The Jim Crow-like Minstrel Doll Named Golliwog

Golliwogs & Racism

For the past four decades Europeans have debated whether the Golliwog is a lovable icon or a racist symbol. In the 1960s relations between Blacks and Whites in England were often characterised by conflict.

This racial antagonism resulted from many factors, including: the arrival of increasing numbers of coloured immigrants; minorities' unwillingness to accommodate themselves to old patterns of racial and ethnic subordination; and, the fear among many Whites that England was losing its national character. British culture was also influenced by images - often brutal - of racial conflict occurring in the United States.

In this climate the Golliwog doll and other Golliwog emblems were seen as symbols of racial insensitivity. Many books containing Golliwogs were withdrawn from public libraries, and the manufacturing of Golliwog dolls dwindled as the demand for Golliwogs decreased. Many items with Golliwog images were destroyed.

Despite much criticism, James Robertson & Sons did not discontinue its use of the Golliwog as a mascot. The Camden Committee for Community Relations led a petition drive for signatures to send to the Robertson Company. The National Committee on Racism in Children's Books also publicly criticised Robertson's use of the Golly in its advertising. Other organisations called for a boycott of Robertson's products; nevertheless, the company has continued to use the Golliwog as its trademark in many countries, including the United Kingdom, although it was removed from Robertson's packaging in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong.

In many ways the campaign to ban Golliwogs was similar to the American campaign against Little Black Sambo. In both cases racial minorities and sympathetic Whites argued that these images demeaned Blacks and hurt the psyches of minority children. Civil rights organisations led both campaigns, and White civic and political leaders eventually joined the effort to ban the offensive caricatures. In the anti-Golliwog campaign, numerous British parliamentarians publicly lambasted the Golliwog image as racist, including, Tony Benn, Shirley Williams, and David Owen.

The claim that Golliwogs are racist is supported by literary depictions by writers such as Enid Blyton. Unlike Florence Upton's, Blyton's Golliwogs were often rude, mischievous, elfin villains. In Blyton's book, "Here Comes Noddy Again", a Golliwog asks the hero for help, then steals his car. Blyton, one of the most prolific European writers, included the Golliwogs in many stories, but she only wrote three books primarily about Golliwogs: The Three Golliwogs (1944), The Proud Golliwog (1951), and The Golliwog Grumbled (1953). Her depictions of Golliwogs are, by contemporary standards, racially insensitive. An excerpt from The Three Golliwogs is illustrative:

Once the three bold Golliwogs, Golly, Woggie, and Nigger, decided to go for a walk to Bumble-Bee Common. Golly wasn't quite ready so Woggie and Nigger said they would start off without him, and Golly would catch them up as soon as he could. So off went Woggie and Nigger, arm-in-arm, singing merrily their favourite song - which, as you may guess, was Ten Little Nigger Boys.

Ten Little Niggers is the name of a children's poem, sometimes set to music, which celebrates the deaths of ten Black children, one-by-one. The Three Golliwogs was reprinted as recently as 1968, and it still contained the above passage. Ten Little Niggers was also the name of a 1939 Agatha Christie novel, whose cover showed a Golliwog lynched, hanging from a noose.

The Golliwog's reputation and popularity were also hurt by the association with the word wog. Apparently derived from the word Golliwog, wog is an English slur against dark-skinned people, especially Middle or Far East foreigners. During World War II the word wog was used by the British Army in North Africa, mainly as a slur against dark-skinned Arabs. In the 1960s the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one of the most noted regiments in the British Army, wore a Robertson's golly brooch for each Arab they had killed. After the war, wog became a more general slur against brown-skinned people. As a racial epithet, it is comparable to nigger or spic, though its usage extends beyond any single ethnic group.

Dark-skinned people in England, Germany, and Australia are derisively called wogs. In the year 2000, a British police officer was fired for referring to an Asian colleague as a wog. The association of wog with racial minorities is also seen with the word wog-box, which is slang for a large portable music box, the European counterpart of the ghetto blaster. The wog-box is also called a "Third World briefcase."

Some Golliwog supporters tried to distance themselves from the wog slur by dropping it from the word Golliwog. James Robertson & Sons, for example, has always referred to its Golliwog as "Golly." In the late 1980s, when the anti-Golliwog campaign reached its height, many small manufacturers of the Golliwogs began using the names Golly or Golli, instead of Golliwog. Not surprisingly, the words Golliwog, Golly, and Golli are now all used as racially descriptive terms, although they are not as demeaning as wog.

In the early 1980s, revised editions of Enid Blyton's Noddy books replaced Mr. Golly, the gollywog proprietor of the Toytown garage, with Mr. Sparks, to the outrage of many parents of a generation who thought that was a retrograde iconoclasm biased against both gollies and black garage-owners.

