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No serious discussion on ideology and culture in the US is complete
without a reference to the issue of race. Indeed, race has always defined the
contours of American culture—in language, music, literature, politics, humor, and other aspects of social life, as the Irish, Italians, Polish, and other immigrants from Europe have faced instances of discrimination, harassment and abuse, beginning with the genocide of native Americans. American cultural history has been filled with consistent and pervasive discriminatory practices against the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Mexicans, Arabs and other people of color. Chapters and books could be written on the complex interrelations between the multiple racial, ethnic, and national cultures in the US. However, the most distinctive feature of race relations in the US has been and still remains the division between blacks and whites.1 In this context, it would do well to look into the troubled relations between African Americans and the dominant white society as depicted in the popular animated cartoon Tom and Jerry (T&J).
Defined by color or otherwise, race has always been and remains a crucial issue of social and cultural struggle in the US. It also continues to communicate across social and cultural boundaries. Prior struggles and their outcomes, and the changes in the social and cultural structure of the contemporary American society have made racial relations more contradictory than ever before. However, an examination of the question of race in America through the lens of ideological discourses, especially in popular culture, will help to unravel the chronic social conflict and the myth of the American Dream. The dominant group continually negotiates its relationship with subordinate groups through its economic and political control over the instruments of production. The hegemonic attitude of the dominant group filters through the cultural practices and economic and political structure into a seemingly acceptable code.
Understanding popular culture in this way challenges the traditional constructions of cultural history. Popular culture and popular cultural art forms, including comics and animated cartoons like T&J, have been usually seen as the opposite of legitimate or “highbrow culture.” The dominant cultural group refuses to acknowledge it as the integration of cultural practices by competing social groups. This is evident from the great deal of self-destructive, masochistic hostility that has been spun around the black characters and/or the myth of stereotyped characters like ‘Mammy’ invented by the American historians. The deviance of the black woman as the slave, her physical strength, her sexual promiscuity, her propensity for dominance in the household, and her emotional callousness toward her children and her mate have become the ‘linchpin of theories of black inferiority’, first in the historical accounts of whites and black historians, and then in sociological accounts.
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