In viewing the “Hateful Things” exhibit from the Jim Crow museum of racist memorabilia, several items depicted standard racism from the past, but the item with the most prevalent racism, I would have to say, would be the “A Comical Game. Atta Boy” card game. Within these playing cards it shows various characters, both black and white doing day to day things. While one card shows an older white mail with a cigar and cane smoking a cigar, there is another card with a black male doing the same thing. The differences between the two are subtle, but also where the racist aspects arrive. Both white males with these outfits on are both wearing top hats, which I believe used to represent wealth and/or class depending on how tall the hat was, while the black man is wearing a hat that is fitted to his head showing that he is somehow inferior to the white man.
When looking at all of the cards as a whole, you can see distinct differences between the white people and the black. All of the white people seem to have some sort of wealth in their nice clothes, doing things such as reading or painting. The black people seem to be depicted as dumb and poor. They are all dressed up in what seems to be rags for clothing in comparison to the white people’s attire. Also all of the black people’s expressions are dumb looking, implying that blacks are dumb. Other than just their looks on their faces, the cards have them doing things such as riding in a boat with a man overboard looking as if he cannot swim, another of a man standing still on ice with icicles hanging from his body. The sum of all of these pictures is that it portrays blacks to be inferior to whites, in style of dress, daily activities, and even intelligence. It may be a stretch, but one more possibility would be the card of the dog. One would assume that the dog is owned by a white person, sitting pretty with a tie on its neck, but the dog is brown. It may be coincidence or intentional, but the color of the dog could be tied to blacks being as important and intelligent as a domesticated animal, in this case a dog.
