The Black Box: Writing the Race

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A large part of it was aimed at what might be called the valorization of the mother, or the recuperation of the dignity of Black women, who were depicted in the broader popular culture either as light-skinned, hypersexualized Jezebels at one extreme or as dark-skinned, unattractively obese mammies at the other. These two stereotypes of Black women remain with us today—another binary such as we saw with Frederick Douglass’s multiple versions of his autobiography. It is no accident that the first Black woman to receive an Oscar was Hattie McDaniel for her role as “Mammy” (she had no other name) in Gone with the Wind, a Hollywood fantasy of the love that the Black house slaves had for their white masters. Drawing on George Frederickson’s term, Higginbotham calls this “romantic racialism.”