Good intention photos that make me think…. Well wait a minute (and in this case it makes me think…. Holy Crap….YIKES!!)

Part Eleven:

Back in the early parts of the 1900’s this was seen as “entertainment”, accepted and the norm. It is not just the picture that gives me pause for thought, but the song that this picture is the advert for. Here we have, what was billed at the time as “the most successful hit song of 1901”.

How times have changed… or have they? With our climate of political correctness and ability to “know the right language”, one can still get away with such ideas… just not in such a blantenly overt manner of hatred. Like him or not, the manner in which people interact with the President of the United States if they are opposed to him is more disrespectful (in terms of the way people speak to/about and with him) than from what I have seen or heard of any president of that country in my lifetime.. and I am sure longer. Generalizations of certain groups of people are strong in many cultures today.

Today we subvertly do it through such things as “profiling” of certain cultural backgrounds. Plastic surgery (to make eyes wider, change noses to look more like others etc) marks another way that internalized ideas of these things rear their ugly head. Whitening products (especially in Eastern countries) for ones skin and other such advertising notions still navigate society as a whole.

We are a long way from true equality… but at the same time (I would like to think and hope) we are a long way from where we were in the time of this song….

For your interest (of the thinking of many at that time… and I am sure still this time as well for some) the lyrics to this song….

They are as follows: (seriously makes me stop to think about ideas of human thinking and what fear one has inside oneself that would drive them to think in this manner)

Although it’s not my color,
I’m feeling mighty blue;
I’ve got a lot of trouble,
I’ll tell it all to you:
I’m cert’nly clean disgusted
With life, and that’s a fact
Because my hair is wooly
And because my color’s black.
My gal, she took a notion
Against the colored race.
She said if I would win her
I’d have to change my face;
She said if she should wed me,
That she’d regret it soon,
And now I’m shook, yes, good and hard,
Because I am a coon.

CHORUS:
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I wish my color would fade.
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I’d like a different shade.
Coon! Coon! Coon!
Morning, night and noon.
I wish I was a white man
‘Stead of a Coon! Coon! Coon!

I had my face enameled,
I had my hair made straight.
I dressed up like a white man,
And cert’nly did look great.
Then started out to see her,
Just shortly after dark,
But on the way to meet my babe
I had to cross a park;
Just as I was a-thinking
I had things fixed up right,
I passed a tree where two doves
Sat making love at night;
They stopped and looked me over,
I saw my finish soon.
When both those birds said good and loud,
“Coo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oon.”