I think the New Yorker was being deeply self-aware and aware when it made its joke. I doubt it will say so in public but I imagine this joke was intended to remind people that the last fuss about this sort of joke ocurred when the Muslim world largely lost its sense of humour when some Danes tried to send up terrorists. Geddit?   

I am not at all sure that it is possible to make a good joke which is not in bad taste. Almost inevitably, a joke will be picking on someone’s weaknesses. Quite often it will pick on the weaknesses a person is thought to have by being the member of some group or other. Of course, one can make wry and ironic jokes: that is, one can make a joke pretending to believe that a person has a weakness widely (but wrongly) thought to pertain to a certain group.

In short, one can be wry, ironic - and post-modern.

Thus, the New Yorker ran a cover which at first sight implied that it believed that Mrs Obama was a 1960’s black radical and that Barack was a Muslim extremist. Then  - one was supposed to spot - it was obvious that the nice and liberal New Yorker could not possible mean that. The cover was a joke at the expense of anyone stupid enough to believe or pretend to believe that the Obamas could be like that. (The joke was doubly tart in that Mrs Clinton’s campaign is believed to have deployed such games.)

The thing went from bad to worse. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in his Financial Times column, John McCain (Obama’s main political opponent, at least outside the Democratic party) joined the chorus of disapproval. Caldwell is quite right, this was perhaps a Machiavellian move. After all, “The cartoon is offensive only to the extent that it is thought plausible”. When McCain deplores the cartoon he is saying one obvious thing but may be saying lots of less obvious things.

Of course, there is a very serious issue here and it is one less discussed. That is, are there any jokes about black people which can be funny and made in public? The answer is too often no. At least, you’d have to be very sure that the joke wasn’t funny simply because the person joked-about was black.

You can make Polish, Irish and Scottish jokes fairly easily (though you might want to watch your back). You’d better be very secure of your ground if you want to make Jewish jokes, or be Jewish (and then your jokes can be in the worst possible taste). But you’d better be careful with black jokes, with the exception of cannibal jokes, which are a tad easier.

It’s worth saying that this is very bad news for blacks. You may think that we should avoid black jokes because blacks have suffered and one shouldn’t make jokes about that. But the real reason why we have to avoid black jokes is that all the stereotypes of blackness are not just about failings (all jokes are about those) but about very serious failings. So when you make jokes, which are inevitably about types, you are likely to be reminding people that black people are thought to be criminal and violent. Car theiving and drugdealing feature heavily in the samizdat of black jokes. That and rough sex.

The truth is that this situation will change only when there are other more positive black stereotypes to build on.  

There is a further problem. This is that we have not yet acquired the ability to see the person beneath the black skin. I mean that both black and white people are very unsure that a joke about any particular black person is about that individual, or about blackness.

It is a very complicated business to work out what would be the shrewdest response to the New Yorker cartoon. But it is very tempting from my own comfortably white and British perspective to say that one plausible response would be to be glad that the New Yorker risked treating the Obama’s as being available for the routine risk of knockabout humour. 

But that gets you into some further difficult territory. Barack Obama may become incredibly important because in time we stop seeing him as black. This is a difficult business: he may get elected because he is black, and he may fail to get elected because he is black. For now then, he is importantly a highly symbolic black person. But we may - with a huge dose of luck - get to admire him (or even fail to admire him) for what he is as a person. He may also become amongst the first black people we can make jokes about as an individual.   

In the meantime, it takes courage to make jokes about black people, and it shouldn’t.

Memorabilia and its dilemmas
by Richard D North
19 June 2008

The Financial Times weekend magazine (June 14/15) ran a witty piece by New York writer Sam Apple.

It was a tale of refined feeling and embarrassment. Proud of his battery-driven plaything, a doll which dances and sings “I Got You” (”I Feel Good”), Sam and his wife found themselves putting it away when a black person visited their apartment. After all, as good white liberals, they didn’t want to offend. Then they wondered if there was greater offensiveness in hiding the thing away.

