Stereotypes in Black Films

Donald Bogle’s article, “Black Beginnings: From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the Birth of a Nation,” traces the historical roles of black characters in film. Using specific cinematic examples, he concisely outlines the five major stereotypical characters that can be found in American film.

>>>ROLE: The Tom

ORIGIN: The Tom stems from a twelve-minute film adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It depicts the notion of a “socially acceptable Good Negro” (207).

CHARACTERISTICS: Usually victimized by enslavement, harassment, insults, or other abuse. Still grins and remains kind and generous. Is heralded by white audiences as valiant.

PROMINENT EXAMPLES: Uncle Daniel in Confederate Spy (1910), a former slave in For Massa’s Sake (1911)

NOTES: The Tom is the most prominent of black stereotypes in film. For more information, go here.

>>>ROLE: The Coon

ORIGIN: No specific one stated, but dating back to photographs taken in 1893.

CHARACTERISTICS: Lackadaisical, even clownish

ALSO KNOWN AS:  The “Pickaninny,” who is typically a child, and the “Uncle Remus,” who spins comic, harmless philosophy.

PROMINENT EXAMPLES: Rastus in an early 20^th century short film series, Buckwheat in the Our Gang series. For more information, go here.

>>>ROLE: The Tragic Mulatto

ORIGIN: The Debt (1912) presented the story of a white man and his illegitimate mulatto sister falling in love, their relation to one another unbeknownst.

CHARACTERISTICS: fair-skinned, sympathetic

PROMINENT EXAMPLES: 1913 included Humanity’s Cause and In Slavery Days.

NOTES: Due to the romantic and melodramatic potential of this character, it was (is?) a director’s favorite. For more information, go here.

>>>ROLE: The Mammy

ORIGIN: 1914’s Coon Town Suuffragettes

CHARACTERISTICS: female, overweight, “fiercely independent” (210).

ALSO KNOWN AS:  aunt jemima – who are less outspoken and more tom-like than a mammy

PROMINENT EXAMPLES: Mae West films of the 1930s, Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939) For more information, go here.

>>>ROLE: The Brutal Black Buck

ORIGIN: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

CHARACTERISTICS: carnal, lustful, violent

PROMINENT EXAMPLES: Broken Chains (1916), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) For more information, go here.

Along with the “mythic types: of characters, “specific black themes” grew during the early to early middle period of the 1900s as well – especially that of the Old South. “Guises” were used to add variety to and even muddy perceptions of the basic stereotypes (215). However, a mammy servant and a tom soldier are still, respectively, a mammy and a tom.

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation essentially glorified the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a protector of white citizens against out of control blacks – the aftereffects of slavery’s abolishment, according to the movie. Though the film became the subject of wide significant backlash by black and white, it remains one of the highest grossing films of all time. Griffith maintained until his death that he did not intend the film to be racist.

Final Thoughts
What is perhaps most disturbing in Bogle’s appraisal of these stereotypes and rends is how many of them have been hidden in characters or premises that are seemingly harmless, even admirable, on the surface. Many viewers probably interpreted George Jefferson simply as a successful businessman with a comedic flair, not a relative of the coon stereotype. The same can be said of dozens of other characters of modern and recent past television and film – characters presented to us as simply noble, amusing, unfortunate, cantankerous, or aggressive, but who are really one of the types depicted in Bogle’s thesis, and harmful to the perceptions of those who watch without knowledge the racism hidden in those one-dimensional characters.

Work Cited

Bogle, Donald. “Black Beginnings: From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the Birth of a Nation.” Get it Together: Readings About African American Life. Ed. Akua Duku Anokye & Jacqueline Brice-Finch. New York: Longman, 2003. 205-16.