who some of the collector's are. I was.
Check out this article.
Excerpt:
And that brings up the second question: whether items that perpetuate racist stereotypes should be sold on online auction sites. Black memorabilia, also called black Americana, is a phrase that covers a wide range of items, from Aunt Jemima cookie jars to slave shackles, from Negro League baseball jerseys to postcards bearing photographs of lynchings.
To many people, some of these objects are offensive reminders of a racist past. But others argue that the objects are part of history and worthy of preservation, that they serve as important reminders of that racist past.
Many collectors of black memorabilia are black (estimates range from 50 to 80 percent); well-known collectors include Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby and Spike Lee. Lee made extensive use of black memorabilia in his 2000 movie Bamboozled, about a 21st century minstrel show that becomes a hit TV series. ---------------------------snip------------------------------------------
In 1994 Pilgrim founded the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State as a way of preserving the more than 4,000 artifacts he had collected (many of them purchased on eBay). He wanted to put them into a context that would ensure they would be used to teach about and prevent racism, not perpetuate it.
Pilgrim's work has made him a veteran of online auctions and knowledgeable about collectors of black memorabilia and their motivations.
"There are 50,000 to 100,000 people who buy" black memorabilia, he says. "They're black and white. I'd say there are five categories. There are people who speculate, who hope to make money from the items. There are those who are nostalgic for the good old days, whatever those were.
"There are liberation buyers, who want to take the stuff out of circulation. There are people like myself who want to use it to educate. And there are those who say, 'It's my First Amendment right to buy the weirdest, dumbest thing I can buy.' " Pilgrim says that the use of the n-word in titles in online auction descriptions isn't a problem. Other items contain the word as part of their design or brand name, such as cans of N---head brand oysters from an old Baltimore company or early 20th century prints of a group of black children about to go swimming, with a caption reading "Last one in's a n---."
Pilgrim has bought thousands of such items for the museum and knows a great deal about their authenticity. "Some people say these things are part of history," he says, and he agrees that they can teach us about the past.
--------------snip----------------------
taken from:
http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/newslist/floridian/Which of course, isn't to say that this person's items have ANY historical significance at all. I get the sense that most of her items are just hideous reproductions. Ways for people like this to relive the "glory days." :eyes:
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