For a while, they hid James Brown in the basement along with the author’s other problematic doll, a model of a boxing rabbi. (This, as Brown is being promoted as an icon of black culture in the inaugural online show of the forthcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.) Finally, Sam took the singer to work where there was cover in the form of an office doll of Bing Crosby.

All this is from the hands of a master of the ethnically subtle. Sam Apple has written a book, Schlepping Through the Alps, about an Austrian shepherd who sings yiddish songs in towns famous for their history of support for the Nazis. (It isn’t quite the point, but Lionel Blue tells a story of a non-Jewish scrapyard totter who taught his horse Yiddish so it wasn’t frightened of the little boys it met in pre-war Whitechapel, London.)

George Eleady-Cole tells us in his interviews that he has noticed that some people hide their black memorabilia when he’s around. And that’s true even if they’re selling and he’s buying. It can be easier if he has a white companion on buying trips.

We are attempting to get in touch with Sam Apple in the hopes that he will think TBHM is a good final resting place for James.

Only a few of the images in The Black History Museum are directly imperial. But many of them are in some sense imperial. This is because the Empire brought British people face to face with the fact of Africa and the West Indies and their black inhabitants (“natives” was the word cheerfully used for most of history). Indeed, Empire gave British people what might be called an intimate and personal sense of faraway peoples they might otherwise have regarded as wholly foreign.

This is part of the reason why the mainstream British view of “the Black” was quite often quite friendly. It was at other times other things, but it was often quite friendly. That familiarity and friendliness (and yes, it was often patronising) lies behind the success of the gollywog in the famous Robertson jam advertisements.

Empire was a serious business
The British Empire had evolved out of commercial priorities, but it is very important (at least in the minds of Empire’s few enthusiastic modern supporters) to note that the British took their Imperial responsibilities quite seriously. They also became very interested in their worldwide fellow-subjects. I say “fellow-subjects”. It is possible that one of the merits of Empire in the mind of the average white Briton was that it allowed them to suppose that though they were down-trodden at home, they were in some sense masters of all the bits of the world coloured pink (as the Empire was in most atlases).
The British Empire produced the unintended effect that the 60 million of so people in Britain today have a shared history with billions of people around the world.

But it goes even deeper. The British have always thought of themselves as being the progenitors and inheritors of liberty. They have until recently been proud of the way they are governed. It was easy for the British to think that they could provide the world with good government. Other European countries might have empires, but theirs wouldn’t be as well and as kindly managed as ours. (The British were less wrong about that than might be supposed.)

This sense of involvement in part accounts for the way “Empire” was succeeded by “Commonwealth”. The British motives for wanting a post-imperial Commonwealth were not mostly commercial: they were to do with a sense of what was proper and even familial.

So why hate the Empire?
The British Empire divides people. Most young people thing that it was a dreadful thing. It must have been, right?

Well, it didn’t seem so to most people before the Second World War, though the left was deeply suspicious of it and campaigned against it.  The majority view of most Britons up until the 1940s was that their Empire was magnificent (that much isn’t very controversial) and noble (that is).
This changed quite quickly as it became the intellectual and popular mainstream view that no man has much superiority over another. It become obvious during the early twentieth century that “one person, one vote” had to be extended to every person, even if female or black. It followed that it was impossible to deny that democracy should be accorded to countries in the British Empire.

Democracy mostly didn’t last
It happened that the British accorded democracy to their African countries, and the leaders of those countries quite soon cancelled it. Many of those African leaders had learned a socialist rhetoric at British universities, and used to it win power in their countries. But many of them developed what came to be called a “patrimonial socialism” in which they centralised all the functions of the state and then hijacked the benefits for their own families and tribes.

There is a lively argument as to whether this process was itself the product of Empire – and not least the product of the artificial national boundaries Empire produced. Besides, it has been argued, population growth took off just as African leaders took over, and the most benign governments (even an Imperial one) would have struggled.

