The Remus stories are a monument to the ambivalence of the South. Harris, the archetype of the southerner, went in search of the Negro’s love and claimed that he had won it (the grin of Uncle Remus). But at the same time he was striving for the Negro’s hatred (Br’er Rabbit), and he reveled in it, in an unconscious orgy of masochism–very possibly punishing himself for not being the black man, the stereotype of the black man, the prodigious “giver.” Is it not possible that the white South, and perhaps the majority of white America, often behave in the same way in their relations with the Negro?

Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, loc. 627