What's cute about racist kitsch? / Are 'Mammy' and 'Uncle' replicas OK just because similar antique figurines have become popular?

This is an example of racist kitsch or souvenirs that are available today in novelty and gift shops. SHOWN: a small-object holder--possibly matches or toothpicks. Her name would be "Mammy." For Home and Garden story. Photo taken on 6/8/05, in SAN FRANCISCO, CA. By Katy Raddatz / The San Francisco Chronicle less This is an example of racist kitsch or souvenirs that are available today in novelty and gift shops. SHOWN: a small-object holder--possibly matches or toothpicks. Her name would be "Mammy." For Home and Garden ... more Photo: Katy Raddatz Photo: Katy Raddatz Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close What's cute about racist kitsch? / Are 'Mammy' and 'Uncle' replicas OK just because similar antique figurines have become popular? 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

From an ad found through eBay: "Take a look at this BRAND NEW Pappy Black Chef, 3-dimensional Table Set. Included in the set are Salt and Pepper shakers and a napkin holder. This beautiful table set matches one of our Pappy and Mammy design lines. The chef is so cute with smiles sampling their own recipe! The set is really beautiful with plenty of detail, vibrant colors and gorgeous design!"

When I flipped to the page in the catalog, I wasn't sure I was seeing right. It showed exclusive replicas of antique Mammy figures: cookie jars, salt and paper shakers, and tea towels decorated with pictures of pickanniny- like children eating watermelon. I read the copy, waited for my feelings to settle and looked again.

Perhaps I was taking this too personally; perhaps enough time has passed since the Urban League and the NAACP campaigns of the 1950s that made it politically incorrect to market these stereotypical images of the caretaking Mammy and the subservient butler.

No one had ever told me that these images were demeaning. In post-World War II urban areas, in the heyday of the Freedom Marches leading up to the black militant era, I never heard anyone talk about them. But I knew it when I saw it. Viewing the catalog, my stomach pitched and clutched while I tried to get a grip on my reason.

But no rationalization allowed me to deny what I saw and what went whirling through my head. I didn't think of Mammy in "Gone With the Wind," or Uncle Tom in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

I thought of Vyry in Margaret Walker's "Jubilee," the "Gone With the Wind" for black folks that I read in my 20s. Vyry was not thick and dark- skinned, but a mulatto with long hair and a trim figure. She took up with a free man (marriage was not permitted) who eventually wanted her to go away with him, and she was caught while trying to escape, brought back and whipped, leaving scars she bore the rest of her life. I look at the pictures of these Mammies and Uncles and I see pain, healed scars from lashes, scars from branding and the unseen scars of rape and loss.

A few months later, I was in a Bay Area flea market walking the aisles, scanning for brightly colored batik shawls, when my eyes snapped to antique figurines of Mammy and Uncle.

The booth was about memorabilia: old Coca Cola signs, chastity belts, old daggers and knives. All were placed helter-skelter, except the figurines, which were carefully arranged on a curio shelf. On the table in front were chains and locks and handcuffs, paraphernalia of slavery.

My eyes fell out.

If I had been able to accept the rationale I had heard in the months between what I saw in the catalog and what I saw on that table, it was unacceptable now.

The spokesman for the catalog said the replicas were made because collecting African Americana, one of the terms to describe the phenomena, had become very popular in recent years. I was never able to talk to the owner of the company despite numerous phone calls and messages, including a visit to the company store on the East Coast.

Oprah has a collection, and so do Whoopi Goldberg and Bill Cosby, the spokesman said.

Oh. Black people were collecting it, so it was OK now. Digging a little further, I learned that a lot of the collecting, especially among black people, was not because these images reminded them of what had been in their childhood homes. On the contrary, it was to preserve it as history that otherwise could be easily forgotten.

The chains and handcuffs as memorabilia are straightforward links to slavery. More insidious are the things that came afterward.

In the decades after slavery, black people were reviled in this country and yet, in a strange way, loved. The images -- beautiful and cruel, horrifying and patronizing -- reflected that.

Those images horrify me. There was Nigger Hair Tobacco, Darkie Toothpaste, Aunt Jemima (who looked nothing like the way she does now) and other ads that used Mammies, pickaninnies, Uncles.

Some got updates and name changes (Bigger Hair, Darlie Toothpaste) and are still sold today, according to longtime collector Janette Faulkner, who has exhibited memorabilia in a show and book called "Ethnic Notions."

But these replica cookie jars and postcards from blatantly racist ads are not updates. They are of their time and speak of the mind-set of that time. For white entertainers, it was minstrel shows, Al Jolson in blackface, Amos 'n' Andy on the radio. For us, it was the foul legacy of Jim Crow, redolent of colored and white drinking fountains, chain gangs, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan and the day-to-day small and large attacks on black people's dignity.

Both Faulkner and her antiquing sales partner, Renita Pines, have cultivated a certain emotional distance about the pieces.

Pines, an Oakland teacher, said that the owner of the catalog company, who refused to talk to me, had had Mammy and Uncle figures like those in her house when she was growing up. Rare now, Pines said, the owner had had them replicated to share them with the public. Pines herself bought some.

"I didn't have any in my collection," she said. And even these replicas will become old sometime, increasing their value.

