I learnt about this when i was taking my Cultural Imperialism class. The strong black woman as the maid of white society was drawn up as a typical character to show that black society was inherently backward (in those times) because they had women running the society instead of the men and that there was no hope for civility in such a society that was AS backwards as this...

Then there is the little black kid. This image portrays black people as happy-go-lucky docile people, HAPPY to be in the position they were, grateful that they were under the white man's rule (to justify slavery at the time, in the eyes of the common man). You'll notice the way that the little kid ends up sparring with animals... whats really obvious in this clip is that it is meant to reduce the character of these people down to the level of animals, unable to be civil and demonized by animals themselves, as if deserving of such treatment... ie: not human, in order to justify the treatment as nonhumans... Remnants of this bullshit that I know of: the cartoon Animaniacs

I suppose one must do SOMETHING in Cultural Imperialism class but wow, that kind of over analysis takes a special kind of idle tenured mind to concoct! The cartoon is obviously highly overtly racist, but how do you think someone a hundred years from now will view some of the clips on here that you and I so cursorily laugh at? No offense but I'm pretty sure that things like cultural imperialism classes seem to (ironically) exist for little more reason than to convince ourselves of how stupid we all used to be in comparison to the high-mindedness those classes purport to foster now. We may be more knowledgeable about our past heinous crimes against humanity and that's great, but we're just as stupid as we've ever been about the ones we're currently committing without a second thought.

Cultural Imperialism sounds like a concoction of a sensitive, loyal-lefty socialist college prof....the solution is in the the paradigm: -not working within it, bound to watch the ebb and flow of its many iterations.....the solution to perceived imperialism, is to eliminate the perceived necessity by the imperialists, to accumulate matter, and centralize power.....

that does not mean any other isms in its place......silly college kids.....take more math classes!!!!

(could'nt agree more with gluonium.....if we could only wake up colectively and daily, to our own bullshit....what a world it could be....

more perspective over at metafilter

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