The Influence of Jim Crow

The rising volume of racist hate speech is so loud, the nation seems to be involuntary witnesses at a public seance. Die-hard lovers of a race-baiting America are desperately crying out for Jim Crow to return to mainstream American life.

It is sanity-defying that South Carolina GOP leader Rusty DePass thought it humorous to link First Lady Michelle Obama to an escaped gorilla. It is dehumanizing that an e-mail depicting President Barack Obama as a black background just with white eyeballs would stay in anyone's e-mail inbox. But Sherri Goforth, a legislative aide for Diane Black, a Tenneesee Republican state senator, told Nashville Is Talking: "I went on the wrong e-mail and I inadvertently hit the wrong button. I'm very sick about it, and it's one of those things I can't change or take back."

The same country that elected Obama in an historic election has also produced revolting speech and images that degrade African Americans and all human beings. Rabid speech has been uncorked from the fringes of civil dialogue and we are not outraged enough.

Thankfully, as Mary C. Curtis pointed out, both Democrats and Republicans demanded David Letterman apologize "for real" to the family of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about his ugly words regarding her daughter. Letterman did and Palin accepted.

But we also need a rigorous defense against the campaign to resurrect Jim Crow.

Jim Crow, which got its name from a song by a white minstrel entertainer, never was just about segregation laws. Jim Crow was a way of thinking, as Dr. Ronald L.F. Davis writes in "The History of Jim Crow," which was an accompanying website to PBS' awarding series, "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow."

Jim Crow spawned stereotypes and images that took root in politics, the arts, and social and economic life. Jim Crow also birthed violence. Our culture is not fully removed from those stereotypes and images if we still think black face and associating African Americans with watermelon and a song is still funny. Think about it: With full support of this loud, emerging fringe, could we see a new minstrel show on Broadway? The cast could be in full black face, and from sea to shining sea, Jim-Crow supporters probably would call the performance a tour de force.

Perhaps someone will successfully clone D.W. Griffith and give him $100 million to write, direct and produce The Birth of a Nation, the Sequel. Those who laud Griffith's work will praise this film as a sleeper hit because it depicts righteously enraged white people and scary black people who are itching to be lynched.

Davis writes of Griffith's silent film, The Birth of A Nation:

D.W. Griffith's classic silent film "The Birth of a Nation," released in 1915, depicts elected black congressmen during Reconstruction as ape-like characters, eating bananas on the floor of Congress. This image was further repeated in white-produced movies with black film actors often cast as a lazy, submissive, and innately docile characters who spoke in the same manner as did black slaves when in the presence of their masters or in the company of whites. That is, taking a posture of docility, holding their head down, and smiling all the time with their hat in their hands when talking to whites. In short, African Americans were forced to assume a multitude of personalities in order to cope with Jim Crow.

Thanks to DePasse and Goforth, we are reminded yet again that we do not yet live in a post-racial America. Despite the advent of the Obama Era, this administration has become a lightning rod for some to reintroduce racially based rhetoric and thought glossed over with politics.

Jim Crow would be proud.