>> A production of the South Carolina Educational Television Network.

♪ Listervelt Middleton> Good evening, and welcome to For the People.

One of the challenges facing most Black parents is how to help our children survive the barrage of negative images that surround their lives.

One person who has spent much of her life nurturing children is child development specialist Ms Geraldine Wilson.

We asked Ms Wilson what can Black parents do to help their children feel good about themselves?

Geraldine Wilson> That implies, I think, that maybe there's something we aren't doing.

I think that children are reflections of adults.

And so I think that Black adults, not just parents, but family members, have to think about things... They have to think about how they feel about themselves.

Adults can't really teach children something that they don't feel or something that they don't know about intimately.

And I think the whole question of how we as a people feel about ourselves are reflected in the children.

So I think that if we decide that there's something that we really have to teach our children about how we should feel about each other as Black people, then we have to, as adults, examine how we feel about ourselves.

And, I do think that after that examination we'll be more prepared to, assist children in developing feelings, of positive self image.

That's a phrase that we've used a lot, but I think I would like to consider it on a deeper level.

I think that we are casual about the society's treatment of us, and the fact that accumulatively, over the years that this system, as we call it, has eroded positive feelings that we may have had in the past about ourselves.

I think that it's important that we examine our homes, that we look at what's hanging on our wall.

I looked at my toothpaste this morning and realized that I had brought a tube into my house that had this White couple on it.

It used to be that toothpaste just had the name of the toothpaste on it, but now there was a White couple about to embrace each other in my bathroom.

Listervelt> Now, you know, what somebody, some folks who are watching this will say, "Oh, come on now, "why should you be concerned about something that small?"

Geraldine> A tube of toothpaste?

Well, I think the White people are showing up in strange places in our houses.

They're on tubes of toothpaste.

They are, on boxes of cornflakes.

There's been a step up of advertising, that shows the faces of White people on it.

And, I know that there's been a lot of questions about White theorists and their, theories of child development and whether or not they should apply to Black children.

But I like what Piaget reminds us that we should understand about media and the development of children, and that is that media constantly is giving off messages with which children interact and from which children learn.

And I think that the increase in, in White advertising, the increase of the physical likeness of White people on billboards, in public buildings, in sculpture and statuary, that it's very important for us if we decide that, having a positive image of ourselves is important, then we will do something active about that.

We will see to it that the children have books, but more specifically, we will see to it that we spend time with children.

And the things that I have to suggest are very simple things, sitting and reading to children, sitting and talking to children and telling family stories.

We've also been very casual about those stories, and we've not paid as much attention, perhaps, as we need to, about those people who have accomplished tremendous feats in our families and in our communities.

And as a result of that, some of that history is slipping away from us.

And, the children don't know that we perhaps you and I, although I am older than you.

Right.

Let's throw that out.

<Just slightly> For instance, my mother was raised by her father, who had been a slave.

Now I am the last generation to be raised by someone who was raised by a slave.

And so the stories of who we are and the stories of people who accomplished these great feats are really going to disappear unless we make it a point to really share them with our children and make them available.

I happen to believe that those kinds of things make a difference in the development of children.

It's, I try not to get hysterical about it, but I feel very strongly that with this group of our children, the first group to be largely taught by White people in this phase of our oppression, that we call integration, that, that we will have a serious problem in terms of transmitting our culture, our history, and our heritage, because we will no longer have our children in the presence of African Americans who can role model important cultural behaviors for them, and who in the past taught them a certain amount of history and a certain amount of how they should behave as Black children.

But we have to see that as important.

I mean, perhaps the goal for us is to be American.

Listervelt> Now, you talked about the the White images on our toothpaste, other places, Black images, Aunt Jemima pancakes.

How do you feel about this?

Geraldine> How do I feel about Aunt Jemima?

(laughter) You mean, how do I feel about the caricature <Right> of Aunt Jemima?

It's important for us to know that, I guess from the mid 19th century until presently.

But in the mid 19th century, which was at the height of the institution of minstrelsy.

And the purpose of minstrel, the minstrel industry, and we need to understand that it was an industry.

They hired many people.

They made a great deal of money, and the behaviors of the minstrel shows passed into the larger community.

