Black brute
Encyclopedia
The black brute caricature is a stereotype
originating around the time of the Reconstruction Era of the United States, which depicts African American
men as inherently violent, savage, and immoral beings.
in 1863 , society in the America
began to fundamentally change in its structure, and debates about expanding suffrage once again came to the forefront. Radical Reconstruction began in 1867 with the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, granting citizenship and due process to African Americans and protecting their right to vote. Democrats
and white supremacists in the South, began a political response to Radical Reconstruction, claiming that freed slaves would steal jobs by migrating North, create an economic burden on whites, and threaten white society with their purported savagery and barbarism. While before the American Civil War
, black slaves had been depicted as childlike and inferior beings, happy in their captivity, white supremacists now insisted that freedom would drive blacks towards crimes of theft, murder, and the rape of white women. To support these claims, newspapers would publish articles bolstering the image of black brutality to frighten and reinforce racist assumptions in white Southerners.
In 1864, two white supremacists wrote a pamphlet called “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro,” hoping to frame the Republicans
as attempting to bring about the mixing of the two races. As a result of Emancipation and the Confederate defeat, black men, innately savage when not under the supervision of whites, would rape white women. These caricatures, among others, were used to perpetuate fear and outrage against radical Northerners, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen, but also to validate the justness of Southern racial society.
An even greater fear, however, was the fear of black brutality. Claims of an impending race war and unsubstantiated rumors of increasing black violence served to fuel the anger and unease in the South. Riots occurred, including the New Orleans Riot of 1866, where whites – claiming that the attack was justified – attacked, wounded, and killed hundreds of blacks and their white supporters. The sensationalized stereotypes of black masculinity, were continually used by white conservative journalists and politicians to display the failures of Reconstruction. In his article "Racist Reporting During Reconstruction" Cal Logue details how stereotypes of black politicians were used to delegitimize the constitutional conventions of 1867: "Reporters emphasized how blacks would "chuckle and grin," thereby exploiting the racist assumption of many whites that blacks were mere fun-loving, animal-like creatures who had to be protected from themselves. When R.H. Cain, black delegate from Charleston, spoke, writers told how his "violent and blatherskite appeal to the passions and prejudices of the ignorant raised a howl of delight within the menagerie which proved but too truly the revengeful and bloodthirsty instincts of some animals" (Mercury: Jan. 24, 1868). When white orators achieved such a rhetorical response, newsmen call it eloquence."
In the news and papers, blacks continued to be portrayed as animals and brutes, committing terrible crimes against white people. Beginning in 1967, white writers claimed that without slavery to control them, blacks were becoming merciless criminals. Substantiating the idea of black brutes was the idea of black men’s sexual powers. In the South, racist whites sanctified white women to the point that they were regarded as a cornerstone around which any racist act could be justified as long as it was protecting the innocence and purity of their women. They hated the idea of white women falling prey to a black man’s advances, and they even believed that white women would be unable to resist the sexual prowess of a black man. Although white men frequently raped or had sexual relations with black women, which in turn created mulatto children, this only served to emphasize the idea of white womanhood, which meant that since white women had to maintain the purity of the white race, they had to be protected at all costs against the black rapist brutes.
Lurid anti-black propaganda tales of blacks raping and murdering innocent white women spread like wildfire in the South, although few stories were actually substantiated. This, however, didn’t seem to matter to whites. Any black accused of rape was quickly lynched. Those tales, found everywhere from novels to scientific journals, created the impression that there was such a pandemic of black men raping white women that the lynching of blacks could only be justified.