I followed her reasoning: At some point even the replicas will fold themselves in with the history from which they had emerged.

But is it the history the manufacturers of replicas are focusing on? I don't think so. And however nostalgic it might be to some, sharing that nostalgia isn't free. It takes money. And the intent is to make money.

By comparison, would it be all right to profit from memorabilia of the Holocaust in Europe? Would you pay for the armbands or the yellow stars?

A client of Faulkner's, who has been trying to sell those items, has learned that the idea of selling Holocaust memorabilia is very unpopular. The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has a policy that encourages the donation of such items. On occasion, the press officer said, an item may be purchased because of its rarity or historical value.

Take it one step further. Would anyone replicate those armbands for sentimental reasons? And make a profit as well?

Faulkner tells me that stereotypical images of black people are not the only ones around: Other minorities, including Jews, are targeted. For new and old collectibles, there is a market for lazy Mexicans, their faces unseen under huge sombreros; grinning Chinese; and relics of World War II-era anti- Japanese propaganda.

An essay by Teresa Whitener in Faulkner's book makes it clear just what the psychological impact is.

"Not all of the objects depicting black people from this period were violent or ugly. ... For decades after Emancipation, these things enabled their white users to experience the psychological satisfaction of holding blacks in a kind of symbolic slavery. Indeed these gentler images may have been the most damaging of all, for their message was insidious -- couched in "harmless" humor that invariably reduced blacks to generalized stereotypes. The black images were intended to amuse, serve and entertain; they were never shown as intelligent, competent, autonomous humans, equal to whites and worthy of respect."

In Germany, Russia, China, places where the people making these things are unlikely to have any real acquaintance with the African American experience, Faulkner said, factories are turning out the products that are exported here.

On a trip to New Orleans in May, I was looking for items that conveyed more positive images because my aunt had once brought back a napkin holder that was a doll dressed in gingham. It spoke of another time, but its features were normal. But that was hardly what I found.

In shops that stocked manufactured busts of musicians from John Coltrane to Louis Armstrong, figures of African kings and queens, Masai warriors and knickknacks of boys fishing, or a woman reading a Bible, there were also cheap replicas of Mammies and Uncles for household use and decoration.

None of the white clerks would talk to me about them. Finally, a Cuban woman brought it up as I purchased a Mammy creamer. "Some people find this offensive," she ventured. How long had they been selling it, I asked. She consulted the shop manager in Spanish: at least since the manager had been there, since 1982.

Who buys it? I was finally able to ask. Older white tourists from the South, she answered. "People said they don't take them up North."

"Why are you buying it?" she asked me.

"I am going to break them," I said.

A few blocks away, a gallery specializing in African and African American prints and sculptures had postcards made from racist advertising posters on a rack between postcards of famous African Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X.

I could not understand how they could share the same viewing space.

"I sell it because black people, the people who come in here, ask me for it," said the proprietor, Khaliq Siddiqi, a Pakistani man who was aware of the historical contradiction. "Eighty percent want it. Twenty percent think it's offensive." His father had opened the store as an art gallery like many in the quarter, but began specializing in black works because of requests from black tourists. I appreciated his honesty, and I bought a poster from him that combined images of the Middle Passage and lynchings and Emmett Till's ruined body in his casket.

I went back to the Bay Area flea market the next week. The owners of the booth where I first encountered the slavery paraphernalia were immigrants. The Mammy figures carefully placed above the chains, locks and handcuffs were no accident. They knew enough of American history to know what those things represented. I told the man that I respected his feelings, and I would not try to dissuade him from his request that no pictures be taken. He would answer no questions about where any of the items had come from or how old they were. He was curt. You want it, you buy it, he said. He had two more hours to make money that day, he said.

This time, like the last time, black people came in and out of his booth, sometimes picking up items from between the handcuffs ($65) or right in front of the Mammies, apparently oblivious to what was wrenching my emotions. Maybe their complacency accounted for the merchant's ability to sell these things without flinching. Perhaps that was the case of the white clerks in New Orleans as well. But the defensiveness of the immigrant flea market seller and the avoidance of the New Orleans clerks is the attitude of people who are not proud of what they are doing. Perhaps they know that there's something a little bit wrong here, even if they can't name it.

"I am amazed at how many non-black people bring their children to the Mammy and Uncle displays (at antique shows) and say to them, 'Isn't this cute?' " Faulkner said. "That's why we still deal with oppression -- people teach it to their children." In those same shows, she says, there are samples of derogatory figures of Mexicans, Jews, and Asians that she's never witnessed anybody describing to children as "cute."

These figures are neither cute nor retro nor nostalgic. They are racist. It is time to see them and call them -- no matter which ethnic group they malign -- what they were and are: insulting images of hate.

There are places in Texas and Arkansas, Faulkner said, little truck stops along the highway, where you can find nasty images of Middle Eastern people. These have all cropped up since Sept. 11, 2001. They sell well, she said. I stare at her, my naivete showing all over my face.

A Yoruba proverb enters my mind: "Nobody will buy your head if you don't sell it." If it isn't there to sell, it won't be bought. But that choice is up to us. Hate and money, I think, fear and greed. They do sell well.