Is Uncle Remus Racist?
Written on January 15, 2008 at 12:03 pm, by Lain
I’d like to know what you think. Your gut reaction is important.
Feel free to leave a comment, and keep in mind, there’s no right or wrong answer here!
Just now I got off the phone with a girl scout leader not too far from here. Her girl scouts are a diverse group, racially speaking. She had wanted to bring the troop to the Wren’s Nest in the spring, but when she presented the idea to the parents of the girl scouts, she was met with dead silence.
“Uncle Remus has been banned in the United States because it is racist,” one woman said.
Incidentally, the white mothers were the ones who had a problem with the kind of exposure the Wren’s Nest would give their children.
Confusion of Joel Chandler Harris and Song of the South
New York Times: Rehabilitating Uncle Remus
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Amber Suitt
Program Director
Lain Shakespeare
Executive Director
15 Comments to Is Uncle Remus Racist?
My experience as a white male, age 45, both visiting the Wren’s Nest and reading a collection of tales by Joel Chandler Harris, has been positive and thought-provoking.
Seeing how Harris portrayed Uncle Remus as a thoughtful storyteller who also referred to himself as a “ni**er” made me wonder how Harris could have admired members of the elder African American community and also let such self-hating behavior go without remark. This is a question I felt inspired to explore because of the sense of curiosity that The Wren’s Nest and recent scholarship have created. Perhaps racism survives because its strength includes allowing that kind of contradiction that Harris accepted.
What you have in this cultural and literary resource is a great opportunity for exploring issues of race in the context of history, storytelling and publishing. The Wren’s Nest does not have to pursue that opportunity at all times to be successful. It is a serious challenge. Not all visitors will be up to it. Not everyone is ready to talk about race. That’s because racism is still a force in this country.
Bryan, Your thoughts are very insightful and very often true. However, it is not always possible to accurately view the racial mores of historical figures in our time frame. We can not walk in their shoes. Even when we look at race in the current context, we often get into a dilemma (ex. Clinton vs Obama on race and gender issues). One of the important missions of the Wren’s Nest is to preserve these wonderful tales that would have been lost if not for the editorship of Joel Chandler Harris. They have their roots in African and Aesop fables with unique adoptions of the enslaved Africans. These tales show the power of a politically powerless people. Remember that they were property and for political purposes counted as only three-fifths of a man (women did not count). Until the 1870 Census, they were not listed by their full names and considered living in a household unless, of course, they free men. Harris’ personal position on race was quite progressive for his period. Board Chairman Marshall B. Thomas
I have to admit that I long thought of the Brer Rabbit stories as racist. I thought that the Wren’s Nest, by extension, must be a place hopelessly trapped in the racist past of the South and couldn’t imagine that it would have anything at all to recommend it.
OK, so I was wrong across the board. I maybe didn’t realize how wrong I was until I came down to the Wren’s Nest Fest last year and picked to play the roll of the Tar Baby during story time.
I think that you guys are doing a great job of confronting the misperceptions (that I think are widely held) and doing your best to educate people. Keep it up. At the very least, you are creating good and productive conversations about race that we as Southerners tend to shy away from.
[...] Incidentally, the Wren’s Nest has the unique opportunity of being a site folks visit specifically for black history and a site that folks won’t visit because we’re racist toward blacks. [...]
An interesting parallel: I just read some info about Aphra Behn’s book called Oroonoko, about a white colonial woman narrating the story of a black slave in Surinam. Behn is considered the first female professional writer. An essay at http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/racism.htm states, “Particularly interesting in this respect is the relationship between the two members of disadvantaged groups: the hero of the story, the black male slave, and the white mistress who is his narrator. While this narrator is sympathetic to the plight of her hero, the novel cannot avoid participating in the discourse of racism. Oroonoko is an example of racism in the sense of intrinsic social inequality rather than an individual racist document; in fact, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Oroonoko was considered an anti-slavery novel. . . .”
Very cool, Bryan. I like this discussion.
That article does a great job of pointing out the dangers of labeling historical accounts as “racist!” or “not racist!” since it’s much more complicated than that.
It’s hard to place today’s standards of racism on yesterday’s culture. After all, for many northerners during the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves was just the first step. Sending them back to Africa was the second.
What is it that Mark Twain says about judging men by the standards of their own time? Whatever the exact quote, I think it applies very handily here, especially with texts like Oroonoko or Uncle Remus. Twain himself is no stranger to the “racist!” moniker, but to me that doesn’t diminish his literary value and historical importance one bit.
I read an intro written by the author & in it he expresses curiousity & even admiration for Uncle Remus, but at the same time there is a strong sense of degradation & exploitation. It reminds me of the Europeans raiding & exploiting the pyramids & the lands of Kemet. In any case, please be careful when you are trying to “preserve these wonderful tales” because as with the majority of American history it is just that HIS STORY.
I’m sure Uncle Remus would have his own version.
I wouldn’t say that it is racist, but it doesn’t promote equality either.
