Take It Down! Organizing against Racism (review)

In 1905, Ontario Beach Park in Rochester, New York, was graced with a vibrant new carousel designed by the renowned Dentzel Company of Philadelphia. Nicknamed “The Duchess,” the popular attraction featured fifty-two hand-carved animals and two chariots. It also featured a panel with a derogatory depiction of two African American children being terrorized by a rooster. The panel seemingly did not elicit any noticeable protest until 2015; it was not removed from the carousel until the following year. The reasons behind this lag are explored in Take It Down! Organizing against Racism, an exhibit at the Rochester Museum and Science Center in Rochester, New York. The exhibit employs a somewhat basic format. The original eight-foot-long carousel panel lies behind glass in a display case flanked with interpretative text outlining the history of the piece along with discussions of racism and racist imagery. A video monitor and additional text lie below the panel. The compact setup was informed by one of the exhibit’s stated purposes. The curators, a collaboration of Rochester Museum and Science Center employees and a community advisory board, wanted to create an easily portable exhibit that could be displayed in a number of different types of venues, thereby attracting visitors representing a range of demographic backgrounds. The exhibit’s content is decidedly more complex than its form. The carousel panel, depicting two petrified Black children with exaggerated, fire-engine red lips cowering from a menacing rooster, is an example of pickaninny art. The “pickaninny” is one of a number of racist stock characters that pervaded American visual and commercial culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the loyal, desexualized “mammy” and faithful servant “Tom” characters are probably better known to the general American public—most notably in the form of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben—the pickaninny was equally damaging and effective at perpetuating racial stereotypes. Pickaninny caricatures portray African American children as wild, unkempt figures with exaggerated facial features. They are often pictured either in animal-like poses or as the impending victims of an animal attack. Such