Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Is Uncle Remus Racist?
Posted by: lain // Category: Good Questions, Historical Quagmires, Song of the South, This is awkward, Uncle Remus // 12:03 pm
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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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.