Anyway, Africa’s problems increased mightily and continue today. One could make a good “what if” case that for many parts of Africa, continued British rule might have been “A Good Thing”. That is especially the case if (hypothetically) the Africans concerned had voted for British rule, a thing few would have done at the time.

The Empire’s diaspora
Instead, you might say, many Africans have voted with their feet. They emigrated to Britain. One way of looking at this is to say that white Britain found a new way of exploiting black people: as cheap labour. Another way to look at it is to say that the immigrants have found a way of getting value out of the white world, and they are welcome to, granted how long the white world sought to get value out of them.

Perhaps the best way to look at immigration from anywhere at all, but perhaps especially from the erstwhile Empire, is to say that it continues the evolution of a globalised world.

Empire is normal
The truth is that until very recently, empire was the historical norm. Any country or state that could, was inclined to extend its maw. The Romans did it spectacularly, but the habit (and it was a practice more than an idea or an ideal) was centuries old when they took over chunks of Britain. The Norsemen did it (as frenchified Normans) when they took over chunks of Britain. The French revolutionaries did it under Napoleon when they aimed to take over chunks of Britain. The Europeans took over the Americas and swathes of Asia and Africa.

Only slowly over these centuries did the idea evolve that this might be a fundamentally wrong thing to do. And only very recently has the idea evolved that imperialism was the second worst thing to do (after genocide). 

Empire as racism
This modern habit of thought lives right next door to the idea that racism is the cause of most evil in the world (even worse than, though similar to, sexism and elitism). The right wing in vain lobs in the idea that totalitarianism is probably at least as bad an idea. They are politely attended-to, and then everyone gets back to hating Hitler more that Stalin or Mao.

However, one can worry about racism, and even hate it wholesale, without necessarily hating empire. It is one thing to see a people (a nation, or tribe, whatever) as weak or even primitive. It is quite another to assume that such people have no value. You may say that it amounts to the same thing, and that taking over someone’s territory, sometimes by force, is to hold them in very low regard. Actually, the fact is that many imperialists admired or liked the people they ruled. There was plenty of bad colonialist behaviour and there were plenty of attitudes it is now easy to condemn. There were attitudes most people knew were wrong, even back then.

The British Empire was often racist if you mean that it believed in the superiority of the white races (of the British race, anyway), and was convinced of its own right to rule. But it was very seldom racist if you mean that it thought its black citizens and subjects were not fully human and deserving of “decent” (if not exactly equal) treatment. There was lots of double-thinking and denial and some nastiness. But The Empire was very far from all bad, and it was nowhere near Hitlerian.

Africa – the dark continent – has a powerful place in the imaginations of both white and black people. For the British, especially, it was where they had several of their colonies. It was where millions of black people who would become slaves were born. It is where tens of thousands of blacks died trying to keep the colonialists off their land. It is also where a good few thousand white men died in colonial service, and their number was probably well exceeded by those whites who were taking Christianity to the African.

Above all, and especially now, the whole world thinks of Africa as a continent with exceptionally high levels of poverty and violent strife. It is also a place in which religion of every kind is a matter of great importance. And there is a lot of extra-marital sex.

Africa has many features which are found anywhere in the world. There are motorbikes and mobile phones. But to a degree which shocks us, there are elements of the Stone Age about the continent. In many places farming has not advanced beyond levels of technology common thousands of years ago. In much of the violence, there is a brutality – an amount of rape and limb-chopping with machetes - which seems deeply primitive.

Alongside this is a really odd problem. Africa is unique in being a continent whose tourism industry is important but dependent on the glamour of animals rather than the glamour of humans.

And where the non-African tourist does get invited to celebrate the African person, it is most often as a member of a glamorous tribe. The art and fabric design which the tourist buys are beautiful – but they are tribal or primitive. The Maasai, in particular, are much admired by visitors. Noble, brave, swift, they are presented as prototypically African. In fact, some Maasai go to universities all over the world, and some are drawn back to the old way of life. But it as hunter-warriors that they are, well, lionised.

