Stanley Crouch

Breaker, trick rider, picador, and the heavyweight ring’s fastest jockey, Ali has made ring time canter and canter, bow, leap over giant bushes, and move so much in his own terms that time became mutual with his grace, Truly the Professor of Boxing, he elasticized his profession, made daring and cunning and mystery part of the craft. Did we ever wonder as much during anybody else’s fights what the champ was thinking?

As with any ethnic group, there has always been an element of self-satire in most black American humor, a touch of the minstrel. But the irony of the grotesque reduction to sambo stereotype by white performers in blackface is that its popularity owed as much to the vitality it distorted as it did to the appeal of racism. Consequently, when cartoon characters are based on actual black entertainers like Fats Waller, the question becomes what it has been since Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley, Flip Wilson, or, for that matter, The Jeffersons. Where does the stereotype stop and the fun begin? Where do we draw the line between vernacular humor and cinematic slander? During the years when these cartoons were made, the shuffling, giggling, lazy, and stupid darkie was supposed to have represented black authenticity to white Americans. Maybe yes, maybe no. What, for instance, did white Americans think when they watched newsreels showing handsome Joe Louis whipping white men with very consistent regularity on programs that also featured Negroes running from sheets in films or personifying incompetence and abandon in cartoons? Perhaps it was simply more convenient to accept the stereotypes.

The American dream is actually the idea that an identity can be improvised and can function socially if it doesn’t intrude upon the freedom of anyone else. With that freedom comes eccentric behavior as well as the upward mobility resulting from talent, discipline, and good fortune—and the downward mobility observed in some of those who inhabit the skid rows of this country because they prefer the world of poverty and alcoholism to the middle-, upper-middle-, or upper-class backgrounds they grew up in. As one bum who had obviously seen better days said to a waiter as he was being ushered out of the now defunct Tin Palace for panhandling, “People come from all over the world to be bums on the Bowery. Why should I deny myself that right?”