Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/17/aunt-jemima-brand-will-no-long.html
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I’ll bet that Uncle Jemima is right out too:
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Aunt Jemima moved out of the Mammy outfit and into a ‘entrepreneur’ look with pearl ear rings decades ago.
Still I can understand why they dropped it given it’s history, tho most people under 30 wouldn’t connect the brand with racism today.
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“Urgent”… “130 year old”… Better late than never, I guess.
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Asparagus Roll-Ups? I’m interested 'cause over here it’s actually asparagus season and that’s a pretty big thing.
We don’t have Aunt Jemima here but Uncle Ben’s - looks like a similar problem:
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They might double down and use “Washington Redskins Syrup”
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And the move was rightfully criticized by the Black community as merely performative back then.
Getting rid of the brand all together is long overdue.
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Always found the Aunt Jemima brand distasteful despite my personal thoughts on premade pancake mixes and fake pancake syrup. Glad they’re getting rid of the brand finally, it’s always been antiquated and racist despite their best attempts.
I’m also finding that the Uncle Ben brand is being changed as well
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Ignorance of racist [eta: grammar] symbolism doesn’t mean it’s not racist. Plenty of white people do not see our system of policing as racist, yet it is.
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Aunt Jemima already had her street in Winnipeg renamed.
Of course, that Aunt is my great, great grandmother’s sister Jemima, Their mother was Syilx.
I’m torn about the pancake brand. Yes, it’s based on a stereotype, but the photo has been updated. Hence it’s one of the few times we see a non-white person on a product (and I gather Uncle Ben’s may be disappearing too).
Symbols are easy to change, real change is harder. Will things be dissipated by going after symbols and statues, leaving the real work undone?
A lot of white people haven’t given any of this much thought until a few weeks ago. I’m way more interested in boosting things long invisible than erasing things but that’s just me.
Suddenly people want to erase Gandhi. He always had his “quirks”, I read about some of them forty years ago. But kids miss that he was probably a catalyst for change in other countries. And he was a major practitioner of nonviolence, WWII pacifists built on his work and in turn pased it on to the civil rights movement. Bayard Rustin did time in WWII, and went to India afterwards to work with Gandhi (except Gandhi was assassinated before he got there). Bayard was black. He’s been resurrected in recent years, in part as a gay man. He was hidden in part because of that. But his pacifism seems missing tgese days.
Even the ANC in South Africa was influenced by Gandhi, until they went to bombs.
So things aren’t binary, and it seems a shame to act suddenly rather than with care. At least around symbols, I want a world where I don’t worry when I see a police car.
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I’m honestly surprised it’s taken this long. The make-overs never did the trick of fixing the core issue here.
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Here is one well known food logo/branding that overall works better for me:
It has something more to say as it references the culture and people of an area. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben painted themselves into a corner by placing their branding in a extremely specific image/idea of a black person coupled with a name that has racist connotations/history.
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Uncle Jemima’s Pure Mash Liquor.
“You probably know my wife, the pancake lady.”
Watch Saturday Night Live Clip: Uncle Jemimas Pure Mash Liquor - NBC.com
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According to the Uncle Ben’s website, the name was first used in 1946 in reference to a black farmer known as Uncle Ben who excelled in rice-growing. The man depicted in the logo is a “a beloved Chicago chef and waiter named Frank Brown.”
However, the imagery evokes a servant and uses a title that reflects how white Southerners “once used ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ as honorifics for older blacks because they refused to say ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’” according to a 2007 New York Times article.
Ugh. Yeah, that ruins the imagery.
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If they want to pay homage to black farmers or well known black figures (ie: a chef) they need to actually try. The Uncle Ben brand is really lazy, especially considering that the person that inspired the logo has absolutely nothing to do with the purported rice farmer beyond the color of their skin.
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Unless the actual POINT of the imagery was to comfort whites participating in a system of racism and oppression in the first place. Which it was?
But the homage wasn’t TO African Americans, it was to white supremacy.
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Totally; Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, Mammy, Sambo etc are all fictional “Happy Darkies” archetypes who ‘didn’t mind’ their oppression and exploitation.
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Re-post of one lady’s message:
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