The art market has favored African American artists such as Charles and Colescott whose work “promotes” racial stereotypes even though the artists’ purpose is ironic. In each of their paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, longing, and violence appear, reminding the African American community that they cannot detach themselves from the past as it shaped them to what they’ve become, and ultimately how they are portrayed. However, a film that played a pivotal role in creating the negative racial stigma associated with blacks throughout American culture is the film The Birth of a Nation.
Birth of a Nation paved the way for racial stereotypes of Africans Americans to transcendent time throughout motion pictures. The film Birth of a Nation (1915) was adapted from Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman. “Dixon was a minister and lecturer and wrote The Clansman to offer what he felt was an accurate view of the South during the Reconstruction era.