ABSTRACT
In America, black heterosexual masculinity has been strategically defined and black men have conveniently had their identities pre-arranged for them. The current definition and identities have produced images that are consistently reproduced in various forms of electronic and print media. Before the sambo became a specific identity, it represented a concept that originated during the colonial period in the seventeenth century. Boskin states that "the sambo was conceived on the European continent, particularly, in England, and drew its first life with the initial contact with West Africans during the slave period". The brute nigger image also emerged on the European continent as a description for Africans. With respect to the savage, it was held that the Black man was endowed with violent and sexual impulses. It was argued, buttressed with quasi-scholarly data from mid-nineteenth to the later decades of the twentieth century, that dark-skinned people were stunted in their intellectual capacities.