From the time of Reconstruction up to World War II
, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched. These lynchings occurred usually in or around the Southern states of America. Many of these blacks received no fair trial and were also tortured before their deaths. These lynchings also created an even darker public image for blacks. Because these lynchings were so incredibly violent and vicious, this required that black people be seen as even more violent and vicious in order to justify such violence on the account of white people. That need for justification created an outpouring of literary and scientific writings depicting black men as sex-crazed and criminal.
wrote a book called The Negro: A Beast or in the Image of God, claiming that black people were not human, but rather animals. This was not the end of men using science to substantiate claims that black people were subhuman, bestial, and criminal. In 1854, George Fitzhugh
wrote that slavery had saved black men from their own brutal and degenerate nature. Using Charles Darwin’s theory of “natural selection
”, the so-called men of science of their time “proved” that black people were inferior to white people. The chief statistician in the U.S. Census Bureau claimed that blacks were more likely to commit crimes than whites, while in Germany, Dr. Frank Hoffman
claimed that immorality was part of the racial makeup of black people. High-ranking people and respected scientists in both the North and South continued to perpetuate a dark and disturbing image of black people, especially black men.
In 1898, two years before Charles Carroll’s book was published, Thomas Nelson Page
wrote the novel Red Rock
, which took place in the era of Reconstruction. This book introduced one of the first black brute caricatures in literature. The main antagonist was a black man who attempted to rape a white woman, and was later lynched for his crimes.
In 1905, however, Thomas Nelson Page was completely outdone by Thomas Dixon
, who wrote the novel The Clansman
. The novel depicted black men as evil, bestial brutes who were incapable of controlling their slightest impulses, and the only group of people capable of saving and protecting white America from these black brutes was the Ku Klux Klan
. He claimed the book was historically accurate, and when shown on Broadway, it became a huge hit for white audiences.
, the coon
, Mammy
, the tragic mulatto
, and lastly, the black brute. The black brute did not come into film until after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
by Thomas Dixon, Jr
. Directed by filmmaker D. W. Griffith
, Birth of a Nation demonstrated the bestial nature of the black man, whose violence is an outlet for his sexual frustration Birth of a Nation helped to set in stone these characteristics of black people in film, a characterization of black people that has continued to modern day times. Despite protests from the NAACP and black leaders nationwide, D. W. Griffith turned the movie into a national hit, a hit welcomed even at the White House. These black stereotypes appeared in other movies such as: Interrupted Crap Game, Prize Fight in Coon Town, and Chicken Thieves. In catalogs, these disturbing stereotypes were internalized as realistic depictions of African Americans.
Following the publication of The Clansman, over one black person was murdered or tortured every week in the United States that year. Almost a decade later, after the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915, that statistic remained the same.
Although many African Americans were lynched for specious causes rarely related to rape, and were extra-legally (illegally) lynched without criminal charges or due process, politicians, the press, and certain films perpetuated the imagery of the black rapist, and that lynching remained a just and justifiable means to protecting their women.
The black brute caricature gained prominence during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era
, and the Gilded Age
, or whenever African Americans were making strides for equality. It was used both to justify lynchings and as a scare tactic to scare away black people from breaking the status quo or from asking for racial equality in the States.
. Blaxploitation films first attempted to present the black experience for black film viewers through the eyes of black heroes. Despite the possibility of representing blacks in a more positive way, these films only furthered the black brute stereotype, possibly due to the use of stereotypes and the social atmosphere of the time.
Blaxploitation films such as Melvin Van Peeble’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song presented a black anti-white protagonist. The character of Sweet uses violence to assault white police officers and rape a woman. White audiences were frightened, but black audiences flocked to see it. In the time of the Nationalist movements, black people enjoyed seeing a black man rebel against the white system, and not only that, but also use violence against whites to win against them and get away with it.
Blaxploitation films portrayed black antiheroes that would be rejected in white society, either because they were pimps, drug dealers, etc. White directors used the unexpected success of Sweet Sweetback’s Badaaass Song to create their own movies. But their low-budget movies and formulaic plots only created stronger foundations for previous prejudices and stereotypes against black people.
In 1980, American Gigolo
was a film that had the character of a sadistic and violent black pimp who used violence against white people. In The Color Purple
, released in 1985, the husband is a savage wife abuser. [Pilgrim 2000.] In Superfly
, the main character was also a pimp, and in Shaft
, the main character was a highly over-sexed and unfaithful man. In all these blaxploitation films, black men were shown as hyper-sexual and aggressive beings with minimum character development. Similar to how black men in Birth of a Nation were portrayed, the black men in blaxploitation films were violent and sexually aggressive – in essence, they were black brutes. These violent characteristics became generalizations for the black men of the 1970s, and the black brute stereotype continued into modern-day times.