The Golliwogg was based on a Black minstrel doll that Upton had played with as a small child in New York. Her first book was published in 1895. In 1896 the USA legalized Apartheid laws were named "Jim Crow" after a minstrel character, too. The Golliwog symbolizes Apartheid and racial discrimination worldwide.

Golliwog is a racial slur in Germany, England, Ireland, Greece, and Australia. Interestingly, it is sometimes applied to dark-skinned Whites, as well as brown-skinned persons. Golliwog is also a common name for black pets, especially dogs, in European countries - much as nigger was once popular as a pet name. Golliwog was also the original name of the rock band Credence Clearwater Revival. They sometimes performed the song "Brown-Eyed Girl" (not the Van Morrison tune), dressed in white afros. This is not to suggest that they were racists, only to show that Golliwogs were a part - albeit, a small one - in American culture.

The Golliwog celebrated its 100 year anniversary in 1995. Golliwog collectibles, which always had a loyal following, again boomed on the secondary market. This popularity continues today and is evidenced by numerous eBay and Yahoo internet auctions and the presence of several international Golliwog organisations. A pro-Golliwog viewpoint can be found at the International Golliwog Collectors Club's website: www.teddybears.com/golliwog/direct.html. Many collectors, primarily though not exclusively Whites, contend that the anti-Golliwog movement represents political correctness at its worst. They argue that the Golliwog is just a doll, and that the original Florence Upton creation was not racist, intentionally or unintentionally - this is reminiscent of the claims about Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo.

Critics of the Golliwog have launched a new attack. They are trying to get the image removed from all newly published children's books, and they are trying to force businesses to not use the Golliwog as a trademark. The Black Trinidadian writer, Darcus Howe, said, "English [White] people never give up. Golliwogs have gone and should stay gone. They appeal to White English sentiment and will do so until the end of time." Gerry German, of the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, was quoted in The Voice, a Black newspaper, as saying: "I find it appalling that any organisation in this day and age can produce anything which would commemorate the Golliwog. It is an offensive caricature of Black people."

(source: Golliwogg UK)

Tintin: Sinister Racist Propaganda

Time Magazine reports, "Tintin: Heroic Boy Reporter or Sinister Racist?" by Leo Cendrowicz / Brussels:

As an explorer, crime fighter and all-around hero, comic-strip icon Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its racist portrayal of Africans.

The trial, which will begin on Wednesday in Brussels, the city where Tintin's creator, Hergé, lived, is reviving memories of an era that Belgium would rather forget: its brutal colonial empire in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case was lodged by a Brussels-based Congolese former accountant, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, 42, who says the book — first published in 1930 — is racist, colonial propaganda. "It shows the Africans as childish imbeciles," he tells TIME. "It suggests blacks have not evolved." Indeed, to today's reader, many of the scenes range from politically incorrect to hideously offensive, including one in which a black woman bows before Tintin exclaiming, "White man very great. White mister is big juju man!"

A white man's fantasy of Congo women worshiping at their white feet.

Congolese women reality: Shackled together, enslaved in their own homeland, held as hostages until their men returned with enough rubber to make King Leopold and the Belgium people rich beyond their wildest dreams. While impoverishing and enslaving the native people.

Hergé, who had never visited Congo, was just 23 when he wrote the book, which he was persuaded to do as part of a government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo. But Mbutu Mondondo says it served — and still serves — to prop up a sanitized account of Belgium's colonialism. "It twists history to suggest that everything was happy and fun," he says. "In reality, it was a tragic, hurtful time."

Belgian Congo was one of the most bloody and cruel colonial regimes in Africa. The original inspiration for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it was claimed for King Leopold II in 1885 by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

For 23 years, the area — the size of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden combined — was the King's personal possession. Leopold's agents pioneered a ruthless forced-labor system for gathering wild rubber: villages that failed to meet the rubber-collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in amputated hands. Some estimates say Congo's population fell by 10 million during that time.

The colony was handed over to the Belgian state in 1908, but there was no thought of granting Congo independence until the late 1950s, and then it happened very suddenly in 1960.

"All countries prefer to see any conquests they took part in as something noble, whether [it be] manifest destiny, bringing civilization and Christianity to the savages or whatever," says Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, the 1998 best seller that explores Belgium's savage colonial history in Congo.

