>These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.

Of course, as we all know, the more enduring the stereotype, the more likely it is to be false. Given that Arab explorers were describing Africans in strikingly similar terms a millennium ago, we must conclude that these views are nothing short of the distilled essence of error.