, NYPD Blue
, Deadline, as well as many others. They were used in movies such as 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? Black brutes in the 1980s and 1990s only served to solidify the notion in the public mind that black people, particularly black men, were by nature violent and brutish.
, newspapers mocked blacks as Sambos and brutes. They portrayed blacks as lazy and degenerates and were always quick to make jokes and cartoons about them. Whenever a crime was committed, if a black person was involved in any way, newspapers would always mention the connection, regardless of the involvement
After the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and 1960s, blacks were shown in the media being beaten and arrested by white police officers. This led whites to see black people more as victims than as brutes. Lynchings decreased, and were now held in private. Legal segregation was finally allowed. However, racism, prejudices, and stereotyping of black people were not over. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, while publicly supporting racial desegregation, were privately racist towards blacks and did not approve of desegregation in schools. Presidents Richard Nixon
and Ronald Reagan
used loaded words to speak about black people in public addresses. They denounced blacks, black criminals and ghettos to be immoral and dangerous.
Following this time, newspapers were quick to fill their pages with pictures of black criminals and tales of violent black brutes. A murder in Boston
sparked a public uprising and a search citywide for the so-called black perpetrator. The people of Boston easily believed the word of a white man that a black man would kill without mercy or remorse. In truth, however, the white man had been the one to pull the trigger and to frame an innocent black man. Newsweek
called it “the great hoax.”
In the past, the press has been quick to play the race card. They have fanned the fires of hatred and racism before, and have a tendency to focus on crimes committed by blacks. In addition, the media has paid special attention to ghetto crime, black gangs, drugs and drug dealers, perhaps in order to get the attention of the public. The media only needs to talk about the brutality of black people in ghettos, rather than trying to figure out the causes of such reported brutality.
In 1993, in one month, five of the biggest newspapers and media giants were reviewed for their daily coverage of black news. While there were over 20 articles on crime surveyed, five articles on welfare and poverty, and one article covering AIDS, there was not a single article on black achievement in any of these five American newspapers.
Even in modern times, the press and mass media have yet to disagree or discount the racial prejudices of the past, portraying black men as sexual and degenerate. Even today, black people are regarded as potentially dangerous, and the media of today tries to contain black people into categories in their existing value systems, by reviewing the racial past, or by normalizing black people only as spectacles or in the case of exceptional athletes
In fact, these brutish and violent portrayals of blacks are encouraged both by black entertainers who get money from their portrayals as well as the media. Young black men are buying into the idea that real blacks are thugs and gangsters, and studious blacks aren’t true African-Americans.
accused a black man of murdering his wife, the media ran dozens of scare stories and the police used brutality and scare tactics to interrogate black men before Charles Stuart picked Willie Bennett, an ex-convict who was the perfect scapegoat. A relative who knew that Charles Stuart was the real murderer began to confess, and Charles Stuart committed suicide. In Boston with its racial tensions, the use of the black brute caricature was another example of how racism still exists in America.
Additionally, in 1994, a South Carolinian woman named Susan Smith
claimed that a black man had carjacked her car with her two sons still inside. However, 9 days later, Susan Smith confessed that she herself had drowned her two sons. She was guilty but she understood that the black brute caricature and stereotype remained as a stubborn representation of black people in American minds, and a culpable scapegoat.
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
originating around the time of the Reconstruction Era of the United States, which depicts African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
men as inherently violent, savage, and immoral beings.
History
Following the declaration of the Emancipation ProclamationEmancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation is an executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War using his war powers. It proclaimed the freedom of 3.1 million of the nation's 4 million slaves, and immediately freed 50,000 of them, with nearly...
in 1863 , society in the America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
began to fundamentally change in its structure, and debates about expanding suffrage once again came to the forefront. Radical Reconstruction began in 1867 with the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, granting citizenship and due process to African Americans and protecting their right to vote. Democrats
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
and white supremacists in the South, began a political response to Radical Reconstruction, claiming that freed slaves would steal jobs by migrating North, create an economic burden on whites, and threaten white society with their purported savagery and barbarism. While before the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, black slaves had been depicted as childlike and inferior beings, happy in their captivity, white supremacists now insisted that freedom would drive blacks towards crimes of theft, murder, and the rape of white women. To support these claims, newspapers would publish articles bolstering the image of black brutality to frighten and reinforce racist assumptions in white Southerners.
