Interview with Professor Miriam Petty on Stepin Fetchit

Dr. Miriam Petty is a professor of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University. Stepin Fetchit is among her research interests, and she has been a valuable resource during the development of Fetch Clay, Make Man. She spoke with McCarter literary manager Carrie Hughes.

Why is Stepin Fetchit so fascinating/controversial?
I think the reason for both is that we’re most comfortable thinking of stereotype as an act that’s perpetrated on African Americans. It’s simple, and often accurate to understand it in that way. And so part of what is controversial and fascinating about Stepin Fetchit is his legacy as someone who made a living enacting and popularizing the stereotype of the lazy, shiftless, African-American man. That changes the dynamics and raises uncomfortable questions about complicity and who’s watching him do this. I think that those kinds of questions are not immediately answered by a quick look at his life or a quick look at his body of work. So I think that’s part of the reason that he’s fascinating, because of the way that he embodies these questions about complicity and these questions about agency. And I think, because Stepin Fetchit was a black performer, people tend to want to attribute a kind of double edge to his performance, to say, well, he was manipulating this image or he was doing something subversive. While there’s some evidence for that, his motives are not necessarily clear cut, and the effect of his performance at the time largely reinforced the racial status quo. In my own work, I come to the conclusion that he overestimated his own ability to control the character that he created. Ironically, the life of Lincoln Perry the man, was ultimately controlled by Stepin Fetchit, his cinematic alter ego.

Why is it important to reexamine Stepin Fetchit now?
I think it’s important because just like any sort of artifact of American cultural history, Stepin Fetchit’s career tells us something about the present day. It tells us something about the road we’ve traveled in terms of race and representation. We come from a time when Stepin Fetchit was exceptionally popular, and was one of a very few well-known African-American performers. That cultural appetite for an abject, racist view of Black people fed the demand for the kind of performance he delivered, and it hasn’t disappeared from America. It has transformed, and we see and hear the impact of it on television, in film, on the radio, all the time.

How has our view of Stepin Fetchit changed over time?
I think there’s always a variety of different perspectives about someone like Stepin Fetchit, even in one person. I mean, my own view is not just one perspective, but many. Yet one thing that can enrich and complicate our view of him is a consideration of the work of more contemporary African American comedians that have followed him, like Dave Chappelle and Richard Pryor. Their careers push us to reexamine why Stepin Fetchit had such a limited set of choices to make in his time. Dave Chappelle, who’s so well known and so popular, who was making so much money, walked away from that, and essentially said “I don’t trust what this country is making of my art; I don’t trust what this country is making out of the statement that I’m trying to make, and that lack of trust means that I can’t do this anymore.” For me, that moment reinforced the importance of America’s cultural history, and considering and reconsidering Stepin Fetchit’s life and career is a part of that. It’s a moment when we can think about the limits of satire and humor as a way of thinking and talking about race. Dave Chappelle’s discomfort about using humor to critique racial politics in the 2000s provides a sense of the serious risks of the game Stepin Fetchit was playing in the 1930s.

How would you characterize Stepin Fetchit?
Immensely talented. Self-destructive. Frighteningly perceptive. Stepin Fetchit was someone who had a keen sense of an appetite in America for a certain kind of racist representation and an uncanny talent for bringing it to life. It’s a classic case of double consciousness: his understanding of the way that others imagined him, his ability to see himself on his own terms, as well as his ability to see the space between the two perceptions. Navigating that distance became his lifetime struggle.