That’s an interesting point. My niece texted me a photo of her Irish-American husband holding their brand new baby. In it, daddy — a NYC fireman — is wearing an FDNY tee shirt, with the “Fighting Irish” mascot shown beneath “FDNY”. The force is ~90% white. (How many are not of Irish heritage… I have no idea. ) The exact demographics for the FDNY didn’t jump out at me in a general search, so I instead searched out FDNY tee shirts as a clue to racial breakdowns. (Twice in a life-time clever boy!) ‘NYC Firestore’ appears to be the place for all FDNY wearables. Search out “Irish” and stand back as you are eye-blasted with shamrocks and Celtic and such. A search for other racial groups yielded one tee shirt touching on “Little Italy”. One ‘Irish’ tee shirt did catch my attention, and it’s an interesting one. https://www.nyfirestore.com/item/irish-heritage/fd-irish-brotherhood-t-shirt/ Flanking the guy in the center, there appears to be one Black and one Hispanic fireman. The rest of the image and its description delivers the tee’s message. Make of it as you will. 
" White parade-marchers will continue to dress up as Sinterklaas‘ helper, Black Pete, when the event takes place on Nov. 16. However, they’ll apply their makeup as though it were soot, not black skin, according to parade organizers.
“This is a logical next step for us,” the parade organizer and public broadcaster."
But the character is still by all intents and purposes a black person. So changing the make up to be “soot” seems like an incredibly thin excuse to continue parading around in blackface without calling it as such.
How about… don’t put on any dark/black make up?? Or get rid of the racist character entirely?
https://media1.tenor.com/images/f1afa1ccba9234361248f2618202b8da/tenor.gif?itemid=5051134
Holy shit.
Well, they didn’t just come up with Black Pete a few decades ago for an advertising campaign. It’s a European Tradition that goes back a few hundred years.
Loving that someone else on the planet is familiar with the Comedian Harmonists. 
This entire subject also brings up another thing about America. We really don’t have a culture except what gets pushed to us from Advertising. We’re more likely to recognize the Kebler Elves, or Col. Sanders… than say…Martin Van Buren or Thomas Paine.
So this ‘revisionist’ history that strikes to the heart of grocery bags makes american’s react a bit more visceral than others.
It’s not so much that Aunt J was racist in the past…she’s changed. People change…and isn’t being able to change and be accepted part of being American?
Just for the record (I wonder if I’m in the running for a pedant award…nah, probably not) —the one you posted is the version from 1972. As you (and other folks) may know, her image has been updated many times over the years. Here’s the newest (though it’s from 1996, so maybe they’ll update soon, who knows) —it’s a composite of 75 real women.
[Edited to make the portrait smaller.]
She still looks like she’s going to a MAGA fund raiser to stop Trans People from using bathrooms, and complain about children books in the library. I know it’s me…but it’s kinda country club, GOP vibe she’s giving off that creeps me out.
Or anything else other than what it is, and the ingredients. Whatever happened to the “generic” brands that popped up in the 70’s then disappeared. White, with “Corn Flakes” in big letters, and a bar code. There was even generic beer. They could do that with everything. Save a lot of money on marketing.
And? It’s invented whole cloth and is a caricature of a black person, is there anything that prevents the character to be depicted as something else? If its kept for “the sake of tradition” that’s a really lousy reasoning. By that logic there’s little reason to change things for the better because that’s just how things have always been done.
As far as i’m concerned anyone putting on soot on their face parading around as Black Pete is wearing blackface. There is no excuse for it.
The story behind Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey:
Holy shit, that packaging is horrifying.
Yep.
I have a friend who’s mom actively collects antique “bigoted kitsch” as a reminder to never forget how racists have tried to marginalize and dehumanize us in this country.
What can I say but 
My grandmother did the same, along with kitchen and household tools. I created a display area in my home because they really show how much manual labor was involved in cooking, washing clothes, and ironing. When I’m tempted to complain about housework, one look at it reminds me to be grateful for the appliances that enable me to have leisure time.
Wow. It looks like that ended in 1970 when the sponsorship deal was not renewed. That location is currently called River Belle Terrace. It’s sort of the transition point where Frontierland (and Adventureland on the back side) meet what’s now New Orleans Square (which opened in 1966).
I recall that (at least in the late 1980s), Disneyland would not schedule any janitorial employees (a.k.a. sweeps) who happened to be black to cleaning duty in the New Orleans Square area of the park.
I mean it’s a racist characticutre on a product owned by PepsiCo. (I almost was going to say a conglomerate that has other syrups and breakfast brands as well, but they don’t seem to have as wide array as I thought.) Why not get rid of the bad branding? It’s got nothing to do with what the product was when it came out in 1889 anyway, and it didn’t have anything to do with a black woman then, either, other than a racist stereotype.
