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Abstract
This article examines the progression of stereotypical images of African American women in film and advertisements (Mammy, Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, etc.) to deviant figures in political discourse (the Matriarch and Welfare Queen). Locating caricatures within theories of African American deviance, the history of welfare policy, and the crack cocaine controversy, I argue that icons of African American women serve as recognizable, shortcut representations of purported African American pathology used to promote political agendas. Methods include discourse analysis of social policies, historical analysis of images of African Americans in media, visual and literary forms, and ethnographic research with African American former substance abusers. The data informed narrative analysis of the Crack Mother characters in films by African American filmmakers from the 1990s and early 2000s. The data reveals that the Crack Mother icon is an amalgamation of previous stereotypes, operating as a stock character to generate predictable responses from audiences and propagate gender and racial ideology. The Crack Mother is not only a loaded signifier infused with notions of racialized deviance; she is also closely associated with broad social problems. The article brings to question the role of hypervisible African American caricatures, suggesting that they function to sustain white normality.
Stereotypical representations of African American people and culture comprise a mythology of African Americanness that serves as a backdrop of mainstream consciousness. Repeated distortions and omissions in literary and cinematic portrayals of African Americans are a tradition that reifies notions of black pathology. Misrepresentation is not exclusive to entertainment. Grand narratives of addiction consist of social, legal, policy, and scientific elements that perpetuate racial ideology and related material conditions. This dynamic has occurred repeatedly over time, when images of black inhumanity, immorality, immaturity, hypersexuality and so forth were used to justify slavery, black codes, sterilization campaigns and Jim Crow laws, to name a few. Racial ideology is behind war-on-drugs policies that target African Americans. Legislators, like Joe Biden, admitted that media reports and popular culture influenced their support for discriminatory mandatory sentencing for crack cocaine offenses. Legal scholars have outlined the social, educational, and financial impact the widespread incarceration of African American men has had on the black community (Chin, 2010; Alexander, 2010).
The collateral consequences of war-on-drugs policies instituted during the Regan era...