There is much that is attractive and good about all this. But it risks being patronising.

All this sounds negative. But the ordinary African person – the “unglamorous” farmer or urban dweller - also captures the imagination of many of the people who visit. All that is unfortunate about Africa also contributes to a level of courage, humour and stoicism amongst its people. Many poor African countries have taken in refugees from neighbouring countries with extraordinary generosity.

It is easy to sound patronising when one says so, but this experience is reflected in the comments of many non-Africans who know the continent well. To ignore their testimony would be as foolish as to ignore everything that is bleak about Africa.

No-one can really guess if and when Africa will start to do well. Some countries are making huge strides. Botswana is an obvious example, but Nigeria and South Africa are amazing too. But the gloomy facts remain, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

There are plenty of theories as to the difficulties Africa faces. Geography (dryness, poor soils and long haulage distances) all make things difficult in many places. A long tradition of looking after one’s own family and tribe in adversity has seemed to make it hard to build sophisticated societies. A deep faith in tradition may have made development harder.

And then there is the difficulty that it is tempting for Africans to blame their colonial legacy for everything which ails the place, even half a century after the colonials left.

It is tempting to argue that a politics and culture of resentment is one of the features which distinguishes Africa and Africa’s intellectuals. Resentment may be natural and justified, but it probably isn’t much use. Arguably, the next heroic quality Africans will need is to forget much of their past.

George Eleady-Cole’s collection has thousands of images of black people, of which we show a tiny proportion here. If there was one thing which characterises these pictures and objects, it is the smile. Time and again, we see the ear-to-ear grin.

It is the standard image of black people. It is a smile which seems to wash away guilt. It is the smile which made many a black entertainer much loved. It is how white people like to see black people.

It’s probably not a coincidence that when blacks generate their own stereotypes of blackness, it’s often an image of an unsmiling tough guy. Think of the Gangsta rapper and his often ironic depiction of the black man. But that’s another story, of blacks biting back. Even the African fertility symbols – there are a few in George’s collection – are markedly serious faces.

Anyway, the images in the Museum are mostly images made by white people and often they were made for white people. So why the smiles?

Firstly, it has always suited white people to think of the black as a cheerful soul. If you are going to take a man into slavery, it’s as well to be able think of him as being disposed to accept his fate and even enjoy it. When he’s been freed from slavery to join the bottom of the working class, it helps if you can think of him as cheerfully unambitious and well-adjusted to his life of service.

Secondly, we have to remember that these portrayals are not portraits. At least they are not necessarily honest portraits. In most cases, we have no idea if there was a life-model for the images: we don’t know if a real person “sat” for them. Even if there was, we have no idea whether he or she was smiling. If he or she was smiling, we have no idea whether they felt like it.

Thirdly, there was every reason for black people to smile. If you are oppressed, it often makes sense to smile at your oppressor. If you are easy-going, agreeable, and compliant, things may go better for you.

So white people may have met a lot of black smiles. And they certainly photographed, drew, painted and sculpted them. There may have been rather fewer genuinely smiling black faces.

Slavery is so obviously very wrong that it might seem perverse to try to find less unkind things to say about it. But actually, revisionism is seldom all bad. There should be no no-go areas for challenge. The more important the issue, the more important it is to apply argument to it. That usually amounts to having a taste – even an over-developed taste – for the counter-intuitive. Here are some arguments which ought to be borne in mind. Some are more dreadful than others. We can always reject them.

Slavery was normal
Slavery has been pretty common and normal in many places for most of history. It is much more common now than might be supposed. It is often remarked, and true, that slavery was commonplace in and from Africa before 17th century Europeans decided that it was amongst the things which would make empire work well in their modern world. The Africans had routinely taken one another into slavery as the spoils of war. It was a small step – a step willingly made – to sell slaves to Arabs for shipment east and (a little later) to Europeans for shipment West.

