It is so bizarre that I came across this article this morning. Last night, we had a discussion about “lawn jockeys” with people on the boat behind ours. God only knows how we got on the subject…. I think we were talking about toys of old, and the English woman said she had a “gollywag” toy set when she was a kid, which is totally politically incorrect in this day and age…..and it went from there. And then here’s this article first thing this morning. Life is strange……ain’t it?

Driving along the outskirts of Washington on a late summer afternoon, you sometimes spot a head peeping out of a ragged patch of black-eyed Susans, and you wonder: What is that lawn jockey doing there? Who put him there? Why?

Plaster saints — we know what those stand for. On a more whimsical note, the same goes for the garden gnome, the stag, the Dutch girl with the fishing rod.

But the lawn jockey? He’s a ghost from the days of plantations and magnolias, fox hunts and manorial estates.

To some, particularly African Americans, the lawn jockey is a pint’size monument to repugnant stereotypes, a holdover from the days of slavery and Jim Crow, an artifact of racial prejudice alongside Aunt Jemima.

More here