"For decades, the Belgians who lived in Congo have been a powerful lobby for maintaining a very rosy view of the colonial era — in the Africa Museum outside Brussels, in school textbooks and elsewhere — and for shunning scholars, many of them Belgians, who portray something darker."In some ways, Tintin in the Congo was mild for its time. Hergé's ideas about the colony were entirely in tune with the age, when Africans were considered to be primitives

. Until 1960, Belgian schoolbooks would contain phrases like "The intellectual development of the black child stops very early" and "Negroes are indolent, lazy by nature, lacking in foresight." As odious as it sounds today, Africans were considered eternal children who needed to be groomed for adulthood.

In June, the former colony celebrates 50 years of independence, and Belgium's King Albert II will attend the festivities in Kinshasa. But feelings between the two countries are still raw, with Belgium regularly grumbling about Congo's human-rights record, and Congo accusing the Belgians of paternalism. During a diplomatic spat in 2004,Congolese Information Minister Henri Mova Sakanyi charged the Belgian government with "racism and nostalgia for colonialism," adding, "It's Tintin in the Congo all over again."

But should Tintin pay for the sins of Belgium's past? Hergé himself later expressed remorse over the book. "I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved," he said in the 1970s, and he made many changes for the color version of Tintin in the Congo, which was published in 1946. For example, a scene in which Tintin teaches a class of Congolese people about Belgian geography — saying, "Let's talk about your country, Belgium!" — was later changed to a math class.

Nonetheless, the book remains controversial, even outside Belgium. In 2007, Britain's Commission for Racial Equality said the book contains imagery and words of "hideous racial prejudice." The book's British editions carry a foreword explaining that Hergé's depiction reflected the colonial attitudes of the time, and Mbutu Mondondo says he would be satisfied with a similar measure in Belgium.

Moulinsart, the organization that runs Hergé's estate, accepts that the book reflects colonial clichés but warns against moves to censor Tintin. "Obviously, if someone showed Tintin in the Congo to an editor now, it would not get published," says Moulinsart communications director Alain de Kuyssche. "But you can't judge Tintin or Hergé solely by today's standards and attitudes. If you don't take account of the historical context, you would have to put a warning on every book over 50 years old."

Mexico's Sambo: Memin

Mexico’s Race Problem

And the real story behind Fox’s faux pasClaudio Lomnitz

In a speech to a binational agribusiness audience this past May, Mexican President Vicente Fox complained about growing American barriers to Mexican immigration. Faced with an anti-immigrant vigilante movement, a forbidding wall raised on the Arizona border, and a Real ID program that denies Mexican illegals a driver’s license, a bank account, and legal identification, Fox confidently told his audience that “una solución win-win” was possible. After all, he said, Mexican immigrants are doing the jobs that “not even blacks are willing to do.”

Fox’s statement caused a political storm in the United States. Jesse Jackson traveled to Mexico and met with Fox. So did Al Sharpton. Both demanded explanations and apologies. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, expressed concern to his Mexican counterpart, and the White House issued a formal complaint. Mexican-American and African-American organizations decried the statement; African-American businessmen considered boycotting tourism to Mexico. The story was picked up by all the major American media—The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CNN—and it caused an even bigger storm in Mexico: when the United States catches a cold, Mexico gets pneumonia.

Memín was described by his creator, Yolanda Vargas Dulché, as un chiquitín negrito de ojos enormes y muy chistoso – “a very funny little negrito with enormous eyes.” Although she drew the comic between 1945 and 1952, the series has been perpetually reprinted, and beloved, to this day. In 2005, when the Mexican Postal Service printed stamps in honor of Memín Pinguín, they sold out within a matter of hours. Various U.S. politicians, including Jesse Jackson, complained, ensuring the historical place of the stamps as collectors’ items. (Source: David Lido, Mostly Mexico City)

The ruckus completely overshadowed the original subject of debate; Mexican racism replaced immigration as the issue of the day. Then, just when the scandal had finally subsided, a new conflict broke out around a set of five Mexican postage stamps issued as part of a commemorative celebration of Mexico’s comic books. The stamps, which featured a cartoon character named Memín Pinguín, raised the accusation of Mexican racism once again.

Memín was created in the 1940s by Yolanda Vargas Dulché, an exuberant sentimentalist and blockbuster photo-novella writer. In a country in which newspaper runs rarely exceed 100,000, reprints of Memín still sell 125,000 copies a week. Memín has black skin, thick lips, a flat nose, and eyes like saucers. He lives alone with his mother, doña Eufrosina, an Aunt Jemima–like washerwoman who speaks Spanish with a Cuban accent. Memín, who was named after Vargas Dulché’s boyfriend, and later husband, Guillermo (“Memo”) de la Parra, loves his “Ma’ Linda,” who spoils him adoringly, though she does not spare the rod (her famous palo con clavo—board with a nail). Doña Eufrosina is, in any case, honest and clean, a dignified representative of the “working poor.”

