"What You Swatting At?"

This is the video that has been looping in my head all week. It's crass, to some offensive, and I have not been able to stop laughing at it for years.

Like all great satire, it points out the absurdity of its target by taking that target's intellectual underpinnings to their logical extreme. Here the target is European-America's Reconstruction era fantasy of slavery, epitomized in the still vibrant corporate brand names of Aunt Jemima pancakes and Uncle Ben's rice. Of course, on our shelves today Aunt Jemima has been modernized to look like she could be the Secretary of State, but no one has forgotten her recent slave scarf past. In the video, see how Aunt Jemima busts into her husband's commercial with her huge smile and pile of pancakes, eager like the race traitor she is to coon it up for white America, as personified by the camera. It is all of black America that yells back at her, through Morgan, to shut up.

While satirizing one corporate icon, this Saturday Night Live sketch smartly links that attack to the same white supremacist notions about American chattel slavery that were also presented in the movie Song of the South: that slavery was an idyllic state for African Americans, who lived in childlike simplicity in the loving care of their captors. It is still rather stunning how many white Americans cling to that notion, that fantasy, and refuse to acknowledge the toxicity of the ideological roots behind such notions. Cut and paste this link to visit a Song of the South fan site to see an example of this: http://www.songofthesouth.net/ . They seem to me much like children nostalgically clinging to a worn out, now hazardous toy. It is from this movie that the clip takes its art direction: the perpetual sunsets, the flushed coloring, and of course the animated Disneyesque bluebirds fluttering on Uncle Jemima's shoulders. The latter leading to the funniest line in the piece, "What you swatting at?"