Word: samboe
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...been trained for combat during the war against the Portuguese minority regime. Still maintaining a military component, LIMA now has chapters throughout the Angolan countryside and concentrates on political mobilization of the populations in those areas, instructing women in effective techniques of village political organizing. Its Kwacha Institute in Sambo, near the small town of Vila Nova, provides care for the elderly and disabled, administering occupational therapy and literacy classes. LIMA also operates cooperative farms in which food is produced for public institutions such as the orphanages under their care. City women pledge two or three days a week...
...Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Amos and Andy--historically, blacks have been conscious of public images of themselves because these images have had a tendency to harden into stereotypes. It's difficult to gauge the importance of an image, because its effects are intangible and hard to measure. But in racial issues, image is as important as reality, because what often underlies people's actions are certain preconceptions that are too ingrained to be recognized. And in recent years black students and administrators have grown concerned about their image here...
...childlike, lackadaisical behavior of plantation blacks remained, though it now began to be explained away in all sorts of sympathetic, guilt-ridden and ingenious ways. Stampp regarded it as a kind of defense against the pressures of the peculiar institution. Historian Stanley Elkins' Slavery (1959) even suggested that "Sambo, the typical plantation slave ... docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing," resembled not so much a kind of survivor's soft-shoe sabotage of Massa as the form of demoralization and infantilism that set in among inmates of Nazi concentration camps...
...certainly admirable. But Time on the Cross--whatever the validity of its individual findings--actually goes even further than attacking racism in attacking traditional approaches to American history. For the power of a view like Elkins's--even in its discussion of such topics as what "Sambo" really meant--is too great to dismiss as merely racist. It belongs rather with the old Abolitionist tracts, or even with the modern and equally important tracts of people like C. Wright Mills, moving and evocative in their assertion that capitalism grinds down the humanity of labor. It derives from horror--maybe...
What could be more charming and nostalgic than your little memory trip through those delightfully racist books of our childhood? Why not include Little Black Sambo while...