The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo

Author:Rebecca Wanzo [Wanzo, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040 Literary Criticism / American / African American, Social Science, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American, African American, art
ISBN: 9781479840083
Google: QAS5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2020-04-21T23:51:31.623748+00:00

4

“The Only Thing Unamerican about Me Is the Treatment I Get!”

Infantile Citizenship and the Situational Grotesque

Just as the African American hero has been antithetical to constructions of white, masculine citizen ideals, black children have been a binary other to romanticized depictions of white children. American visual culture history is filled with this binary, with perhaps Topsy and Eva from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin being the most explicit examples of a black “pickaninny” caricature functioning as opposite to a white angelic girl child. As we saw with the Yellow Kid comic strip, black children are often represented as outside of innocence and something other than children. But some African American cartoonists have turned this caricature of white innocence on its head, marking the universal, idealized childhood as suspect given the material realities facing many children.

Few cartoonists were better at making the white child caricature the Other than Brumsic Brandon Jr. His comic strip Luther (1969–1986) was one of the first nationally syndicated comic strips created by an African American featuring black characters outside of the black press, following Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals and Ted Shearer’s Quincy. Luther and his friends attended an inner-city school and dealt with poverty, hunger, unseen teacher Ms. Backlash, and a white classmate who stood in for blithe ignorance to black suffering and passive resistance to the black freedom struggle. The unfortunate timelessness of his comic strip is on full display in a 1970 four-panel strip (Figure 4.1) in which Luther and his friend Pee Wee discuss police shootings. Brandon’s strips frequently employ incongruity to produce the joke in the last frame. Here, Pee Wee asks Luther why “so many black people get hurt when . . . the police say they were shooting over their heads?” “Well,” Luther speculates, “a lot of policemen think all black people are BOYS.” In the last frame a close-up of Luther’s wide, innocent eyes, and round face in his hands delivers the punch line: “So I guess the cops don’t shoot HIGH enough!”

These black children embody a racial melancholia springing from lost objects they cannot quite place—a mourning and confusion at the violability of black bodies that speaks to the fact their personhood should be cherished and is not. And for readers, grotesquerie lies in the liminality of these cute children’s knowledge of monstrous facts. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse about the “child” has mandated that children be innocent but suggested that adults should work to maintain that innocence. But class and race always complicated who was allowed to be a “child” in national discourse. Regardless of how much we might want to complicate these constructions, we can still express dismay that young African American children know or must be taught that black boys and men are disproportionately shot by the police in the United States. These child characters are in between adult consciousness and childhood innocence, which is a characteristic of the precocious child in the comic strip. The seriousness of the issue puts a twist on the characteristic child persona in the funny pages.

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