On the Dreadful Nature of Unseen Point-Blank Racism

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2572

I've written a number of times about tertiary,  massively incorporated examples of racist behavior in the pre-WWII United States. Impossibly bad stuff that we would never think of as having any place anywhere today was sort of every place everywhere 75+ years ago.  The racist imagery seems to spontaneously occur in places where there just wasn't any "point" for it, but there it was, a sort of non-sequitur of half-conscious social quiet-loathing.

Tonight's examples were inspired by a Twitter post by Ward Harkavy (https://twitter.com/WHarkavy) on an incredible piece of social propaganda: a patent for rifle shooting game in which the target is an African American. (It is interesting in and of itself that the inventor thought enough of his invention to patent it so that no one would steal his idea.)

There it is: the "Electric target machine with reversing target", by William P. Falkenberg and James R. Hall, U.S. Patent # 2188292 A, 1939/1940. "Our invention relates to an improvement in electric target rifle ranges and has for one purpose the provision of an improved target", the target being  Black man. Well, a Black man carrying a chicken, though it could be that "or any other suitable target", whatever that was.  (The folks applying for the patent actually used the word "negro" with a small "N", even though by about this time the fight to deprive African Americans of even the capitalization of the name of the race was over by about 10 years, though there were obvious pockets of resistance.)

"...simulate a negro [sic] carrying a chicken,

or any other suitable design."

 

 From the patent report:

• "...#54 which may for example simulate a negro carrying a chicken, or any other suitable design."
• "We illustrate, however, means for reversing the movement of the target structure in response to every hit so that the negro, if hit, may reverse his direction of movement."

I did a quick search on Google Patents and found a few more examples of this extreme passive-aggressive form of racism.  The second is from 1923,  a "Pursuit toy", U.S. Patent # 1588143 A, by Joseph A. Ross, 1923.  The toy consisted of a cop who would spin 'round and 'round trying to catch/club a Black man whose head would pop up from a sewer cover.  The figure that the cop was chasing according to the report was "in the Form of a negro [sic] or any fugitive".  The profile of the toy shows a cutaway of the patrolman (with raised baton) and the African American head (in the drawing beneath) coming up and through the manhole cover.  

 

 

[Source:  https://www.google.com/patents/US1588143?dq=google+patent+search+negro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ6wEwBDgKahUKEwjph5fq3YvJAhUGdz4KHQGzAbE]

"This invention relates to amusement devices and more particularly to an amusement  device wherein a figure in the form of a policeman is represented as pursuing a second figure in the form of a negro or any fugitive."

• "An officer or pursuing figure 9 operates in a circular path and is supposed to be in search of a fleeing figure 10. Figure 7 illustrated in the form of a negro, and the negro appears at. times from beneath vman-hole covers

The third example is this nasty little toy, "Climbing figure toy", U.S. patent # 1441055 A, by Ralph D. Bellew, 1925, in which a bear chases Black people up a tree to the point where the reach the top and fall off.  From the patent: "...the arrangement being such that when the bear reaches each negro [sic] figure he will carry the latter down or the device and throw him off, after which the bear reascends and brings down the next figure, and so on, until all the figures have been dislodged whereupon the bear ascends to the top of the support presumably to reach the representation of a cub at said top."

[Source: Google Patents, https://www.google.com/patents/US1441055?dq=negro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CF0Q6wEwCWoVChMIq-C-2fOLyQIVRso-Ch032QQr]

The fourth, final, and oldest example in this post is this (insert appropriate adjective) Chicken-Stealing Black Man Bank:

[Source: https://www.google.com/patents/US462150?dq=negro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CF0Q6wEwCTgUahUKEwilkJzo-YvJAhXEdz4KHfjMCzA]

This bank has nothing to do with the scene, at all--it just takes the deposit of some sort of coin to enact the small and insistent tragedy of the African American in tattered clothing trying to steal a chicken. In the wings the coop owner and an angry dog await, and spring into action once the coin deposit is made.  So the entertainment is to see the poverty-stricken Black person trying to steal a meal, and gets caught in the act.  It is considerably older than the other three patents (1923, 1925, 1939), but I included it because of its bold meanness and nastiness, displaying such a scene for pure enjoyment, teaching a child an "attribute" of a race and reinforcing it with the idea of accumulating money--it is more than mildly suggestive that such images could have been deeply written into the memory (subconscious or otherwise) of the kid who used this toy/bank and perhaps perverted their sense of the place of the people of that race in the grand scheme of human beings. 

There are only four of such patents--I assume that there must be more, but four is what I'll use today. The racism in these toys is deep and vicious, but seeing that they were intended to amuse children, parents giving these things to their kids would have seen nothing inherently or necessarily wrong with them, which means on another level that this sort of hatred was so ingrained in the national psyche that it was visible only on the level of amusement, which means that that racism for many didn't exist at all--the stuff was just funny, or something equally dreadful.