition, then “raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments . . . will be the blood of the raped” and the lynched. Bilbo proposed Black colonization abroad and praised the doctrines of Nazi Germany. But it was those very Nazi doctrines—and the mass murders of German Jews, which began in 1938—that were enraging White intellectuals and turning them off from Jim Crow. In December 1938, in a unanimous resolution, the American Anthropological Association denounced biological racism.
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In denouncing racism, scholars first had to define it. Beginning around 1940, Columbia anthropologist Ruth Benedict, a student of Franz Boas, dropped the term “racism” into the national vocabulary. “Racism is an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another,” she wrote in
Race: Science and Politics
(1940). She excused her class of assimilationists from her definition, though, all those women and men who assumed the cultural and temporary superiority of one human group over another. As assimilationists took the helm of racial thought, their racist ideas became God’s law, nature’s law, scientific law, just like segregationist ideas over the past century. Assimilationists degraded and dismissed the behaviors of African people and somehow projected the idea that they were not racist, since they did not root those behaviors in biology, did not deem them perpetual, spoke of historical and environmental causes, and argued that Blacks were capable of being civilized and developed.
¹⁶

Aside from Benedict’s
Race: Science and Politics
, the most influential assimilationist scientific text of the era came from E. Franklin Frazier, the former student of assimilationist Robert Park. In 1939, the Howard University sociologist published a definitive study entitled
The Negro Family in the United States
. In his introduction, Frazier expressed a debt to Du Bois’s Atlanta University Study on the Negro American Family thirty years prior, when Du Bois had concluded that “sexual immorality is probably the greatest single plague spot among Negro Americans.” Du Bois returned the compliment by praising Frazier’s brilliance as a Black sociologist, showing some of the holdover of his assimilationist ideas.
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Frazier painted broad strokes of the urban, non-elite Black family as an ugly, disordered, matriarchal albatross. He described absent fathers and unmarried working mothers leaving their children alone, sons growing into criminals, and daughters learning to imitate “the loose behavior of their mothers” and transmitting “moral degeneracy” from one generation to the next. In Frazier’s sexist view, male-headed, nuclear, two-parent families were ideal. In his racist view, Black families statistically fell short of White families in fashioning this ideal.
This “disorganized family life” in Black neighborhoods was caused by racial discrimination, poverty, cultural pathology, and the introduction of the matriarchal Black family during slavery. Completely “stripped of his cultural heritage,” the slave became a brute, Frazier argued. The slave’s emergence “as a human being was facilitated by his assimilation” of his master’s culture. And now, Black “assimilation of . . . the more formal aspects of white civilization” is ongoing in urban areas, Frazier concluded. “Intermarriage in the future will bring about a fundamental type of assimilation.”
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E. Franklin Frazier was hardly alone in his assimilationist preference for becoming White. Psychologists Mamie Clark and Kenneth Clark found that the majority of the 253 Black children in their study in 1940 and 1941 preferred the white doll over the dark doll. Some junior high school students associated light to medium skin tones with intelligence and refinement, and dark tones with meanness and physical strength. The lighter, the better, paralleled the assimilationist idea of the straighter, the better. Since the 1920s and the craze of the
conk
—short for the recipe called
congalene
—Black men had joined Black women in straightening their hair. One teenager, “Shorty,” gave his friend from Michigan his first conk in Boston in 1941 or 1942. “We both were grinning and sweating,” Malcolm Little remembered. He stood there, looking in the mirror, “lost in admiration of my hair now looking ‘white.’” Two decades later, Malcolm X reflected on his “first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.” Malcolm by then realized that he “had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’—and white people ‘superior’—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.”
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THE SUDDEN WILLINGNESS
to name and define racism did little to obliterate it, especially in popular culture. In 1939, MGM released
Gone with the Wind
, based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel.
Gone with the Wind
shared the story of the strong-willed daughter of a Georgia enslaver pursuing a married man. Scarlett O’Hara’s lack of morality aside, the White enslavers are portrayed as noble and thoughtful; the slaves as loyal but shiftless, and unprepared for freedom.

African American protesters failed to stop the movie’s success. It was almost universally praised by White film critics for its superb cast of actors and actresses, characters that seemed oh so real, bringing the old Georgia plantation to life before their eyes. The film smashed box-office records as hard as it smashed the truth of slavery, and it received ten Academy Awards. It supplanted
The Birth of a Nation
as a box-office leader, becoming the most successful film at the box office in Hollywood history. In the same way that
Tarzan
became the primary medium through which Americans learned about Africa,
Gone with the Wind
became the primary medium through which they learned about slavery. The only problem was that, in both cases, the depictions were woefully incorrect.
²⁰