It was a period in which there was massive, ridicule and massive caricature of African behaviors that were expressed by African-Americans.

There were attacks on our language.

We were said to speak bad English and publicly through the minstrels our language was caricatured and ridiculed and induced great feelings of shame among us.

Along with the minstrel era came an era of ridicule and caricature that was expressed through the development of products that were sold and that were bought, and which were displayed in most White homes.

And these were the figure of the "auntie", if you will, the older Black woman who wore her head wrapped, as most women of African or many women of African descent do all over the world who wore big gold earrings and of course, Christians, meaning White Christians, did not pierce their ears.

That was considered heathen and savage.

And so the figure of the "auntie", the older Black woman of respect in her community, was caricatured and ridicule carried on products.

You could say in a way that we as a people helped to build the advertising industry, product cards, small cards that advertise, soap, which had two little pickininnies sitting on a bale of cotton.

There were hundreds and thousands of these cards, passed all over the United States advertising products.

There was the production of post cards with pickininnies and people in cotton fields and, caricatures and cartoons.

<What was.

What was> It was a massive industry?

It, had a profound effect on us as a people.

It was one of the tools that White people used to de-Africanize us.

It was also one of the tools by which we were made ashamed of many of the expressions of African heritage.

And I think that resulted in, in on one level, a kind of shame about how we spoke, about the use of the head wrap, about the use of, braids, dressing the hair.

corn rowing.

I came up in a family where women didn't pierce their ears and you wore respectable braids.

You didn't wear corn rows.

And so I think these things have had a profound effect on how we see ourselves.

Listervelt> Is it any accident that, I think there's Ms.

White, something which is a product with a White woman on it, then there's a pop corn by a Mr.

somebody, but then there's Uncle Ben grits and Aunt Jemima.

You talked about the prevalence of these images years ago, where many of the consumers, most of them I would, would have been, White.

How do you explain this?

Here you have people who apparently did not like Black people putting Black people on products that they too were using.

What do you think was at the, was at the bottom of that?

Geraldine> Well, they didn't really put pi of Black people.

They put... <Yeah, right.> caricatures and They wanted also to project the kind of their vision or their perception of the kind of Black person that they wanted Black people to grow up to be.

Listervelt> Do you think that it's still current?

That it's still the case Geraldine> Surely, it's still current.

In 19, I think it was in the early 30s that Sterling Brown are elder poet of profound talent and concern for our culture did, did an article which identified some of the stereotypes, that had been prevalent during that period because certainly it lasted until the 40s or 50s, but I think that those stereotypes that Sterling Brown identified are still visible in contemporary media.

I think that they are much more sophisticated.

There's a show that comes on every week that is very, very popular that shows a woman who's a domestic, who takes care of a White family, who has forsaken her own family and lives her life in isolation of her community.

for this White family.

She's a very talented actress.

However, she is playing a role that has been very traditional in the media, whether it was on a product card of the 1870s or 80s, whether it was on an Aunt Jemima box in the 20s, or whether it's on television as a prime time situation comedy.

One can still see the tradition of the stereotypes it reaches back over 100 years.

Listervelt> Do you think that, White Ameri make Black Americans, African Americans fit into that old stereotype?

I mean, aside from the, from the from what you see on boxes, etc., you know, packages?

Geraldine> Oh, certainly.

And I think that it's one of the things that that adults, family members parents need to remember when they talk with children, when children come to them with questions, about who they are.

That, who we are is never told or never reflected back to us on the public media.

This society was built on our labor.

We were slaves.

We live in a colonialist society in which we are unable to tell our story.

If we told our story, if we talked about those people who resisted our bondage and who still resist our bondage, we would.

The history books would look very different.

Our children do not know about people like Martin Delaney.

It's much more comfortable for us to talk about Frederick Douglass.

Our children know very little about the importance, really, of Joe Lewis to Black people who lived in the 1930s and 1940s.

We know of him as a very quiet boxer who was certainly, beat up everybody, but the children don't really know the exciting stories of what it was like when Joe Lewis whooped them White boys, and how much psychological and emotional importance Joe Lewis was to us.

We don't pass on to our children, and I know that in South Carolina, older folks know the stories of how John Conquerer, who was the slave, who always outwitted the master, so that the face of literature in this country would look very different.

if Black people had the opportunity to tell their children the stories as we ought to be telling them.

