![]() Like Felix, Bimbo, Oswald, most of the animated film characters who preceded him, Mickey had a black body and head, large white eyeballs, and a white area around the mouth - all characteristic of African Americans as portrayed stereotypically in cartoons, illustrations, and advertising of the time and based on the image of minstrel show performers in black face. Thomas Inge described Disney's famous character in his essay "Mickey Mouse": Many historians of the period believe that Mickey Mouse, like other early 20th century animated characters, was heavily influenced by blackface performers and minstrel shows of the time.Ī collection of essays entitled A Mickey Mouse Reader includes several mentions of Mickey's supposed minstrel show influences. While this viral image does not depict a character named "Jigaboo" which served as the inspiration for Mickey Mouse, Charles' painting does invoke the early history of the latter character. But there’s a difference between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we can’t easily divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed. People just don’t stop to think about where these images come from.Ĭharles says, “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” Twisted caricatures of African-American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the aura of harmlessness that lends them an appearance of truth that is very seldom questioned. A piece of the puzzle is missing.Īrtist Michael Owen added more insight into Charles' work: ![]() In Charles' puzzle painting Join the Club, three little Sambos feast on basketballs with a juicy red filling that looks suspiciously like watermelon. Permanent Daily Circus posters, figures named Dawg Boy and Sealboy perform for the crowd. His Michael Jackson wears a jester's cap with little Sambo faces at each point instead of bells. ![]() Charles paints Aunt Jemima wearing a Wonder Woman costume or standing in a sexy pose like Marilyn Monroe with the wind whooshing up her skirt, only wearing floppy pink slippers on her feet and a red and white polka-dot kerchief tied on her head. Burning all the books about Sambo and tossing Aunt Jemima into history's trash heap isn't going to make them disappear. "The past is present," he says with each new painting. Michael Ray Charles contends that you have to open up old stereotypes and lay them out, superimpose them on top of today's world, in order to understand them, to have any chance at all of truly making them go away. They are about deconstructing symbols and tracing their history, past to present. His paintings seek to create understanding rather than foster blame. He didn't invent them, he is not singlehandedly perpetuating them. Charles says that negative images about African-Americans are hiding throughout American culture, just below the surface, on TV sitcoms and cartoons of every vintage and in advertising and sports. They are about the racial stereotypes that white people created and perpetuate still, rather than acknowledging African-Americans as complex and individual human beings. They are about the negative stereotypes that African-Americans still buy into - the minstrel and the mammy - and how they update them, hide behind them. Charles also created several other artworks which overlaid racial stereotypes onto modern characters and symbols such as the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Superman, and Elvis Presley:Īrt critic Rebecca Cohen explored Charles' work in a 1997 article published in the Austin Chronicle: The fact that the character in "BEWARE" resembles Mickey Mouse, however, is not a coincidence. This caricature was not the inspiration for Mickey Mouse, nor did it depict an early cartoon character known as "Jigaboo." This image is a contemporary work of art by Michael Ray Charles that was created in 1994 (nearly 70 years after Mickey Mouse made his first appearance in 1928) entitled " (Forever Free) BEWARE." Mickey mouse was a remake of a character named jigaboo who was made to mock black people. The most popular posting of these images that we could find was accompanied by a caption stating: "RACISM. In February 2019, an image showing "Jigaboo," a racist caricature that supposedly served as the inspiration for Disney's Mickey Mouse character, began to spread via social media:
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