Samoans riot over "Sambo" poster

Another essay on racism from correspondent Melvin Martin:"NIGGER INCORPORATED"
by Melvin Martin

The following are my thoughts and feelings on "Sambo" Waiter = Indian Mascot that appeared on Newspaper Rock on 3/29/09:

Throughout my life I have often heard racist whites refer to blacks as apes, baboons and monkeys. "Blackface" and blackface stereotypes were (and still are) essentially drawn from the widely held belief among racists that blacks are more biologically akin to the lower primates than to human beings--and as with all racist stereotypes, to include Indian mascots, the more outlandish the imagery is, the more the racists' needs are fulfilled in portraying people of color as animalistic, beastly and all-too-less-than human.

When I was in the U.S. Army in Germany from 1972-1974, I befriended many older Germans as I was one of the few American soldiers where I was stationed to actually take the time to learn some conversational German (which was offered free to all at the base recreational center, and taught by a most attractive young blonde woman with a degree in linguistics from Cornell). Anyway, the older Germans that I drank bier und schnapps with at the many "guest houses" that I frequented told me that when they first encountered white U.S. soldiers during WW II, that they were invariably informed by these troops that all black soldiers "had tails."

What I found most tragic about these accounts related to me by my German friends was that a lot of them still believed what the white GIs had told them about blacks, and this was in the early '70s in Central West Germany.

At about the same time period or shortly before, when I was in high school in 1971 in Los Angeles, the school's drama club put on a production that was ostensibly a re-telling of the classic play "Othello"--with the lead role assumed (for laughs in retrospect) by a popular student and local champion surfer named "Joe Dude." Joe Dude was a very blonde, intensely blue-eyed Hitler Youth-looking California beach bum type, so he was decked out in blackface for the presentation. By either deliberate design or by sheer ignorance on the part of the student drama club, Joe Dude's Othello facial make-up made him look more like the "Sambo" caricature of decades past that appeared in countless comic books, newspaper cartoon strips and even movies of the '20s through the '40s.

There were several large, custom-made posters for the play that were hung up around campus a week before the play began. Someone then took a wide, felt-tipped black pen and wrote "NIGGER INCORPORATED" on all of the posters that showed Joe Dude in blackface dressed like Sambo-Othello with an outrageously large Halloween party Afro wig that was added for the poster to hide his shoulder-length, blond hair.

What happened next I could not quite figure out then. There were about a hundred black students attending school at the time of the play, and not a word of protest was heard from their corner. However, the school's Samoan students (probably numbering about 200 or so) rioted over the posters, setting fire to trash cans, beating up whites, Mexicans and Asians, and then marching off campus in a '60s-style "walk out."

I am of the opinion now, that the Samoan students were offended as there was a really mean-spirited joke circulating on campus at the time: "What do you get when you cross a Samoan with a nigger? SAMO-NIGGUH!" There was another factor, too, in that almost all of the Samoan male students wore their hair, grown out naturally, in a manner that closely resembled the Afro hairstyle that was quite popular then among blacks. So, the Samoans saw the posters as particularly offensive to them, meaning that this was a case where a stereotyped image had a spillover effect onto another minority group.

At any rate, the depiction of blacks as Sambo-like creations does indeed, to my way of thinking, equal Indians as mascots in that both forms of symbolism reduces the basic humanity of both blacks and Indians to less than zero. As long as any ethnic group is depicted as grossly stereotypical, for whatever reasons or purposes, then the scourge of racism will always have that much more of an impetus to remain alive and well and living not only in the United States, but around the world, too.

Lastly, the Samoan students were always, up until the "Nigger Incorporated" incident, the most peaceful, gentle, and joyous individuals that I had ever known. I have been told over the years by various Samoan people I've come to know that once a person from American Samoa is truly exposed to the downside of U.S. society that they become very angry and defensive--two behavioral traits that are quite uncommon in "the islands."Comment:  It would've been interesting to ask the black students what they thought of this production. Did they fail to recognize the stereotyping? Did they recognize it but not care? Did they feel it was useless to protest? Or...?

Martin's observations about Samoans read almost like a case study. Put a minority that previously wasn't exposed to racism and stereotyping into a white-dominated culture. What happens? The corrosive effects of white privilege and prejudice change the subjects from peaceful and joyous into angry and defensive.