Africans were suited to slavery
Here’s an argument you may find distasteful, but it comes from a very liberal-minded historian and geographer, Hendrik Van Loon. He noted in the 1930s that Africans were taken west to slave work on plantations in south America after the native indians were found to be unsuitable for the work. Africans were, he says, more biddable. The clear implication is that Africans were thought to be – found to be – better able to adjust to slavery.

You may think that is a wicked thought. But actually, it talks of African strength and stoicism, which one may say are important positives in a character. But there is a negative: I have heard it said by Africans that the greatest African curse is that they will put up with untold suffering with too much patience. Yes, I know: African courage does not go anywhere toward excusing African slavery. Anyway, there were plenty of slave uprisings. Some commentators, by the way, find it important to stress such slave dissidence, perhaps for fear that otherwise Africans and their descendents might be thought complicit in their bondage.   

The Europeans only industrialised the slave trade
One charge against the European slave trade is that it was always wrong in principle, but that it was made much worse in practice by its being conducted on what we would now call an industrial scale. Every increase in scale increased the numbers exposed to indignity, misery and risk of death. Besides, there was a new and dreadful thoroughness. This is a little like the argument that Hitler’s racism against the Jews was more awful than the very common anti-Semitism of all the earlier centuries because it resulted in a uniquely industrial scale of violence against them. This is to imply – probably rightly – that the underlying evil of “old” anti-Semitism (or slavery) became much worse when technological methods (and attitudes of mind) were brought to bear.

The evil of slavery was noted from the start
Throughout its history, there was limited (and ineffectual) campaigning against slavery, mostly by committed or professional Christians. They took the view that God had created all men, and Christ had died for all men, without regard to colour. They especially took the view that when slaves became Christians, that proposition became spikily undeniable. In the end, their view prevailed and the British parliament became the first to ban slavery in its territories and to fight against it nearly everywhere.

Slavery took place in more brutal times
Perhaps the worst period in a slave’s life of European bondage were the months spent in the hold of a ship taking him to the Americas. (Though the journey to the African coast took a terrible human toll, too.) It is worth noting that whilst this was by far the worst sea-faring that was routinely inflicted on anyone, any seafaring was a pretty desperate for most of the period of slavery. That’s to say that everyone on a slave ship was exposed to suffering and risk – crew included. The death rate amongst crew was pretty high though much lower than for slaves in the hold below.   

That sort of argument applies to life on plantations. But on land, the slave’s situation becomes even more difficult to calibrate against our own lives. There is ample evidence of brutality meted out to slaves on plantations. But there were beatings on every ship in every navy and in every regiment of any army in the world. Slaves doubtless suffered illness and disease, but their white masters died plentifully too. So life was much more brutal then. Of course it could usefully be argued now that this widespread brutality was used as a cover for the very much worse brutality on some plantations. Campaigners were more easily fobbed off or lied-to.

Was slavery uniformly awful?
What is perhaps more peculiar to wonder is whether slave plantations were always and everywhere brutal. There is, for instance, evidence of slaves in some places becoming entrepreneurs in their own right. In some places, slaves were able to use their spare time to tend plots of land for profit. This may not have been frequent or even normal, but it is a sign at least that the picture is mixed and complicated.

Lucky to be out of Africa?
There is a further odd thought, but one worth entertaining.  How much worse was slave life in the Americas than life for the African left behind? This depends on your view of a very hotly disputed argument on which there is scant evidence. If you think life in Africa was nasty, brutish and short (a life of regular starvation, skirmishes and home-grown slavery), then you may be prepared to think that slave life in the Americas sometimes or often offered better chances of health, longevity and procreation. This wasn’t a voluntary choice, of course. But it was a picture of a “what if?” that’s worth pondering. For my part, I incline to the view that African life was often truly horrendous (by our standards) and that slave labour was, by comparison, probably often rather better. Of course, objective criteria (heath standards, life expectancy, and so on) don’t capture the fact that slavery was a colossal outrage to human dignity.

Apologising for slavery
What should the descendants of slaves think of the white world which held their ancestors in bondage? What should whites feel about this legacy?

