Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Distasteful VH-1 reality show, "Sorority Sisters", is a new low in Black America

I am writing this post in disbelief that a show in which VH-1 produced called, "Sorority Sisters", is actually being broadcast over cable network television. This show is looked at by other groups of people to show the world how Black Americans, college educated people, act no different than your stereotypical ghetto, ratchet, hood nigga bi*##. This show proves that the dollar is the preferred religious method of attainment over dignity, vibrant culture and progression toward equal rights.


Whoever these black women are just regressed the black culture to a period of the early Jim Crow era. I thought that getting a college education was supposed to improve your situation for equal opportunity in the workforce and better treatment of a person's civil rights. Not in these day and times. Instead of improving and developing the current situation of African Americans in a racially divided country these shows promote the exact opposite.
Typical caricature of a black man
in the early 1900's

Back in the days of the Jim Crow era, plays were put on by white people in black face called minstrel shows. These shows were meant to demean, hurt and ridicule another group of people purposefully. When television was invented these minstrel shows were broadcast nationwide in people's living rooms. A famous writer said, "If I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity, I should have little use for opera." -- Mark Twain.

Minstrel performances evolved from several different American entertainment traditions; the traveling circus, medicine shows, shivaree, Irish dance and music with African syncopated rhythms, musical halls and traveling theatre. 
T.D. Rice, the father of American
minstrelsy

The "father of American minstrelsy" was Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice (1808-60), who in 1828, in a New York City theatre, performed a song-and-dance routine in blackface and tattered clothes. Rice's character was based on a folk trickster persona named Jim Crow that was long popular among black slaves. Rice also adapted and popularized a traditional slave song called Jump Jim Crow.   
His act was an immediate sensation and while continuing to prefect the routine, Rice gained fame and fortune by performing it throughout the U.S. and in England.

In 1842, the songwriter Daniel Decatur Emmett and three companions devised a program of singing and dancing in blackface to the accompaniment of bone castanets, fiddle, banjo, and tambourine. Calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, they made their first public appearance in February 1843 in a New York City theater.
The show was so popular that many imitators emerged while the demand for minstrel shows quickly became insatiable {insatiable, [adj] - incapable of being satisfied, always wanting more; from Merriam-Webster Dictionary}. In 1844, only one year after the first performance of the Virginia Minstrels, a blackface minstrel troupe called the Ethiopian Serenaders played at the White House for the "Especial Amusement of the President of the United States, His Family and Friends."  Wow, no wonder this country is divided on the issue of race and the system of racism/white supremacy.



Televised Black Minstrel Show

Blackface performers are, "...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens." -- Frederick Douglass



Initially, Blacks were able to participate in minstrel shows only by declaring themselves "real coons." The minstrel shows of the 21st century are performed by eager and willing African Americans with shows like: Love and Hiphop, Basketball Wives (in which they are not even wives), Real Housewives of Atlanta, Hollywood Divas, Football Wives and Sorority Sisters. Sadly there are so many more to name but I won't do that in this article so I'll address all the other reality minstrel shows in another post.


Sources: Ohio History Central, black-face.com, PBS.org, U.S. History Scene, Ferris State University, Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

 

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