Sheri L. Parks
Associate Professor
American Studies Department
University of Maryland
slp@umd.edu

In the article "An Image Popular in Films Raises Some Eyebrows in Ads," Jeremy Peters (New York Times, August 1, 2006) documented the concerns of some marketers and media scholars over the "sassy" black women showing up in television advertisements. We need to ask just what is it about "sassy" black woman that bothers us so much? In one Dairy Queen commercial, detailed in the article, an African American women gasps irritably when a fellow passenger is distracted by someone else eating his Dairy Queen Blizzard and repeatedly drops his luggage on her. Who among us would not be annoyed? In order for the ad to work, we have to project our own fear that she is about to hurt him, to know that it is within her power to hurt him

The actress in the Dairy Queen ad is well known to "tween age" Disney Channel audiences for her recurring role as Helen, the manager of the local movie theatre and sometime employer on the "Drake and Josh" program. One should not look to children's programming for character complexity but Helen has a few surprises. In one episode, Drake's and Josh's parents go out of town. When their friends find out, the boys end up with a party that they cannot control. They call Helen to help. In a sly twist, the show makes use of the expectations the audience brings to the show; we all expect that Helen will come to their rescue and angrily shut down the party. Instead, she joins it.

American popular culture is full of mature black women who have power of their own. If we insist on seeing them as all-negative images, it may because of our own emotional baggage. In an ad for Twix mentioned in the article, the worry was that the black woman might have erupted. A marketing scholar was quoted as saying the images are "perpetuating a stereotype that black women are strong, aggressive, controlling people. I don't think you want to do that."

Why not? When white men are strong, aggressive and controlling, they call them heroes.

If the image is "a return to a disturbing past" then the concern must be that she is a neo-Mammy. There it is: the word that nobody wants to say, a word that still may carry more shame and rage than any other for African Americans. Even the milder word "sassy" harks back to slave women who stepped beyond their roles as slaves, who talked back to their masters. You can only be sassy if you are a subordinate. Otherwise, you are just assertive, which is usually seen as a good thing in popular culture What was disturbing about that past was that the strong black women were slaves, not that they were strong. Not every powerful black woman is a Mammy.

Popular culture carries the mythology of the larger culture--marketing and children's programming are just more blatant about it. Commercials are short and tend to use images that we instantly recognize, but in so doing, they also may reduce mythic images to caricatures. The giant with the vegetables and the elves baking cookies in the hollow of a tree are the most obvious examples but hardly the only ones. The strong black woman comes in a variety of forms, from the sacred images of Black Madonnas, to the black women who arrive to save the day in dramatic television, films and comics, to the parade of magic black ladies on kiddy TV.

The strong black woman has such lasting power because her origins reach deeply back into Western culture, which had well known images of dark and fierce females long before Africans were brought to the colonies. The European mythologies applied to the women coincided with commonly held images that the African women had of themselves. The strong, resilient and assertive women to whom writers, producers and audiences are responding represent a cultural archetype, that can be found in cultures around the world. Both secular and divine, they often have been thought to be especially adept at rescue, transformation and redemption from the most difficult of circumstances.

Black women are rescuing, transforming and redeeming people all over the American popular culture. Sometimes they even win NAACP image awards for it. It is when the images become humorous that they sting, but our shame may be blinding us to the full complexity of those images, even within advertisements. The Pine-Sol lady is mentioned as being aggressive against dirt, but the larger lesson is that she, like most of the strong black women in popular culture, transforms the people and circumstances around her. The more pressing questions are whether these are exercises of true power and who reaps the benefits?

There are even reasons for the largeness: all of the old goddesses were big women plus black culture has long held a different standard of weight and beauty. Overeating is also a result of the stress from being strong all the time. Obesity is a serious health problem for African Americans, as for many other Americans, but the concern seems less based on health concerns and more on conforming to Hollywood 's standard of beauty. We solve nothing by vilifying large women. The large black woman is one of the only positive images of women bigger than a twig in the popular culture. Raven Simone is a good example.

The strong black woman is a central figure in black families and culture. Like the black woman who reported liking one of the commercials, many black women identify strongly with the image. African American women often report seeing themselves as strong black women who work hard for their families and communities. Admiration for them is visible throughout black culture, in neighborhoods, in literature, in media, even in hip-hop. Bill Cosby recently and controversially called upon the 2006 all female graduating class of historically black Spellman College to assume visible leadership of black America because the men were not doing it.

Usually, however, the strongest critics of visible, strong black women are black men. Their concern could come from protectiveness or it could come because those strong black women are in the way of black men attaining European style patriarchy.

The title of the 2006 reenactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act carries the names of three recently deceased black female icons, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King . In an editorial for the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Hazel Trice Edney argued that the gesture did not make up for the fact that black women were still being pushed to the back of the bus by black sexism. The movement has never been partial to public displays of power by black women.

In his NYT article, Peters rightfully notes that many of the fictional images are being created by black artists. African American culture is mature enough to look more deeply into the images that still affect us as a people but we need to realize that once an image is released into the popular culture, there is no way of controlling who uses it or how. When one part of the audience still harbors deeply ingrained racist assumptions and the other part harbors sensitivity, real or imagined, using old and painful racial images can be tricky (ask Dave Chappell) and even benign or positive stereotypes can be problematic (ask some Asians about being boxed in as "model minorities"). Mass media representations always have been and always will be double edged swords for racial minorities and women.