#I'm trying to amplify Gates' work because he's just been so foundational to my study of African American literature

[gayiconwaluigi]

I wanted to put together some common race-centric “myths” that people bring up in conversation that you might want to dispel but don’t know how. I’ve learned all of this from Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr in his book Stony the Road; Gates writes some of the most accessible history books I’ve ever read.

The Lost Cause -- This is the myth that people use to back up their claim that the Confederate flag is about heritage and that the civil war was fought about states rights and big government. These myths were started immediately by white Southerners after the Civil War to defend their cause as honorable and to denigrate free black people. This was started by the book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War with the Confederates by Edward Pollard.

Media has no affect on reality. -- People claim that things in TV and movies do not affect reality--that blackface doesn’t affect anything or that stereotypical portrayals of people of color don’t contribute to racism. The 1915 film Birth of a Nation singlehandedly gave rebirth to the Klan in the US. 

The use of blackface from the end of the Civil War throughout Jim Crow on things like soap, pancakes, rice, Valentine’s Day cards, postcards with pictures of lynchings, children’s books, minstrel shows, etc inundated the cultural consciousness with the idea that black people were either dangerous or stupid. These representations normalized racism. The portrayal of black people like this was strategic in justifying Jim Crow laws.

The New Negro/Talented Tenth mentality -- These ideologies were pushed at the turn of the 19th century when a wave of helplessness washed over the country about how to live under Jim Crow oppression. Black intellectuals defined themselves as a “New Negro” separate from the “Old Negro” of slavery. The “New Negro” identity was educated, eloquent, clean, and put together. The “Old Negro” identity was dirty, lazy, slovenly, uneducated, and ignorant. The “New Negro” identity was used to distance one part of the black community from the other, bargaining with the white community that they deserved respect. 

This identity redefined itself pretty much every 10 years so that the “New Negro” of the past was now the “Old Negro.” This resulted in the creation of the Harlem Renaissance where black intellectuals were devoted to proving to the white elite that they were worthy of respect and prestige, trying to end oppression through art. But as Gates states in Stony the Road, oppression has never been ended solely through the use of art.

This “New Negro” mentality was connected to what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “Talented Tenth,” which stated that only 1/10th of black people were talented, and it was this section of the black race that needed to cultivate itself to prove to white people that black people were worthy of respect. You can see this viewpoint in movies like Django Unchained where the eponymous Django goes on a whole monologue about how many only 1 out of 1,000,000 black people are special, and he is that one in a million. 

This is getting a little lengthy, but the myth here is that black people need/have to change. As Gates puts it, there’s no amount of changing black people that will satisfy white people. It is the white population that needs to change. 

Stupid people shouldn’t vote/decide politics. -- Any time you call voting rights into concern, the argument is inherently racist. I know this view seems extreme, but I know people who think some people just shouldn’t vote. This viewpoint is positioned in the white supremacist, capitalist view that only well-educated white people should vote, and that we are spoiling and ruining democracy if we let the “uneducated black person” vote. This was especially the perspective of white people after the Civil War where black men were granted the right to vote and then proceeded to vote black men into government. 

This perspective was also shown in the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation that showed a group of black people in government doing nothing and passing a bill to let different races marry as an excuse to rape white women. This film was screened at the White House. 

Racism wasn’t/isn’t as bad in the North! -- I listened to a very good episode of the NPR podcast Throughline available on Spotify called American Police, which detailed the development of the police system in the South and the North [which, long story short, were both based in ethnic and racial profiling]. I’ve heard this myth my whole life, but something I learned from Gates was that many abolitionists were against slavery but were not for giving freed people any rights! They literally thought slavery was bad but also wanted all the freed black people put somewhere [like Africa] where they didn’t have to socialize with them. This viewpoint included black abolitionists whose families had been free for generations and didn’t want to be conflated with this new population of free black people.