"You Sift Dat Meal You Gimme Da Husk You Cookin Dat Bread You Gimme Da Crust"

You know, there are times I curse my obsessive tendencies. I'm going to have to do this in three parts.***

1. A bit about minstrelsy in general, as that is the source of the Golliwogg.
   
2. Mulling three of the prime literary versions of this character type - Golli, Sambo and Topsy - along with the three white women who created them, the concept of 'benevolent intent' and why the answer to this is my beloved childhood and I want to save it  is  save it from what, exactly?
   
3. Finally, for the writerly among us, an intellectual exercise. If one is going to drop this type of character into a creative work, what are some of the ways it can be approached? When you think about it, and with memory of the round of hand-wringing that occasionally breaks among the pale in genre over the default setting of Caucasian and o woe what shall we do about that, Alan Moore has presented us with a gift: he put the most extreme example of throwback racial representation in The Black Dossier, and according to O'Neill, he intends to include the character in future stories. With zero knowledge of what he has in mind (or frankly, what he did this first time around), let us examine the potential storytelling pros and cons in a general sense.

 They'll start rolling out on Monday.

*** Once I actually finish, I reserve the right to add more parts down the road. I already know that once I actually get around to reading the book I will come back to this and do at least one more post.