A group of black women twerk and dance with stereotypical ‘ghetto’ apparel and mannerisms in Taylor Swift’s music video, “Shake It Off”. The video was slammed for Swift’s use of black bodies as props and as glamorized black puppets. Today, white supremacy hides beneath subtle behavior and phrases: for example, non-black people will use the n-word as slang and allege that they are “reclaiming” the expression when they have no acceptable justification as a non-black person, and they have no right to assume the word carries no harm “anymore” when they do not bear the weight of oppression that black people survive through daily. In the eighteen-sixties, racist ideology was concealed by coded racial signifiers through visual media and art as well.
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In the piece, he organized ‘field drawings’ of a black man, an orangutan, and a white man adjacent to diagrams of their supposed skulls to compare cranial traits among ‘different species’. He theorized that the white man evolved separately from the black man; therefore, there were scientific facts proving that black people were beneath the European race, that they were in fact authentically ‘the other’. Interestingly, the drawings were vastly stylized and not realistic reflections one would expect from scientific journals. The white man was characterized by a Greek bust; Grecian society heavily relied on rules that reinforced unattainable ideal features of men. The black man was visualized through a character with “‘scientific’ representations” that included “stereotypes and derogatory images of African Americans” with “an abnormally pronounced brow, protruding lips and teeth, and a back-sloping forehead” . Even more shocking, the monkey appears more human than any other portrait in the study with portrait-style composition and wiry hair. Scientists similar to Norton believed that the intelligence of a creature was dependent on the distance between “the tip of the forehead to the greatest protrusion of the lips”5. The skulls drawn in Norton’s study replicated his views on race with the black man drawn vastly different from the ideal European
In the piece, he organized ‘field drawings’ of a black man, an orangutan, and a white man adjacent to diagrams of their supposed skulls to compare cranial traits among ‘different species’. He theorized that the white man evolved separately from the black man; therefore, there were scientific facts proving that black people were beneath the European race, that they were in fact authentically ‘the other’. Interestingly, the drawings were vastly stylized and not realistic reflections one would expect from scientific journals. The white man was characterized by a Greek bust; Grecian society heavily relied on rules that reinforced unattainable ideal features of men. The black man was visualized through a character with “‘scientific’ representations” that included “stereotypes and derogatory images of African Americans” with “an abnormally pronounced brow, protruding lips and teeth, and a back-sloping forehead” . Even more shocking, the monkey appears more human than any other portrait in the study with portrait-style composition and wiry hair. Scientists similar to Norton believed that the intelligence of a creature was dependent on the distance between “the tip of the forehead to the greatest protrusion of the lips”5. The skulls drawn in Norton’s study replicated his views on race with the black man drawn vastly different from the ideal European