Dehumanizing images of Black Americans have been misinforming every period of American history from the early colonial era to today. These images and the accompanying narrative have been revised and embellished at key points throughout American history to manipulate social and political opinion.

Thus, three categories of Black racial inferiority have been created: cultural, intellectual and moral, where each was created to elicit specific beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and actions related to Blacks as a group. The primary and central belief to be held and reinforced is their inferiority. These beliefs elicit feelings of repulsion, fear, and compromised security. Each image consciously or subconsciously can trigger or prompt a thought or feeling related to “blackness.” Employing especially dehumanized images of Blacks has been very effective in introducing and reinforcing the ideology of white superiority and black inferiority.

Sambo and Mammy were images created to defend and rationalize the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. Sambo was principally utilized to present a benign portrait of slavery. Sambo had two principal parts to his nature: he was childish and comical. Above all, Sambo was amenable to enslavement, happy despite his condition, grateful for the paternalism of his master. Sambo was a natural slave-servant. He was nonviolent and humble. He most often played the role of buffoon, displaying outlandish gestures and physical gyrations.

The Sambo image was designed to portray the African American male as docile, irresponsible, unmanly, servile, grinning, happy-go-lucky, dependent, slow-witted, humorous, childlike, spiritual singing, and of course, watermelon-eating and chicken-stealing. Referred to as childlike, dependent, happy, and contented, the poor primitive savage was fortunate to have been saved by enslavement. Sambo was an image that provided a measure of psychological safety and security for whites.

With Emancipation and Reconstruction, however, came the necessity for a new, more threatening image of the African American male. The most destructive and perverse image created of the black man was that of the “Brute.” The Brute image and accompanying narrative were that of an animal-like ferocious beast that reinforced the myth of the savage African. The black Brute was a sexual predator who lusted for and chased after white women. The crime most associated with the black Brute was the rape of white women.

Two of the principal stereotypes created for female African Americans during enslavement were: Mammy and Jezebel. The feminine equivalent of Sambo was that of Mammy, the loyal, faithful maternal figure. She was the ideal enslaved woman -- obese, dark, grinning, and desexualized. She, like Sambo, also created feelings of safety and security. Mammy is the fixture of the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. An antithesis of the Mammy had to be created as well.

Jezebel was the image of the seductive, beguiling, hypersexual, lewd African woman with loose morals. It was the oversexualized enslaved woman who was blamed, especially by the mistress of the plantation, for luring the master to bed and producing mulatto children. The Jezebel stereotype was used during slavery to rationalize sexual relations between white men and enslaved black women. The Jezebel image rationalized the rape of enslaved black women; the implication being that white men did not have to rape black women. During the Jim Crow era, the Jezebel stereotype of the black woman naked or scantily dressed was portrayed in American consumer culture as ashtrays, postcards, fishing lures, drinking glasses, and sheet music.

The “moral inferiority” of African Americans is the most propagated image in the current American mind. The image of the black Brute is firmly entrenched in the collective white mind in American society. The image and language have evolved to portray the black man as violent, a drug dealer, a criminal. The predator Brute image has in recent years been transferred to young black males walking down the street, several of whom have died innocently at the hands of the police. This culturally conditioned fear of the black male is demonstrated in emotional expression of a Michael Brown appearing “beast-like” or the killing of Tamir Rice, a black boy playing with a toy gun. It is this image that possibly plays in the minds of policemen who kill innocent black men.

The word welfare, used in a general way, became coded language for the lazy, licentious “Welfare Queen” whose only ambition in life is to have babies out of wedlock and secure government assistance, paid for by hardworking white taxpayers. When viewed in a film, the image of a disgusting, abusive Black mother who allows her daughter to be sexually abused fits neatly into the historical beliefs about the negligent enslaved mother whose infant dies, or the overly sexed enslaved woman who lures the master into a sexual relationship that produces a mulatto child. This same narrative evolves into the morally corrupt Black female who lacks the motivation to better her life and depends upon welfare to support herself and her children out of wedlock. While viewed simply as movie script, this narrative and these images reinforce culturally conditioned beliefs about Black women.

The stereotypical narrative and images of blacks are an essential aspect of American culture. These images have evolved into culturally conditioned beliefs about blacks in American society. When believed to be art, these beliefs become more firmly embedded in the collective American mind.