Tag Archives: Little Black Sambo

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Picaninny

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

 

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The Story of the Little Black Sambo

The Story of the Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman told a story of this little black boy who gotten all of his nice clothes taken by some tigers he met in the woods, however he was able to get them back after the tigers had an argument over which one of them was the grandest. Overall, I felt like the story itself had no sort of significance in terms of racism or race relations. However, I do think that the illustrations of the characters are rather too similar to the white people in black face that played in minstrel shows. The Little Brown and Little Black Sambo article does try to defend Bannerman, stating that the characters can be taken in differently by whoever read the story, but I don’t entirely agree with that.  Little Black Sambo is claimed to be an South Asian Indian story, however I didn’t see anything that resembled the way Indian people look to my knowledge at all. As far as the illustrations, if the story were indeed about Indians  I feel as if the people who drew these pictures didn’t have to make the Sambo family as dark as they did. I have never saw any one person whether they are Indian, African or African American who looks a monstrous as the characters in this book; but I do know that black people were looked upon as these ugly less attractive figures that are demonstrated in this text during the times of slaver. Also the fact that Little Sambo and his family has bright pink lips also leads me to believe that this text was solely meant to portray the way whites saw blacks during this time period.