Word: sambo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...children's books evoke such strong emotions as The Story of Little Black Sambo. Its crude, derogatory drawings and racist character names are patently offensive, making it one of the best known relics--practically an icon--of a deplorable era. But Sambo himself is spunky and resourceful, and his story is charming enough that many adults remember it fondly. Now two publishers are trying to resurrect Sambo, preserving the good while jettisoning the bad in new versions of the mortifying old book...
...similar thing in the beginning of the novel where there's this whole thing with the sambo doll and then the black doll that she doesn't want. It isn't that she doesn't want the black doll; it's that she wanted a doll with hair. So what if it was black--it just wasn't physically well-made. That's what she's reacting to. Of course it's misinterpreted as that carte blanche idea that she's ashamed of being black...
...Civil War was genre scenes of American life, which might or might not include blacks. Most American genre painting before Homer and Eakins was lowbrow stuff, in which blacks tended to get the roles played by the fiddling boors and carousing peasants in Dutch genre. They become lazy Sambos with watermelons, fiddling clowns, butts of practical jokes. But not all the time. "Sambo is not my man and brother," snorted William Makepeace Thackeray during his lecture tour of America in 1852-53. Yet when his secretary, Eyre Crowe, painted a group of black women and a field hand waiting...