Sterotypes

Before this assignment, I had never actually looked at the Amos n’ Andy show through the eyes of the person with whom it was stereotyping,   I had grown up in a very anti-black area. I had not been exposed to any positive attributes of the Black American. I grew up with the family listening to this and thinking it was good entertainment and very funny, I had not ever heard anything other than the stereotypical negative portrayal of the Black American. After listening to this with a different perspective, the overwhelmingly racist media of the time became immediately apparent. It is fairly obvious that Amos and Andy are White Americans pretending to be Black Americans as the characters reflect the stereotype of a Black American during the time and not who an actual Black American is.

The characters of Amos and Andy reflect the stereotype of Black Americans being less intelligent than White Americans. In the show I listened to, the characters introduce each other as being "incompetent." They are able to fool each other very easily over insignificant matters. When they are discussing splitting money with each other, they have no idea how to perform any simple math operations and come up with random numbers. During one part of the show, they are reading a map and trying to figure out how to get to Alaska, but they continuously confuse roads with rivers and vice versa. The stereotypical "Black American dialect" is a main focus in the show, attempting to reinforce the unintelligent Black American stereotype.

The White American actors in the show attempt to capture the Black American lingo heard in the stereotypical media of the time. They attempt to do this by purposely using bad grammar and by mispronouncing and chopping words. There is never a "g" at the end of verbs ending in "ing." For example, loafing becomes loafin'. Other words and phrases such as "nuttin' here," "lumosine," and "overwhelmed" are consistently used to enhance the comical aspect of the...