The loyal, loving Mammy in
Gone with the Wind
, one of the most adored characters in Hollywood history, was played by the actress Hattie McDaniel. “By enjoying her servitude, [Mammy] acts as a healing salve for a nation ruptured by the sins of racism,” political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry explained in a 2011 analysis of the film. McDaniel received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, a first for a Black person. After Hattie McDaniel, Hollywood producers loved to wrap bandanas around dark and hefty mammies in a parade of films in the mid-twentieth century. The stereotype masculinized Black femininity while emphasizing the ultra-femininity of their White counterparts on the screen. Light-skinned Black women saw either exotic or tragic mulattoes on movie screens. These characters failed to be assimilated into White womanhood, and failed to seduce White men.
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In the face of these racist caricatures, W. E. B. Du Bois clung to the promise of a group of young Black writers he met in Chicago in 1940. “One feels a certain sense of relief and confidence in meeting such sturdy pillars of the day to come,” Du Bois glowed to
New York Amsterdam News
readers. It was his first time meeting the sturdiest pillar of all. Born and raised in Mississippi, the thirty-one-year-old pillar
had migrated to Memphis and then had gone on to Chicago, where he acquainted himself with the work and students of assimilationist Robert Park. Richard Wright, who mused on the “cultural barrenness of black life” in his autobiography,
Black Boy
(1945), proved to be the novelistic equivalent of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Both gave the United States powerful exhibits into American discrimination. Both benefited from the North’s intellectual march onto the assimilationist avenue during the Depression.
²²

Wright echoed Frazier’s racist historical account of enslaved Africans being stripped of their culture and their “gradual dehumanization to the level of random impulse and hunger and fear and sex,” as Wright said to a friend in 1945. Northwestern anthropologist Melville Herskovits disputed this theory in
The Myth of the Negro Past
in 1941, bringing on the critical wrath of E. Franklin Frazier. African culture was no less resilient than European culture, and the cultural exchange went two ways, Herskovits maintained. African Americans created a strong and complex culture of European “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,” he insightfully argued. Those who had consumed the myth of the Negro past were suffering from “race prejudice.”
²³

Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was one of the few Black intellectuals writing for popular audiences who was not suffering from this race prejudice, this cultural assimilationism sweeping the academy in the 1930s and 1940s. Since her youthful days in Harlem’s Niggerati, Hurston had struggled to make a living as a woman writer—and a Black woman writer at that. She had worked for a New Deal jobs program designed to put writers back to work, but had received less compensation than less qualified White writers. She had gone on to release
Mules and Men
(1935), the finest collection of Black folklore ever recorded.
Mules and Men
did not fit in the canon of media suasionist works that showed either harsh or stereotype-defying Black life, thus upsetting Howard University literary scholar Sterling Brown. Instead, Hurston’s collection revealed the unique, varied, and imperfect humanity of southern Black folk.
²⁴

Mules and Men
seemed almost like a nonfictional appetizer to the novel Hurston released in 1937. The new book carried the indelible
title
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. In it, Hurston guided readers into the depths of rural Black culture in Florida through a protagonist named Janie Mae Crawford. After escaping the domineering confines of two well-off but domineering men, Janie marries and finds love in the much younger and much humbler Tea Cake, and finally feels her “soul crawl out of its hiding place.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God
explores the precarious love life of a heterosexual Black woman at the intersection of sexism and racism. “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out,” Janie’s grandmother tells her. “So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”

Hurston chose neither to glorify nor denigrate southern Black culture, probably knowing that media suasionists and assimilationists would be upset with her choices. But Hurston hardly cared. Instead, she took a revealing shot at the lunacy of Black assimilationists through her construction of Mrs. Turner, a friend of Janie’s. “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria,” Hurston narrated. “Mrs. Turner, like all other believers had built an altar to the unattainable—Caucasian characteristics for all. Her god would smite her, would hurl her from pinnacles and lose her in deserts, but she would not forsake his altars.”
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Hurston did not sell many copies, despite the largely positive (and racist) reviews from White critics. The novel reflects “normal” southern Negro life “with its holdovers from slave times, its social difficulties, childish excitements, and endless exuberances,” according to one
New York Times
reviewer.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
is filled “with a limitless sense of humor, and a wild, strange sadness,” hailed the
New York Herald Tribune
’s reviewer. While racist Whites enjoyed Hurston’s depictions of every Negro “who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory,” to quote a reviewer from the
New York Herald Tribune
, Alain Locke, the godfather of media suasion, demanded that Hurston stop creating “these pseudo-primitives who the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy.” Richard Wright, drowning
in all of his cultural racism, unable and unwilling to see her missives of antiracist feminism, and unable to see the politics of her love story, said the novel “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” It only exploited the “quaint” aspects of Black life. It was like a minstrel show in a book, Wright maintained, satisfying the tastes of White readers.
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Hurston did not need to respond to these Black male critics. “I am not tragically colored,” she had already told the world. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” But the sobbing school was selling out books. By the end of the decade,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
was out of print, and Hurston had to find work as a maid.
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