Looks representation of black bodies in the Jamaican media and the extent to which this representation perpetuates historical stereotypes.

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Reinventing the Nigger: The Perpetuation of Racial and Gender Stereotypes in
Energy Drink Ads
By Taitu Heron, Women’s Media Watch Jamaica
For WMW Newsletter Volume 6, Issue 1, 2010.
The history of the interaction of cultures and imperialism has been replete with racial and gender
stereotypes of Africans, Asians and Indigenous peoples in relation to European historiography and
projections of themselves as a superior standard for the rest of humanity to emulate. For the African,
the imperial project was clear: de-Africanize, racialise, dehumanise and objectify. In short, turn Africans
into niggers.
In looking at the Mandingo roots drink advertisement, WMW
finds that it falls victim to a contemporary manifestation of an
age-old European ideology and representation of African
humanity as black, overly sexed and animalist. Let us go back a
few centuries and explore the justificatory language of European
discourse that was consistently perpetuated during the 15th
to
early 20th
centuries as means of sustaining the imperial project of
capital accumulation and geographical expansion (Said, 1993: 45).
During Afro-Caribbean enslavement for instance, the dominant
‘positive’ model of manhood and masculinity was defined in
European terms as embodying
power, property, gentility, a
protestant or Catholic ethic and high command of English, French or
Castillian, depending on which European colonial power that provided
the narrative. African manhood and masculinity was posited as the
negative opposite: muscular, brutish, devoid of intellect, having a
large penis, thriving on strong carnal energies that could serve the
needs of populating the plantation; while African womanhood and
femininity was perceived as: “extreme lasciviousness” and prone to
“simple and animal living” (Edward Long, 1774, vol. 2 cited in Jahoda,
1999). With different physical endowments than the European
counterparts, these feminine differences of African women were
often exaggerated as lacking refinement, posture, and proper
reproductive functions, reduced to being “wenches” to breed on
plantations and subject to sexual violence by white men. In short, this
consistent ideology served to emasculate, defeminise and make
niggers out of enslaved African men and women respectively. Certain
pejorative categories such as “Hottentots”, “Mandingos”, “Negroes”, “Negresses”, “bejewelled darkies”,
“Congoes”, Guineamen” and many more emerged from centuries of writing of European “explorers”,

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planters, colonial administrators and missionaries from the Renaissance period right through to the Age
of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Imperialist Expansion and well into the 20th
century
(Alleyne, 2002, Wood, 2000; Jahoda, 1999).
If one compares the picture of the willing model, Maliah Michel for the Mandingo ad (above) with the
picture of “Hottentut Venus”, (above) the subject of 18th
century scientific objectivism, often used to
justify “close kinship with apes” and whose body upon death was dissected by George Cuvier who was
fascinated by the “genitalia of blacks”; what perpetuations of the nigger do we see?
While it is impossible to present the range of European writers, writers such as Christoph Meiners,
Freidrich Blumenbach, Hamilton Smith, George Cuvier, G W Hegel, Jules Virey or William Lawrence, to
name just a few, all primarily used religion, science, anatomy, zoology and ‘anthropological observation’
to spread a strident ideological message of inferiority of every race that was not European: African,
Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Native Americans—were equally bad and uncivilised – only the Europeans
had it right (Jahoda 1999: 68). Virey for instance, constantly harped on the ‘animality of blacks’:
Moreover, the negro brutally abandons himself to the most villainous excesses; his soul
is ...more steeped in the material, more encrusted in animality, more driven by purely
physical appetites... if man consists mainly of his spiritual faculties, it is incontestable
that the negro is less human in this respect; he is closer to the life of brutes because we
see him obeying his stomach, his sexual parts, in sum his senses, rather than reason
(Virey, 1834, Vol. 2, p. 117, cited in Jahoda).
Fast forward these ideologies a few centuries, and we will find that contemporary versions exist and are
often imbibed by subjects themselves and the nigger becomes reinvented well into present day in our
media culture. The Mandingo roots drink advertisement, alongside other advertisements, join a spate of
energy drinks on the Jamaican market that rely on racial and gender stereotypes which promote the
idea of black male prowess (if little else) and lascivious and pliant
black females ready for receiving. With a woman straddling the
human size bottle as large as a phallus, the Mandingo roots wine
advertisement asks, “Are you man enough?
This is not the first time that we have participated in our own
self-denigration. This persistent portrayal of black men as sexual
beasts, stud-like, muscular and well-endowed that was also
portrayed in the 1975 Hollywood film (re-released on DVD 2008),
of the same name “Mandingo”. As seen in the movie’s poster,
the man has no identity; he is reduced to being a headless male
slave in chains embraced by female whiteness that he has to
sexually service.

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Other energy drinks such as Jagra play on similar notions of sexual prowess and the potency of the drink
that will give men the power to “take charge and rule”, ostensibly over women in the bedroom. There is
a very thin line here between what can be perceived as encouraging hard core consensual sex or
promoting situations that may create sexual
violence.
The global media also plays a role in this too, as a
conglomerate, images, music and videos play on
racial and gender stereotypes, such as thugs,
gangstas, hoes, and bitches and is further
wrapped up in white dominated ownership of the
media. Whilst some members of the African
American communities and Jamaican
communities internalise these representations
and offer them up to fans to emulate, these
images have an impact on self-perception,
identity and what young people may deem as
possible and legitimate expressions of
themselves. With every Lil’ Wayne, 50c, or Bounti
Killa, there is a Common or Talib Kweli or Tarrus
Riley that counter acts the negative flow. Yet
there is cause for concern because the flow of the
tide is often times heavy and the means to
decipher are often times devoid of historical and
cultural contexts in which to interpret the present.
It is not very often that WMW adopts a historical approach in its critique of the media. However, the
energy drink advertisements commanded a response that seeks to remind us all that violence can be
mental as much as it can be physical. The use of denigrating racial and gender stereotypes generated by
former Imperial/European powers, is a form of self-imposed mental violence when as Jamaicans we
continue to give life to lies that reduce our own sense of power; and in so doing reduce our own
humanity. As human beings living in an era of post-emancipation, we have an obligation not to
perpetuate anti-African, anti-human stereotypes and to point these out where they occur, especially,
when we do it to ourselves.
It is hoped that the market researchers for these products (and others) can dig deeper into their cultural
recesses and use the strength, indomitable spirit, humour and sharp intellect that we have instead in
order to generate and market other products.
References
ALLEYNE, Meryvn. 2002. The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and
the World. Kingston: UWI Press.
Drink responsibly

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JAHODA, Gustav. 1999. Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture.
London: Routledge.
SAID, Edward, 1993. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Verso Books.
WOOD, Marcus. 2000. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-
1865. NY: Routledge.