Here is an interesting thing to think about. How were white people ever okay with slavery? How did they sleep at night? They were, at first, taught that blacks were primitive and animal-like. Believing that your enslaving an animal allows your conscious to become easier to handle than knowing your enslaving a human.
That said, it became apparent that blacks were people too. They bleed, they hurt, they love, they hate, they live, and they die just like whites. So, what do slave traders do to combat the country’s conscious? Make them believe blacks are happy as slaves. Aunt Jemima was fat, black, big-lipped, and wore ‘Do rags. She also always smiled when she served the whites pancakes. Uncle Remus smiled and sang in a happy manor as well. Why feel bad for slaves that are happy to be slaves? That was the idea of it all. Of course, through time her lips shrank, her ‘Do rag disappeared, and she got skinnier and became the Aunt Jemima we know today.
After slavery, the media depicted blacks as savages once again. They were stereotyped to be ugly, mean, and vicious. They were thought to attack helpless people (mostly white women). This was to trick people to think that abolition of slavery was a bad idea.
It’s not about morals at all. It never was. It’s about money. We enslaved them for free labor and another product to market. Not because we actually believed they were evil. We didn’t even fight the civil war just to free them. The north had an industry boost. Tons of new farm equipment was mass produced, but no one would buy them. The north had little farms and mostly factories. The south had mostly farms, but why buy expensive equipment when a slave will do it for free? So we fought them to make them buy farming products. But what country would ally with the north when they’re just fighting for their own money? Not many. So we turned it into a moral issue to gain global support. We pretended to fight for equality of man and got what we wished for: a society run by companies and the artificially created necessity of currency.
Having listened to uncle Remus since my child hood. I do not so much see race as I see an old man imparting his wisdom to a younger generation in a way that they can understand and relate too. Uncle Remus is the kind of “Grandpa” that I hope to be to my Grandchildren.
Brer Rabbit is a part of American History,as well as American, African and European literature.
In some cultures, when a person is smiling, that is when they are most embarrassed, confused or angry and it is unseemly to do anything else but smile.
I see an old African American man, imparting his wisdom. The wisdom to survive as a slave, the wisdom to smile if you wish to stay alive, the wisdom to love the children of your transgressors.
As an African American woman, I love hearing the folk lore tales. In the stories, I feel the pain of slavery, the lash of the whip, but I also feel the courage to live in adversity with dignity…the only kind of dignity that was “socially acceptable”
If you can get your point across being the slave, and your message is told across the world, those are timeless words of Biblical proportions.
Read between the lines and remember The Undisputed Truth lyrics:
“Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes they don’t tell the truth, uh
Smiling faces, smiling faces tell lies and I got proof.
Beware, beware of the handshake that hides the snake
I’m telling you beware, beware of the pat on the back
It just might hold you back
Jealousy (jealousy), Misery (misery), Envy.”
There were smiles of pain, of being happy despite a life of drudgery, and in those smiles, and in those tales, you heard the reflections of man’s inhumanity to man….of slave owners inhumanity to slaves.
Hopefully in time you will hear “Shame on you”
Historically in time, those pearly words could have made abolitionists out of the children of plantation owners.
Just a thought.
signed
a free woman
I just finished watching the Japanese version of “Song of the South” since the NAACP banned it in the United States. I see nothing racist about the movie. It is a wonderful relationship between a young boy displaced without his father and Uncle Remus befriending him and teaching life’s lessons through Brer Rabbit tales.
Yes, it is set in the South and he is a slave. So many other movies have slaves, Gone With the Wind. It was not banned.
I understand it was a horrible time period for African Americans and should have never happened. Let’s be honest, slavery has happened and is still happening all over the world.
Why does a great story have to be hidden because of the time period it was set in.
I never comment on things like this, but I loved the movie, maybe some of our children would have been better off with Uncle Remus in their lives.
When I was a child I owned the record, “Song of the South.” I recently found and bought an old 1921 book, Uncle Remus.
For some reason this story gave me a positive view of elderly black men with beards. That seems strange, but to this day I love seeing black men with gray beards. I don’t ever remember feeling racist in my life, and so how can a book be called racist when it leaves a positive impression on the mind of a young person? Uncle Remus is certainly someone I would love to know.
Brer Rabbit stories racist? Come on!!
As a white Southerner, I get a real kick out of the old slave Uncle Remus telling the little white chilluns about how small, weak Brer Rabbit (representing the slaves) ALWAYS outwits the big, bad Brer Fox and Brer Bear (representing the white folk), the while children just ate it up, and presumably none of the white folks making the connection, and the slaves laughing behind their backs.
Survival technique in a hideous time which, thank God, is no more.
But then, since I’m a white male I’m by definition a racist (ha!), so who cares about my opinion?!
(I should have inserted this before my final paragraph:
Isn’t it high time we stopped this McCarthyite search for “racism” under every bed and tended to real problems? Like how the welfare system has replaced the 19th century planatation to keep too many black people down?
also, “while children” S/B “white children”)
Thanks for your thoughts, Calvin! You might be interested in this series of posts we made about perception versus text in Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit — http://bit.ly/aPrVfp