Memín is the only black kid in a gang of four boys, all of whom attend the Benito Juárez public school in Mexico City. They are a multi-class group from the unmarked (i.e.,mestizo, or mixed-blood) portion of Mexico’s racial and class spectrum, with the exception of Ricardito, who is blond and rich, but (predictably) has unhappy family circumstances. Memín often provides comic relief in ways that are reminiscent of blackface minstrel theater (a well-developed genre in Cuba, where Yolanda Vargas Dulché first conceived of the Memín character, but with precedents in Mexico’s popular puppet theater of the 19th century).

The gang’s core characteristic is its absolute internal loyalty. When the gang travels to Texas to play soccer, for example, Memín’s friends defend him with indignation when he is subjected to Jim Crow laws and personal insults. The boys go on to win their game and triumphantly return to Mexico.

American reactions to Memín in June after the stamps had been released were not informed by the comic book’s plotline, which is of course virtually unknown in this country, but rested entirely on Memín’s image, which is deeply familiar to Americans. Inspired by the cartoon character Ebony White, from Will Eisner’s 1940s comic strip The Spirit, the Memín drawing is a variation of the Little Black Sambo theme.

The White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, condemned the Memín stamps, stating imperiously that such images “have no place in today’s world.” Jesse Jackson, who had just accepted a tortured and ambiguous apology from Fox for his May statement, saw the stamps as a deliberate insult. The African-American community agreed, and the question of Mexican racism against blacks again undermined the Mexican government’s ability to claim the moral high ground in immigration debates.

The Mexican public was caught by surprise in a storm that the Mexican press quickly dubbed “The Memíngate Affair.” Mexican racial attitudes had suddenly emerged as a factor in bilateral relations with the United States. How exactly had this happened? At what point did Mexicans start to be thought of as racist?

After all, Memín Pinguín is not the only comic book of the mid-20th century that was both wildly popular and racist, and that continues to be reissued and avidly consumed. Tintin, the character created by the Belgian Hergé, is a French journalist who, together with his lily-white dog Milú, goes around the globe straightening things out and protecting the feeble colonial races—Bedouins, Congolese, Chinese, Peruvian Indians—from their exploiters and from themselves.

Asterix and Obelix, a Gallic-nationalist duo, also have their racist moments and are nonetheless widely adored. They even have a theme park in France.

And the United States’s own Speedy Gonzalez has been massively popular. Speedy (“Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!”) is a fast mouse in a town of drawling and anemiccompadres and beautiful mouse señoritas. Like Memín, Speedy fools and tricks arbitrary authority (in the form of a cat), while domesticating and reproducing prejudices about Mexicans.

With these images in mind, Mexican response to the Memín affair ranged from surprise to indignation: ethnic caricatures are a standard and relatively innocent form of entertainment, they claimed, and in any case, the United States should not cast stones from its glass house. At least in Memín the black kid is the hero; at least he has a lovable mother; at least he goes to the same public school as Ricardito.

But the roots of the dispute run deeper than American hypocrisy and Mexico’s refusal to inspect its own racism. The Memín affair reflects decades of profound and unacknowledged changes in the relations between the United States and Mexico.

Until the 1980s, Latin America, and especially its two great mestizo countries, Mexico and Brazil, claimed moral superiority to the United States on race relations. In the case of Mexico, their superiority was predicated, first, on Mexico’s early abolition of slavery in 1829, shortly after its independence. Because Mexico later went to war with the United States, and the United States has been a constant source of nationalist anxiety, Mexican superiority on race issues became an explicit theme of public discussion from the mid-19th century forward. Moreover, anxieties about annexation by the United States, which were a constant through the 19th and early 20th centuries, were fueled by American discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in American territory. In short, the experience of discrimination in the United States has helped to sustain Mexican nationalism for a century and a half. (source: Boston Review, Nov./Dec. 2005, byClaudio Lomnitz. )

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Memin Pinguin: The Structural Violence of an Image, Afro Mexicans

Mexicans have 3% to 8% African blood when averaged out among all Mexicans, and 50% to 80% in places like Costa Chica in Mexico. At one point 33% of Mexico was inhabited by African slaves, over time most mixed in the the population. Most people consider themselves to be Mestizo (White and Native only) but genetically, most Mexicans are a combination of Amerindian, African, and European, in different degrees. Most Afro-Mexicans are only considered Negro when they have very dark skin, however the brown/lighter ones are considered to be Mestizo mainly because Mulatto/Negro has a negative stigma attached to it. Memin Pinguin is a great example if this stigma. In addition a significant amount of slaves were originated from Cuba, the Memin Pinguin character is also based on a Afro-Cuban character.