And I feel, I feel a lot of pain about that because the stories of our survival in this country are probably the most dramatic stories that this society has to tell.

The stories of the Black men who led Lewis and Carroll across the northwest of this country.

It ought to be that our children know who those <Lewis and Clark> <Go ahead.

Go ahead.> Yes, the great explorers.

But they were led through the northwest by African-American men who had learned Native American languages and who, to me, those are exciting stories, the stories of the woman who sealed herself up in a box and had herself sent north as a slave.

Those are stories that children ought to know.

But we, we don't tell those stories to our children.

And those are the stories that have been suppressed by the society.

Listervelt> What can Black parents do to help their children become clear about their loyalties?

Geraldine> I think, again, that we need to decide that it's important for us to teach children that, loyalty to each other as Black people is something that's important.

I don't know that we're as clear about that as we used to be.

When my mother and father raised me and others of my age, (laughing) my mother and father made sure that we knew that we were Negro children.

That's, that's what we were called when I grew up.

We were told that we should not bring shame to other Black people.

We had to behave on the trolley car, whether we were in or out of the presence of elders.

And as we got older, we traveled around and into White neighborhoods, but we always had to be conscious that we were Negro and that we were supposed to behave a certain way because we were Negro.

Now, I don't remember feeling that, that was an oppressive request, necessarily.

We misbehaved when we got ready to, I had a girlfriend who hit the trolley car driver over the head with her cello, and we got driven to the end of the trolley car line by the man.

And he called the police.

And we got we got really punished, but we knew we weren't supposed to do it because we were Negroes and we were not supposed to act up.

And we knew that we weren't supposed to act up because, White people had this image of us that they shouldn't have.

I mean, my parents made it clear to me that White people didn't think that the Negroes were as good as they were, and we were taught that we were as good as anybody, and that there was something wrong with White people who thought that way.

We were also taught that we had to do something about being Black.

I remember not being able to give to the Red Cross, for instance, when I was in elementary school, even though, I guess I was in junior high school, elementary school.

I've forgotten at any rate, we had, we had to give to the Red Cross.

But my mother said, no, you can't give to the Red Cross because your uncles and cousins were in the service and, the Red Cross discriminated against them.

So in this family, we're not going to give to the Red Cross.

We'll give the money to the NAACP.

And so I grew up knowing that I was supposed to do something about being Black.

And I guess as a result of that, I developed what you might call a loyalty to or an allegiance to, then we had the 60s and I was involved in the movement, probably as a result of the way I had been raised, because I felt that I was supposed to do something about the fact that we wanted to make changes.

In the 70s, there was a period in which individuality was was of supreme, was of supreme importance.

The idea of individuality is a Euro-American idea.

It is not an idea that had wide currency in the Black community ever.

The Black community has been characterized by a certain kind of cooperativeness, a certain kind of allegiance to family, to clan.

And that included getting yourself out of trouble if you were in trouble.

And we were considered to be in trouble because we were "Black in a White country", in quotes, in a country in which Whites had control.

It's never been a White country.

It's always been a country of Native Americans, African Americans, European Americans and Asian Americans and I remember recently looking at The MacNeil/Lehrer Report on China, and they opened the second segment, I believe, by saying, we are in a country in which the family is more important than the individual.

He said that will be different for Americans because in the United States, we have a society in which the individual is more important than the family.

That's not been true for Black people.

It's been true for White people.

And I think that the 70s did a lot to weaken the idea of the importance of family in the Black community.

I think that those of us who are African Americans felt that the 60s is over.

A good part of our work has been done.

Now we can go to something called, quote, "beyond integration" closed quote.

I think that's a dangerous position for us, because I think that while legal segregation has fallen and we should teach children what that is, many of them don't know it existed.

They don't know how we suffered.

And in the 70s, because we were helping our children learn to be individuals, because we were moving around in something called integration.

I don't know that we understand what integration is, really.

I don't know if we understand that we lost 80 thousand teaching jobs throughout the South, that the idea, of the importance of having loyalty to one's racial and cultural family as important to our survival.

I don't think that we teach that to children today.