In 1864, two white supremacists wrote a pamphlet called “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro,” hoping to frame the Republicans
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
as attempting to bring about the mixing of the two races. As a result of Emancipation and the Confederate defeat, black men, innately savage when not under the supervision of whites, would rape white women. These caricatures, among others, were used to perpetuate fear and outrage against radical Northerners, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen, but also to validate the justness of Southern racial society.
Reconstruction
Once the Civil War ended, and the North had won, Reconstruction began. The ideas of black suffrage and black equality were raised by freemen and Radical Republicans, as a means to completely restructure the social and political society of the South. In the South, whites claimed that the Reconstruction Acts would disenfranchise the white political elite, giving blacks and poor whites control of the state governments. Whites feared that blacks would control every aspect of Southern political and social culture and society.An even greater fear, however, was the fear of black brutality. Claims of an impending race war and unsubstantiated rumors of increasing black violence served to fuel the anger and unease in the South. Riots occurred, including the New Orleans Riot of 1866, where whites – claiming that the attack was justified – attacked, wounded, and killed hundreds of blacks and their white supporters. The sensationalized stereotypes of black masculinity, were continually used by white conservative journalists and politicians to display the failures of Reconstruction. In his article "Racist Reporting During Reconstruction" Cal Logue details how stereotypes of black politicians were used to delegitimize the constitutional conventions of 1867: "Reporters emphasized how blacks would "chuckle and grin," thereby exploiting the racist assumption of many whites that blacks were mere fun-loving, animal-like creatures who had to be protected from themselves. When R.H. Cain, black delegate from Charleston, spoke, writers told how his "violent and blatherskite appeal to the passions and prejudices of the ignorant raised a howl of delight within the menagerie which proved but too truly the revengeful and bloodthirsty instincts of some animals" (Mercury: Jan. 24, 1868). When white orators achieved such a rhetorical response, newsmen call it eloquence."
In the news and papers, blacks continued to be portrayed as animals and brutes, committing terrible crimes against white people. Beginning in 1967, white writers claimed that without slavery to control them, blacks were becoming merciless criminals. Substantiating the idea of black brutes was the idea of black men’s sexual powers. In the South, racist whites sanctified white women to the point that they were regarded as a cornerstone around which any racist act could be justified as long as it was protecting the innocence and purity of their women. They hated the idea of white women falling prey to a black man’s advances, and they even believed that white women would be unable to resist the sexual prowess of a black man. Although white men frequently raped or had sexual relations with black women, which in turn created mulatto children, this only served to emphasize the idea of white womanhood, which meant that since white women had to maintain the purity of the white race, they had to be protected at all costs against the black rapist brutes.
Lurid anti-black propaganda tales of blacks raping and murdering innocent white women spread like wildfire in the South, although few stories were actually substantiated. This, however, didn’t seem to matter to whites. Any black accused of rape was quickly lynched. Those tales, found everywhere from novels to scientific journals, created the impression that there was such a pandemic of black men raping white women that the lynching of blacks could only be justified.
From the time of Reconstruction up to World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched. These lynchings occurred usually in or around the Southern states of America. Many of these blacks received no fair trial and were also tortured before their deaths. These lynchings also created an even darker public image for blacks. Because these lynchings were so incredibly violent and vicious, this required that black people be seen as even more violent and vicious in order to justify such violence on the account of white people. That need for justification created an outpouring of literary and scientific writings depicting black men as sex-crazed and criminal.