We can begin an answer by saying that whatever else, these are old sins with long-dead perpetrators and long-dead victims.

Why should any living white apologise for slavery to any living black? How does anyone know what side of the argument he or she might have been on centuries ago? This white man might have been the sort to campaign against slavery. Plenty of whites were. This black person might have been an African slaver. Plenty of Africans were.

Black resentment about slavery
In much rhetoric from black voices there is a feeling that black people have a right to be resentful and especially because of slavery. That is certainly true. But is resentment useful to black people? Or rather, one can suggest that each black person has to ask himself or herself whether resentment is useful in their own case.

Here’s a controversial possible thought. Many back Americans and black Britons ought to be grateful for slavery: it was the historical accident which brought them to be American or British. To be brutal, it got them out of Africa. Such people owe no gratitude to slavers – but could usefully spare a grateful thought for the suffering and dignity of their forebears. Most people of any race could usefully think similar thoughts about the ancestral shoulders they stand on. Anyone who thinks along those lines may quickly come to the conclusion that the best way to acknowledge that debt is to help build a great society, here and now.

Of course these are ticklish questions, to say the least. In many cases of strife (in South Africa, North Ireland, Chile and Cambodia to name a few) the same questions arise. To what extent is it necessary to pick over the past and apportion blame before people can “move on”? To what extent does picking over the past and apportioning blame make it impossible for them to do so?

It is at least reasonable to suggest that “victimhood” is bad personal psychology and bad politics. It’s best avoided where possible. Where it can’t be avoided, it needs to be put to serious work.

Some time in the last thirty years, “black” became synonymous with African, or of African origin. Even in the US, where the term African-American is the dominant usage , and especially the dominant polite and political usage, that’s what “black” means. It is the category the government census asks people to tick if they are not “white”, Hispanic, Asian, and so on. [http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/race/racefactcb.html]

The “N” word
“Nigger” has never been a polite word for blacks, but it got increasingly rude in the last fifty years. “Negro”, on which it is based, has always had the flavour of a technical word for people of African descent, to be set against calling all whites from northern Europe, “Caucasian”. Even “negro” has now been condemned as a historical usage. (Actually, in the 19th century the word used to be used for Asians, too.)

Even in the Thirties, Hendrik Van Loon, a polite and liberal author, could use “nigger” as a word capturing the ordinary non-polite and even dismissive way of talking about blacks. He could do so without condoning its usage, but without seeming to condemn it either. People accepted that the word was commonly used and not only by monsters.

If the 1950s and 1960s, it was accepted that white British people would use the word “coloured” or “coloureds” to describe blacks, a term which then included Asians. They would do so, for instance, in notes in their front windows if they wanted to get it across that, along with the Irish, or people with dogs or children, they wouldn’t be letting their rooms to them. Journalists would be told what people thought about “the coloureds” coming in from Jamaica and other West Indian countries, and from Africa and anywhere else.

Long before mass immigration to the UK, white people followed US usage. Black people of African descent were called “coons” and “darkies”. These were not necessarily dismissive or negative words, though they could be. But it is worth remembering that they could be familiar, friendly and affectionate, at least in intention.

What is much more difficult to assess is how well blacks took to being called coons or darkies. Many blacks were complicit in using the words, or accepting their use. But then, many blacks worked hard at being friendly with whites and accepting white usage, and sometimes at great cost.

Things get even more complicated when we come to black or white usage of dismissive words. In the 1970s it became trendy for white youngsters to call blacks “spades”, though many of the people who did so hardly ever met a “spade” and would have been very cautious in using the word when they did.

In the 1990s, the use by blacks of the word “nigger” (or “Nigga” – to capture its full flavour) became current in the black rap music which was sweeping the world. In this context “nigger” was ironic, absurd and edgy, and used – according to circumstance – to denote admiration or dismissal. So things had gone full circle. Woe betide a white person who adopted this usage at the wrong moment.

