“The Myth Machine: Stereotypes That Dehumanized Black America”- Visual

 Cadence Grey

 Dr. Harris 

ENGL 2016 

30 November 2025

 “The Myth Machine: Stereotypes That Dehumanized Black America”

 For my final project I chose the visual aspect by creating a collage. My collage assembles several historically pervasive stereotypes imposed upon Black people throughout the twentieth century, using simplified cartoon symbols to illuminate the operations of racial ideology beneath seemingly playful imagery. Each figure: Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Sambo, Macho Man, and the Brute/Mandingo functions as a cultural artifact shaped by white supremacy, designed to restrict and distort Black identity. Although the visual style appears lighthearted, the stereotypes portrayed represent deeply entrenched structures of oppression and misrepresentation. The Mammy symbol reflects the expectations Richard Wright describes in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”, where as in Black labor under segregation demanded cheerful submission and rigid deference to white authority. The Jezebel figure parallels Zora Neale Hurston’s depiction of Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, particularly in Chapter 2, as she becomes aware of how her emerging womanhood is scrutinized and sexualized through the white gaze. Sapphire, represented through imagery of anger or sharp speech, connects directly to Michele Wallace’s critique in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, where she argues that Black women were frequently framed as overly aggressive or emasculating to justify their exclusion from patriarchal and racial power. Meanwhile, the Sambo stereotype renders Black men childish and incompetent, a stark contrast to the Macho Man stereotype that Wallace identifies as a culturally constructed hypermasculinity shaped by both racism and certain strands of Black nationalist ideology. The Brute/Mandingo, symbolized by a caged panther, reflects the long-standing myth of the violent, uncontrollable Black male body, a perception Wright shows to be deadly within the logic of Jim Crow. Collectively, these stereotypes rely on binary opposition, constructing whiteness as rational, pure, and moral while relegating Blackness to the realm of the emotional, the dangerous, and the inferior. My collage exposes how such binaries worked in concert to naturalize racial hierarchy and dehumanize Black identity. 



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