Portrayal in science and literature
In 1900, a man named Charles CarrollCharles Carroll
Charles Carroll may refer to:*Charles Carroll , Continental Congressman from Maryland*Charles H. Carroll , U.S...
wrote a book called The Negro: A Beast or in the Image of God, claiming that black people were not human, but rather animals. This was not the end of men using science to substantiate claims that black people were subhuman, bestial, and criminal. In 1854, George Fitzhugh
George Fitzhugh
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that "the negro is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery...
wrote that slavery had saved black men from their own brutal and degenerate nature. Using Charles Darwin’s theory of “natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
”, the so-called men of science of their time “proved” that black people were inferior to white people. The chief statistician in the U.S. Census Bureau claimed that blacks were more likely to commit crimes than whites, while in Germany, Dr. Frank Hoffman
Frank Hoffman
For the Louisiana politician, see Frank Hoffmann.For the 19th-century baseball player, see Frank Hoffman .Frank Hoffman was an American football player. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1978....
claimed that immorality was part of the racial makeup of black people. High-ranking people and respected scientists in both the North and South continued to perpetuate a dark and disturbing image of black people, especially black men.
In 1898, two years before Charles Carroll’s book was published, Thomas Nelson Page
Thomas Nelson Page
Thomas Nelson Page was a lawyer and American writer. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, including the important period of World War I.-Biography:...
wrote the novel Red Rock
Red Rock
-Places:Australia*Red Rock Reserve, a maar crater complex near Colac in Victoria, Australia*Red Rock, New South Wales, a small town near Grafton, New South Wales, AustraliaCanada*Red Rock, Ontario, a township in Ontario, Canada...
, which took place in the era of Reconstruction. This book introduced one of the first black brute caricatures in literature. The main antagonist was a black man who attempted to rape a white woman, and was later lynched for his crimes.
In 1905, however, Thomas Nelson Page was completely outdone by Thomas Dixon
Thomas Dixon
Thomas Dixon may refer to:* Thomas Dixon , Baltimore architect*Thomas Dixon * Thomas Dixon, Jr. , American minister and author* Thomas Hill Dixon , superintendent of convicts in Western Australia...
, who wrote the novel The Clansman
The Clansman
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is the title of a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. that included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It was influential in providing the ideology that helped support the...
. The novel depicted black men as evil, bestial brutes who were incapable of controlling their slightest impulses, and the only group of people capable of saving and protecting white America from these black brutes was the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
. He claimed the book was historically accurate, and when shown on Broadway, it became a huge hit for white audiences.
Portrayal in film
Most early appearances of blacks in film were stereotypical of the old Southern caricatures. Blacks played basically five different types of characters in film: TomUncle Tom
Uncle Tom is a derogatory term for a person who perceives themselves to be of low status, and is excessively subservient to perceived authority figures; particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people....
, the coon
Coon
Coon may refer to:* Coon, a racial slur used in the United States to refer to black people* Coon, an abbreviation for fur from raccoons and racoon dogs* Coön , a Trojan warrior who fought in the Trojan War...
, Mammy
Mammy
"Mammy" is a variant of "mama" used in several English dialects, including Hiberno-English used in Ireland."Mammy" may refer to:* Mammy archetype, a stereotype of a black woman, depicted as rotund, homely, and matronly...
, the tragic mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...
, and lastly, the black brute. The black brute did not come into film until after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Birth of a Nation
The black brute first made his appearance in film in the film Birth of a Nation, a film based on the earlier novel The ClansmanThe Clansman
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is the title of a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. that included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It was influential in providing the ideology that helped support the...
by Thomas Dixon, Jr
Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. was an American Baptist minister, playwright, lecturer, North Carolina state legislator, lawyer, and author, perhaps best known for writing The Clansman — which was to become the inspiration for D. W...
. Directed by filmmaker D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
, Birth of a Nation demonstrated the bestial nature of the black man, whose violence is an outlet for his sexual frustration Birth of a Nation helped to set in stone these characteristics of black people in film, a characterization of black people that has continued to modern day times. Despite protests from the NAACP and black leaders nationwide, D. W. Griffith turned the movie into a national hit, a hit welcomed even at the White House. These black stereotypes appeared in other movies such as: Interrupted Crap Game, Prize Fight in Coon Town, and Chicken Thieves. In catalogs, these disturbing stereotypes were internalized as realistic depictions of African Americans.
