When we look at early children’s texts that involve African Americans, the African Americans were usually depicted as a picaninny. A picaninny is an African American character whose features are over dramatized by either illustrations or descriptions of the character. Most picaninnies are drawn/described as very dark in color, having a large red mouth, being poorly dressed, the girls would have “kinky” braided hair and the boys would mostly be bald with a shines head, and lastly most picaninny characters were aged infant-teen. Picaninnies were originally founded for the purpose of emphasizing the harm of slavery and how it effects children both physically and mentally. One of the first picaninny characters was actually Topsy frm Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Through Topsy, Stowe wished to depict how slavery could currupt an innocent child. The story of Little black Sambo is a bit controversial when it comes to the question whether it is racist or not. Many believe that Sambo is a picaninny, it’s hard to tell since he does share some traits of the picaninny (such as the big red mouth, dark skin color, and age), however, some of his traits are completely off (such as his expensive clothes, intelligence, and hair). What’s even more interesting, is that there are other versions of little black sambo, which were not written by the original author, that are unarguably racist. These other authors and many others after them took this image of a picaninny and currupted it; they made it into a joke, which we can clearly see in our previous reading, the coon alphabet. http://http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/74/2b/1c/742b1cee7ed4c0f7b097a75a500c6758.jpg
