Hello! I'm Yuu, and i love Sanrio! In this book, i'm going to talk about Sanrio! Ready to learn new things about the magical world of Sanrio?
New chapters every week!
This chapter isn't about the characters, but it's mainly about what's wrong with them.
Sambo and Hannah were created in the same year of Bibinba, other controversial characters.
The main thing wrong with them is their design. They are supposed to be black characters, and here is the problem: their design is basically a blackface. What is a blackface? For those who don't know, a blackface is an harmful kind of representation of dark skinned people. A blackface is based on stereotypes like for example big and red donut-shaped lips. Blackface was created during 1800 and it was used to mock black people during the "minstrel shows." Minstrel shows showed white actors that performed with their face painted to seem like a stereotypical black character. A blackface is an extremely offensive, harmful and racist stereotype that shouldn't be used.
Hannah and Sambo have the same stereotypes in their character design of a blackface. They would be good characters, if only their whole character design wasn't based on a totally racist stereotype that the harmed the dark skinned community for lots of years.
Luckily, Sanrio apologised for whatever this characters are, and they invited lots of black kids to their Little Ambassadors project. As an apology, Sanrio gave 257.000$ to buy toys to poor kids, and still now, they show regret for what they did. I also heard that they fired the whole group that made those racist characters, but I'm not sure.
I hope that in the future Sanrio will make a redesign, maybe not based on racist stereotypes, because the concept wasn't that bad.
Some other facts about the characters. - The kid's mother is based on the Mammy stereotype from Minstrel show. - I think one of the kid's name is actually a slur (not sure, I have just heard rumours about that.) - They are based on a story that was published in 1899. - Another rumour that I heard was that Sanrio donated to a child's hospital as an another apology. - All of their merch was retired from the market.
Here are some pics of them. In the merch their skin is black, not dark brown, making it an even more obvious blackface.
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Hannah
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Sambo. The chapter ends here.
Sorry if I haven't posted in a while, I started writing some other stuff and I really really liked it. Also I wanted to write more about the blackface/racist stereotypes history, but I thought that I would go out of topic, plus, English isn't my native language, and since is a difficult topic to write about, I thought that for now I would just write the main information.
I hoped you enjoyed, because I learned so many things writing this.
Next chapter: Traumacore Yes, I finally decided to write about it.
Bye!
(Do you also want me to write about Bibinba? They're another racist character btw)