Following the publication of The Clansman, over one black person was murdered or tortured every week in the United States that year. Almost a decade later, after the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915, that statistic remained the same.
Although many African Americans were lynched for specious causes rarely related to rape, and were extra-legally (illegally) lynched without criminal charges or due process, politicians, the press, and certain films perpetuated the imagery of the black rapist, and that lynching remained a just and justifiable means to protecting their women.
The black brute caricature gained prominence during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
, and the Gilded Age
Gilded Age
In United States history, the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post–Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded...
, or whenever African Americans were making strides for equality. It was used both to justify lynchings and as a scare tactic to scare away black people from breaking the status quo or from asking for racial equality in the States.
Blaxploitation
Starting around the 1960s to the 1970s, a new style of film arose, called BlaxploitationBlaxploitation
Blaxploitation or blacksploitation is a film genre which emerged in the United States circa 1970. It is considered an ethnic sub-genre of the general category of exploitation films. Blaxploitation films were originally made specifically for an urban black audience, although the genre's audience...
. Blaxploitation films first attempted to present the black experience for black film viewers through the eyes of black heroes. Despite the possibility of representing blacks in a more positive way, these films only furthered the black brute stereotype, possibly due to the use of stereotypes and the social atmosphere of the time.
Blaxploitation films such as Melvin Van Peeble’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song presented a black anti-white protagonist. The character of Sweet uses violence to assault white police officers and rape a woman. White audiences were frightened, but black audiences flocked to see it. In the time of the Nationalist movements, black people enjoyed seeing a black man rebel against the white system, and not only that, but also use violence against whites to win against them and get away with it.
Blaxploitation films portrayed black antiheroes that would be rejected in white society, either because they were pimps, drug dealers, etc. White directors used the unexpected success of Sweet Sweetback’s Badaaass Song to create their own movies. But their low-budget movies and formulaic plots only created stronger foundations for previous prejudices and stereotypes against black people.
In 1980, American Gigolo
American Gigolo
American Gigolo is a 1980 crime drama film, written and directed by Paul Schrader. It is informally considered the second installment in his "lonely man" trilogy, following the Martin Scorsese directed Taxi Driver and preceding Light Sleeper .-Plot:Julian Kaye is a male prostitute in Los Angeles...
was a film that had the character of a sadistic and violent black pimp who used violence against white people. In The Color Purple
The Color Purple
The Color Purple is an acclaimed 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction...
, released in 1985, the husband is a savage wife abuser. [Pilgrim 2000.] In Superfly
Superfly
The term Superfly or Super fly may refer to:*Super Fly , a landmark 1972 blaxploitation film**Super Fly , a Curtis Mayfield soundtrack to the film**"Superfly" , the album's title track...
, the main character was also a pimp, and in Shaft
Shaft (1971 film)
Shaft is a 1971 American blaxploitation film directed by Gordon Parks, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. An action film with elements of film noir, Shaft tells the story of a black private detective, John Shaft, who travels through Harlem and to the Italian mob neighborhoods in order to find the...
, the main character was a highly over-sexed and unfaithful man. In all these blaxploitation films, black men were shown as hyper-sexual and aggressive beings with minimum character development. Similar to how black men in Birth of a Nation were portrayed, the black men in blaxploitation films were violent and sexually aggressive – in essence, they were black brutes. These violent characteristics became generalizations for the black men of the 1970s, and the black brute stereotype continued into modern-day times.
Cinema in the 1980s – 1990s
In the 1980s and 1990s, most black brutes were portrayed as violent movie props. They did not get a lot of screen time; rather, they were used to further to plot or to assault innocents. Sometimes he was a robber, other times, he was a gangbanger. Used in television shows and modern films today, the modern-day cinematic black brute was always violent and always merciless. They were used in TV shows such as Law and OrderLaw & Order
Law & Order is an American police procedural and legal drama television series, created by Dick Wolf and part of the Law & Order franchise. It aired on NBC, and in syndication on various cable networks. Law & Order premiered on September 13, 1990, and completed its 20th and final season on May 24,...
