When I was a boy, in the early years of national television, my favorite shows were "The Howdy Doody Show" and "The Lone Ranger." Howdy Doody was a marionette with an eclectic group of friends, among whom were a serious-acting Indian --uh, Native American-- known as Chief Thunderthud. Also, there was an Indian princess, Princess Summerfall Winterspring. The Lone Ranger, of course, had his "faithful" Indian companion, Tonto.
These were the conventions of my childhood: the Indians were faintly ridiculous, as Chief Thunderthud's name was meant to suggest, or exotic go-fers, like Tonto ("There's some medicine in my saddlebag Tonto --get it"). There were no Negroes, of course: they were beneath notice, even for comic relief, at least until Jack Benny came along with his --valet?-- Rochester. The joke among fifth graders one year had the Indian asserting superiority over the Negro because, "Nobody ever played cowboys and niggers." Funny, huh?
There were other ridiculous characters, of course, who were ordinary white people: Jingles P. Jones, played by Andy Divine as the high-pitched, warbly-voiced (Divine had been gassed in the trenches of WWI), faintly incompetent sidekick and comic foil of the earnest, straight-shooting Wild Bill Hickock. But the Indians were the ones who were invariably not to be taken seriously. When they were not villains, they were sort of silly.
That was racist, of course; and yet some of those old stereotypes are intrinsic to some of my fondest memories of childhood. We've pretty much discarded those old images, haven't we? Certainly, we don't take them seriously; they were the furniture of our innocence, perhaps, but we do not cherish them.
Nowadays, the Washington Redskins and certain other professional sports teams face mounting criticism of their nicknames and their mascots; and some of those teams, professional sports being what it is, look likely to hang on for a while to their monikers which are derided as outdated by non-partisans. An early casualty of what is derided as "political correctness" was the nickname of the Pekin, Illinois high school football team: they were the Chinks.
And this month, in the Netherlands, a blackfaced, red-lipsticked, Afro-haired critter known as Black Peter is getting lots of attention from those who find his character insulting to the growing diversity of that country. As in other such cases, fans of Black Peter have rushed to the defense of this helper (one anti-Peter commentator said, "slave") of Santa. Black Peter is a fond childhood memory, his defenders say. Some of them threaten violence against those who call the figure a racist relic. "He makes the little children happy," one journalist in Rotterdam said on NPR tonight, "he hands out candies."
Now, little children could as easily be made happy by a Blue Peter; they have no memories to overwrite. But the Black Peter stalwarts accuse those who object to him of racism themselves, which is a bit hard to fathom. They say that Black Peter is a cultural emblem, and they are threatened by what they perceive as the steady erosion of their "culture" by outsiders. I wonder if the original inhabitants of New Amsterdam may have felt the same way. The Dutch did a pretty good job of eliminating the culture of the natives of Manhattan Island.
I believe that, no matter how innocently intended, such unconscious racial and cultural stereotypes have to go. Sure, you didn't personally mean anything against black people when you laughed with joy at the appearance of Black Peter; how could you? You were six years old. But unconscious racism is still racism, in that it is a cultural milieu, affecting the dominant and the subservient alike, and poisoning any possibility of honest accommodation between them. As to the threats against a cultural symbol, I recall no outcry in Cincinnati when, in 1954, the baseball team that had been known as the "Reds" for fifty years suddenly became the "Redlegs" for a few seasons. The old name was just too uncomfortable in its association with the targets of Senator McCarthy; the "culture" adapted readily enough to permit the new name to appear on baseball cards and news stories.
So, thanks, Tonto, for all those enjoyable half-hours, when I didn't know any better. I will always remember you. But, Johnny Depp notwithstanding, you are properly relegated to history, a victim and a beneficiary of the gradual progress of humanity, which moves, ever to slowly, in the direction of recognizing your own.
And the Dutch will just have to adjust.
