Word: sambo
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...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...
...many Japanese, the first exposure to blacks came during the post-World War II occupation, when they saw U.S. soldiers housed in segregated barracks. Others picked up racial attitudes and stereotypes -- such as Little Black Sambo -- from U.S. television, movies and books, or American acquaintances. "I experience racism daily," says Robert Jefferson, a black radio correspondent for ABC News in Tokyo. Jefferson says Japanese avoid sitting next to him on trains or taking the same elevator...
...figures before the Foreign Ministry called the firm's attention to a critical article about the mannequins in the Washington Post. The company stopped production. Sanrio Co., the manufacturer of a well-selling line of toys and gift items, followed suit. Its products included large-eyed dolls called Sambo and Hannah, and towels, bags and stationery goods decorated with pictures of the pair. Along with a big-lipped black doll named Bibinba, the line brought Sanrio more than $11 million in sales last year. "We were making a summer item, and we designed it to be kawaii," says Kazuo Tomatsu...
...necessarily inoffensive, postwar depictions. "If there were yellow dolls in the U.S. with buck teeth, narrow slanted eyes and called Jap, of course the Japanese would be angry," says Kaname Saruya, who teaches American history at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. "They're doing the same thing here with Sambo, but they don't realize it. Japanese are obtuse." Obtuse or not, that is little consolation for American blacks: having made progress, however limited, against bigotry at home, they are appalled to find a troubling reflection abroad...