, NYPD Blue
NYPD Blue
NYPD Blue is an American television police drama set in New York City, exploring the internal and external struggles of the fictional 15th precinct of Manhattan...
, Deadline, as well as many others. They were used in movies such as 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? Black brutes in the 1980s and 1990s only served to solidify the notion in the public mind that black people, particularly black men, were by nature violent and brutish.
Portrayal in the media
From Reconstruction to modern-day times, the media has always been ready to portray and sensationalize black brutes. In the early 1900s, before World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, newspapers mocked blacks as Sambos and brutes. They portrayed blacks as lazy and degenerates and were always quick to make jokes and cartoons about them. Whenever a crime was committed, if a black person was involved in any way, newspapers would always mention the connection, regardless of the involvement
After the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
of the 1950s and 1960s, blacks were shown in the media being beaten and arrested by white police officers. This led whites to see black people more as victims than as brutes. Lynchings decreased, and were now held in private. Legal segregation was finally allowed. However, racism, prejudices, and stereotyping of black people were not over. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, while publicly supporting racial desegregation, were privately racist towards blacks and did not approve of desegregation in schools. Presidents Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
and Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
used loaded words to speak about black people in public addresses. They denounced blacks, black criminals and ghettos to be immoral and dangerous.
Following this time, newspapers were quick to fill their pages with pictures of black criminals and tales of violent black brutes. A murder in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
sparked a public uprising and a search citywide for the so-called black perpetrator. The people of Boston easily believed the word of a white man that a black man would kill without mercy or remorse. In truth, however, the white man had been the one to pull the trigger and to frame an innocent black man. Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
called it “the great hoax.”
In the past, the press has been quick to play the race card. They have fanned the fires of hatred and racism before, and have a tendency to focus on crimes committed by blacks. In addition, the media has paid special attention to ghetto crime, black gangs, drugs and drug dealers, perhaps in order to get the attention of the public. The media only needs to talk about the brutality of black people in ghettos, rather than trying to figure out the causes of such reported brutality.
In 1993, in one month, five of the biggest newspapers and media giants were reviewed for their daily coverage of black news. While there were over 20 articles on crime surveyed, five articles on welfare and poverty, and one article covering AIDS, there was not a single article on black achievement in any of these five American newspapers.
Even in modern times, the press and mass media have yet to disagree or discount the racial prejudices of the past, portraying black men as sexual and degenerate. Even today, black people are regarded as potentially dangerous, and the media of today tries to contain black people into categories in their existing value systems, by reviewing the racial past, or by normalizing black people only as spectacles or in the case of exceptional athletes
In fact, these brutish and violent portrayals of blacks are encouraged both by black entertainers who get money from their portrayals as well as the media. Young black men are buying into the idea that real blacks are thugs and gangsters, and studious blacks aren’t true African-Americans.
Modern-day black brutes
In Boston, in 1989 when Charles StuartCharles Stuart
Charles Stuart may refer to:* Charles I of England , English King, executed* Charles II of England , his son, English King,* Charles Stuart , British general during the French Revolutionary Wars...
accused a black man of murdering his wife, the media ran dozens of scare stories and the police used brutality and scare tactics to interrogate black men before Charles Stuart picked Willie Bennett, an ex-convict who was the perfect scapegoat. A relative who knew that Charles Stuart was the real murderer began to confess, and Charles Stuart committed suicide. In Boston with its racial tensions, the use of the black brute caricature was another example of how racism still exists in America.
Additionally, in 1994, a South Carolinian woman named Susan Smith
Susan Smith
Susan Leigh Vaughan Smith is an American woman sentenced to life in prison for murdering her children. Born in Union, South Carolina, and a former student of the University of South Carolina Union, she was convicted on July 22, 1995 of murdering her two sons, 3-year-old Michael Daniel Smith, born...
claimed that a black man had carjacked her car with her two sons still inside. However, 9 days later, Susan Smith confessed that she herself had drowned her two sons. She was guilty but she understood that the black brute caricature and stereotype remained as a stubborn representation of black people in American minds, and a culpable scapegoat.