Herman Cain. The dandy and the legacy of Amos n’ Andy. The Hermanator experience. The old black minstrel show adjusted for free market ideology. Another figure in a long tradition of American snake oil salesmen rising from the depths of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. The almost inexhaustible supply that America keeps producing and Cain as this year’s model of the American reinvention of identity. Black face and white noise, or just plain barking up the wrong tree, we can look at Cain as an entertainment and cultural phenomena that makes no pretensions that he is nothing more than a sideshow, another commodity in the entertainment complex, another actor looking for a gig in the Society of the Spectacle. Even his alleged sex scandal is used to reinforce the steretype of the virile farm hand who went from free slave to sharecropper. Is he an Amos n’ Andy figure? Or an inverted variant of Bell Hook’s Outlaw Culture where the ganstra rapper and free market advocate republican arrive at the destination of reaffirming stereotypes of patriarchy and misogyny, serving white interests and permitting white Americans to use them in working out identity issues.
Amos ‘n’ Andy began on radio in the late 1920′s. However, the caricature has roots profoundly in American culture and is in full evidence today. As Constance Rourke wrote, the origins began with the early Yankee traders and this engendered a culture of figures with murky origins. Jean Genet would call these individuals boundary crossers who had the gumption to cross porous cultural borders and create an enduring figure of American identity that remains elusive and not obvious to define. A Don Draper is another example of he murky origins type, a phenomenon the De Toqueville also remarked on. Clearly, The unfavorble images in Amos ‘n’ Andy has historical precedents, and they continue to inform televised representations of black Americans long after the show was no longer available. its bit of a bifurcation principle, where the pap is spread for mass culture, while a longer tradition continues to exert its influence.
Cain also fits into the Baudelaire urban man model. In the last half of the nineteenth-century the bourgeoisie were increasingly dominant in France. Baudelaire’s position became increasingly defined by an anti-bourgeois stance and a view of a basically elitist, aristocratic ideal; anti-bourgeois tendencies were found in the figure of self-styled dandyism.Cain as Dandyism is not just about dressing well, it is about personal revolt and the elevation of beauty. Cain’s self-help spiritual hucksterism is essentially based counter to the utilitarian and money-grubbing outlook on life, a spiritual path where the manna comes to you: Baudelaire- “Etre un homme utile m’a toujours paru quelque chose de bien hideux”.
…The hysterical announcers. A nice chunk of the revenue came from those indefatigable national advertisers, the cigarette companies and the toothpaste companies. Cigarettes put the stain on, toothpaste takes it off, and the American economy marches inexorably on. ….That was the 1950′s. In August Cain put out a nonsensical ad: “there was a time in America when a man was a man, and a horse was a horse… unless he carried yellow flowers.” The cowboy knocks the ruffian out with a bunch of flowers containing a steel bar….
BAMBI HAGGINS: Particularly, in the late 40’s and the early 1950’s there is a very specific instruction on consumerism that takes place within narratives. That if we have these products then we can move into this different place on this socio-economic hierarchy. The Goldbergs is an excellent example of the ethnicom that starts out in urban America that moves to the suburbs. And in that movement you get a very specific idea of the things you need to have in order to gain access to the suburban American dream. Even in a show like Amos ‘n Andy, which is problematic for a lot of reasons, you have Sapphire wanting to buy a new dining room table because that table is going to afford her access to a higher social and intellectual strata. [TV show: Amos n’ Andy]: I was ashamed of that old set. Man: Yeah, anybody worthwhile don’t have
to come to dinner, they can afford to buy their own. Woman: I’m talking about intellectual people, authors, musicians, artists, scientists. Read More:http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/411/transcript_411.pdf
…On the Real Side by Mel Watkins raises issues critical to an understanding humor at the expense of blacks and “Black Humor.” “Blacks were funny for most white Americans only insofar as they engaged in quaint, foolish or childlike behavior, or stumbled over a language they were only half heartily taught to speak, and forbidden to read.” . This “naive humor” reinforces the power relationships between superior whites and inferior childlike blacks. Nathan Huggins’ Harlem Renaissance “points out that minstrel show stereotypes enabled white society …. to attribute to black people the characteristics that it feared the most in itself ….” Blacks represent laziness, greed, gluttony and licentiousness. The “… psychic reinforcement … enabled whites to accept the suppression of their natural selves” , and instead embraced thrift, sobriety, abstinence and restraint — behaviors necessary to the functioning of an industrial capitalist order. … “Amos ‘n’ Andy did for the values of the 1950s what the minstrel shows accomplished for previous generations.Everything considered precious but contested in white society — like the family or the work ethic — became violated in the world of the Kingfish .