It seems absurd to ask, “What are black people like?” But since to be black is to be in a category, not least in official censuses, there are presumably some characteristics it captures. Maybe the answer is as neutral as this: blacks are like everyone else. They are just a race which come from Africa. So they have some physical characteristics in common, like any other race. But why wouldn’t there be some cultural features as well? Has Africa left a unique imprint? Or has a history of bondage?

There is some point asking what the English (or Americans, the French) are like. They are bit different from each other. Why wouldn’t that be true of “the Blacks”? You may reply that to be black is to have an ethnic background (a skin tone), and no more, and that black people have every right to be thought of as “normal” English (or American or French). They have a right to insist that we ignore their ethnicity - or to call their ethnicity “English”, or whatever. That’s got a lot going for it.

Still, the question has to be asked, even if the answer is that there is no difference. Anyway, people are constantly being invited to be proud of their identity, and that includes their black identity if they’re black. So is there a black identity? The idea that black Americans are “proud to be black” and insist on being called “African-American” implies that there ought to be. Otherwise, why bother with the distinction?

It is unfair but true that there is much more material about how whites identify blacks than about how blacks think about themselves. It was mostly the whites who wrote the books, made the advertisements, produced the models, painted the pictures, which give us our images of black people.

The Black History Museum provides ample evidence that black people have been portrayed as happy-go-lucky, funky, sexy, jazzy. They have not been portrayed as academic, entrepreneurial, or as classical musicians. The Museum almost exclusively features images of black people as whites wanted to be thought to be portraying them. In private, or amongst themselves, or when they could get away with it, white people often thought of black people as being stupid, lazy, over-sexed, violent, innocent, hard-working and very caring (in the case of the black woman). Some white people have also admired black people as being courageous, patient and tough. This is especially true of white people who have known or thought about Africa.

To some extent, these portrayals – whether more or less friendly or outright vicious - are stereotypes. That’s to say: they are descriptions applied in bulk to black people as a group. They tend to collapse in the face of actually meeting a black person. That’s stereotypes for you.

If the white world could successfully hang these labels on black people, and it could, then whites could go on exploiting blacks, or ignoring them.

But we can very tentatively go a little further. Some of the stereotypes have some reality, and a reality which continues. Black people really do disproportionately feature as athletes and musicians and convicts. Black men also disproportionately feature as absentee fathers. We shouldn’t ignore these facts.

But they are not the same sort of facts. There may be all sorts of reasons why black people can run fast: biology and culture come into it. The same might be said of the way black people take to making music. There is a vigorous debate as to why too many black men father children but don’t help rear them and why too many young black boys fail at school and too many black men take to crime. But people don’t tend to argue that there is inherently, or biologically, any reason for the phenomena. It is assumed there is something wrong in the culture in which these black boys and men mature. Whether they are being failed by black culture or white culture is of course a matter of hot dispute.

There’s lots being said about these issues. It is relevant to this museum project to say that nowadays there is very little production of the kind of imaging of the black which fills this site. What was historically possible (cheerful, sometimes dismissive portrayal of black stereotypes) no longer is tolerated.

You may well say that’s a good thing. You may go on to say that the less we generalise about black people, the less we will risk worsening social problems which already trouble us.

Another response might be that this site shows that whites have seen “blackness” in all sorts of ways. They weren’t always especially honest ways. Now that whites are shy of portraying black people and black stereotypes, it is time for black people to portray themselves and discuss themselves in terms of their own devising. I’d say that is beginning to happen quite a lot and in very fruitful ways.

Liberal Europeans agonise about Hergé’s Tintin au Congo (1931). (The Wikipedia article on the theme seems comprehensive, if unimaginative.)  It is interesting to read a New Statesman account  of the controvsery which comes from Tim Butcher, the (impeccably liberal) author of Blood River - A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, who is hot from the Congo and sees things differently. (Hergé fans in the Congo, NS, 26 July 2007).

Indeed, you may notice that the more Mr Butcher quotes the opinions of Africans (rather than his own), the less we seem to have to worry about Hergé’s portrayal of the Congolese.