Jupiter as “coon” — comic through misunderstanding of language, ill-educated
Also as “Tom” — old, obedient
Notice how these caricatures align with what an audience (e.g., white
19th century Americans) that doesn’t know the group being caricatured
(e.g., African Americans) implicitly believes about that group, and by
aligning with what “everybody knows” implicitly reinforces it.
Is entertainment (or anything else) still using caricatured stereotypes?
Lots of examples from contemporary television comedy, stand-up comedy, of
racial stereotypes used for humor
The story exploits a lot of modern caricatures of Africans, e.g.,
a brutal African warlord, superstitious African peasants, etc.
These are again caricatures that correspond to what many Americans “know”
about Africa from what we see in the news media, etc.
As with previous minstrel caricatures, they tend to reinforce the stereotypes we
already have
But what about the fact that the whole play is so obviously satire, doesn’t that
mitigate the effect of the caricatures?
Or maybe it simply reinforces beliefs that the warlords, peasants, etc. are there
to be satirized in the first place
Note that such racial caricatures needn’t be malicious, i.e., they aren’t
necessarily there because someone consciously decided to tell Americans that Africans are brutal,
superstitious, etc. They could be there for other reasons, and the reinforcement
of negative stereotypes just be “collateral damage” (which of
course doesn’t mean that it isn’t damaging)
Implicit association tests
People tend to have a lot of unrecognized implicit biases
Online do-it-yourself psychological tests to identify such biases you might have
Try some
if you want at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html
Not required for this course
Be prepared to feel pretty bad about yourself for a while afterward if you do decide
to try some