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ADDENDUM:
This is a kind of false consciousness; an internalized oppression, a self-hating notion that agrees with the stereotypes. This is a tendency not unique to African Americans. Freud described the phenomenon in his discussions of Jewish humor. This strategy may appease whites, at the expense of further eroding estimates of black self-worth.
On the other hand, when such jokes are delivered by blacks for black audiences there is an undeniable sense of irony — intended to reveal the barbarity of a system premised on a system of inherent inferiority. Activist Julius Lester reversed the messages of Amos ‘n’ Andy. “Kingfish has a joie de vivre no white person could poison, and we knew that whites ridiculed us because they were incapable of such elan. I was proud to belong to the same race as Kingsish” . So how should we understand the humor in Amos ‘n’ Andy? Henry Louis Gates recounts that “One of my favorite pastimes is screening episodes of Amos ‘n’ Andy for black friends who think that the series was both socially offensive and politically detrimental.” … He assets that, “The performance of those great black actors … transformed racist stereotypes into authentic black humor.” The historian Thomas Cripps suggests that only the main characters are stereotyped by language and dress. He points to many examples of well-dressed, supporting actors speaking in Yankee accents. (In fact there were Black professionals including a doctor, a minister, a teacher, a detective, a real estate broker and a nurse.) Only a few of these professionals were darker skinned. My own reading is that this does little to mitigate the show’s concentration on and viewers repeated exposure to the negative impressions created by the lead characters. Read More:http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/question/oct05/…
…”In 1933, Sterling Brown, the great black poet and critic divided the full range of black character types in American literature into seven categories: the contended slave; the wretched freeman; the comic Negro; the brute Negro; the local color Negro, and the exotic primitive.”)
Kingfish Coons — a clown, murdering the English language, conniving to fleece a comrade out of money, bumblingly avoiding employment — The Kingfish — stupid and scheming, and Andy lazy and domineering. “Consistent with the values of the 1950s as mediated through popular culture, family responsibilities — or neglect of them — define Kingfish … his most serious flaws stem from his neglect of the proper role of husband and father” (Lipsitz 95-96). “As in so much of American comedy, marriage in Amos ‘n’ Andy gave us a snare and a straitjacket — a cruel prank played upon men who’d rather be fishing, swapping lies, wiping beery foam from their lips in a cool, dark bar. Instead they find that married life is one long chore; the honey-tempered angels they wooed in innocent youth have turned into witches, shrews. … When Andy announces his engagement to a 21-year-old beauty queen, the Kingfish slaps him on the shoulders and chortles, “Welcome to the land of the living dead” ( ibid. )
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“Cain’s comments about Stewart are a bit odd,” noted Boyce Watkins. “Given that Cain feels an inexplicable degree of comfort around men like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who have insulted people of color in ways were previously unimaginable in the new millennium [sic].” Beyond odd, the accusations, given the accepted deployment of racism, against Stewart meet the definition of Chutzpah.
While the criticisms in this case are disingenuous and evidence of double standards, Stewart’s vocal intimations in this bit are disconcerting. Given the history of racism in this country, it does play upon longstanding white racial frames of African Americans. When I initially watched this bit, it made me uncomfortable. Just as Stephen Colbert “impression” of a Chinese man (I know it is satire, but still) makes me uncomfortable even thought he is criticizing Rush Limbaugh for his own anti-Chinese prejudice, and Bill Maher calling Barack Obama a “’Black Ninja Gangster President’” elicits contempt from me, Stewart’s decision to mock Cain linguistically is troubling especially given its larger historic place. Likewise, his explanation to Wallace (“Why don’t you show — do you want to show me doing the voices for all the other people that we do? You want to see my New York voice? My Chinese guy voice?’) is equally unsatisfying because it doesn’t reveal a lot of self-reflection as to the larger history of race in this country. This instance got me thinking about a piece I wrote for Colorlines some years back about how white populism within progressive pundits/entertainers maintained a larger history of white anti-racist activists who have struggled to reflect on white privilege and how longstanding racial images/narratives impact white progressive as well. Read More:http://notsuris.wordpress.com/tag/herman-cain/