The Mexican stamp controversy continues

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that controversial new Mexican postal stamps featuring a stereotypical Sambo-type character called Memin Pinguin, should be withdrawn. A spokesman for the Mexican ambassador to the US, Rafael Laveaga, told the New York Times that Memin Pinguin was no more racist than the popular US-created cartoon character Speedy Gonzales.

The comparison is weak for a number of reasons. First, Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from its lineup several years ago because of its stereotypical portrayal of Mexicans. Second, while some Hispanics say they saw Speedy Gonzales as a positive character, Memin Pinguin is described as sweet but stupid, and Afro-Mexican reaction to its re-introduction makes it clear that it is not regarded positively.

Further, "positive" stereotypes can also be oppressive -- just look at the model minority myth as it pertains to Asian-Americans. Scholar Siane Ngai explains how such stereotypes can actually reinforce racism:

"... [J]ust as the caricature of the raced subject as excessively earnest, emotional, and expressive continues to haunt the American cultural imagination, the affective qualities that surface in the dictionary entry for animated—"lively," "full of activity, . . . vigor and spirit"—have a long history of bearing racial connotations, not only in American screen traditions (and particularly in cartoons) but in American literature as well. Epitomized in figures ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe's ebullient Topsy (1852) to Warner Brothers's hyperactive Speedy Gonzales (who first emerged in the 1950s), the ostensibly positive qualities of liveliness, effusiveness, spontaneity, and zeal become affects harnessed to a disturbing racial epistemology, such that these emotional qualities—all variants of what we might call animatedness—are made to function as bodily, hence self-evident, signs of the raced subject's naturalness or authenticity. The animatedness of figures like Stowe's Topsy or, in a doubled sense, Warner Brothers's Speedy, thus foregrounds the disturbing ease with which emotional qualities slide into corporeal qualities in the case of racialized subjects, reinforcing the notion of race itself as a truth located, quite naturally, in the always obvious, highly visible body...."(1)

In other words, when a group lacks diverse representation, stereotypical portrayals become even more powerful. The power of this Memin Pinguin stereotype is evident in the reports from African American scholars working in Mexico that they are routinely called by the character's name. Spanish television giant Univision is routinely criticized for its lack of diversity in both news and entertainment programming. Afro-Mexicans complain that they are still marginalized and rendered invisible in their own country.

But what this controversy shows, above all else, is yet another dimension of the complexity of racial discourse in a world in which so much of the history of racism still remains to be acknowledged and unraveled.

(1) "A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice":
Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject" Siane Ngai,
American Literature 74.3 (2002) 571-601