Lit of Comics Response #8

Gabrielle Zuniga

King Ho Che Anderson

I skimmed King earlier in another class, but on re-reading it, I noticed how the patched-together collage approach used by the Anderson kind of resembled how he patched together information from different sources to create the biography of MLK. I also appreciated the fact that he didn’t just present the positives but also the negative aspects of MLK. The witness accounts abstracted the faces of those being "interviewed" and is so graphic looking that you almost can't tell their race, or socio-oeconomic background and you don't 

Stereotypes both perpetuate and reinforce negative and bigoted ideas about different races. I was constantly reminded of the stereotypes of my race (or at least the half-black part) during high school, by my peers, who said they were “only joking” but these “jokes” were constant, and tended to snowball. Whenever I called them out on their stereotypes and racist jokes, they were either personally offended or hurt, or justified their jokes by saying that that’s “how black people are.”

Stereotyping isn’t a necessary part of character design and representation. We can design characters that belong to different races that look unique, as people from every race break the stereotypes pitted against them. That being said, during my own character design classes, we are taught that certain features can call to the viewer’s mind certain traits, and that comes together in the shape language of a character. A character with a giant head is used to indicate without words that that character is intelligent, or giant arms to communicate that they are strong. This is where I myself have a hard time putting a cap on what is necessary stereotyping and what isn’t. To communicate that a character is intelligent with a large skull isn’t so damaging in my opinion, but giving a black character “blackface”-esque features to communicate the fact that they are black is a different matter. Blackface represents all of the negative stereotypes that racists associated with black people, and using it in a design could completely ignore all of the diversity among black people. But, to give character traits that aren’t usually seen on a black person, might make it difficult to identify them as black.
EDIT: I enjoyed Boondocks, catching a couple episodes growing up, and at first I was annoyed by the stereotypical representations (and inappropriate content) , but once I noticed how nuanced and realistic the other representations are in the show, I realized that this creator/writer(?) is probably black, or at least close to the black community. Black people are incredibly diverse, in every way, but especially in their thoughts and opinions. The more stereotypical depictions in media show black people mainly in one opinion, or as a monolithic group of people who believe the same thing.