Aunt Jemim Racial Stereotypes

In June of 2020, Quaker Oats, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, retired the use of Aunt Jemima on all of its packaging, saying goodbye to a character created in 1889 that had sold hundreds of millions of products over her long life. A company representative noted that “Aunt Jemima’s origins were based on a racial stereotype” and that “while work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough.” At the time, several companies that used Black characters in advertising faced criticism for their outdated logos following the murder of George Floyd and the responsive nationwide protests that addressed issues ranging from police brutality to harmful imagery of Black

Post-emancipation advertising that used caricatures reinforced the ocularity of slavery that perpetuated a culture of viewing Black Americans as others, and Aunt Jemima and the mammy served as shining examples of this practice. Aunt Jemima and the Mammy Type Aunt Jemima and the mammy type were representative of how racist depictions of Black Americans in media allowed white America to continue to consider Black men and women as lesser and subservient. Searching for a way to market a new, self-rising pancake flour in 1889, entrepreneurs Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood came across a portrayal of the character Aunt Jemima at a minstrel show in St. Joseph, Missouri. They decided that the mammy figure and name best represented the freedom and the sense of security their product granted white housewives. With a wide smile, the 19th-century Aunt Jemima served white southerners her delicious recipe, and she was frequently depicted alongside cotton fields and other enslaved people (Figure 1). Figure 1: “Life of Aunt Jemima” booklet

The late nineteenth century was a tumultuous time for race relations in America; the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 decided that the 14th Amendment protected against discrimination at the state level but not between civilians, and the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896 legalized segregation. In 1890, R.T. Davis, a wealthy flour mill owner, purchased the trademark from Rutt and Underwood and brought their concept to life, casting Nancy Green, a three-hundred-pound Black woman, as Aunt Jemima and having her cook pancakes with their mix at the Chicago Fair in 1893. Aunt Jemima imagery aimed to create a sense of place for the white housewife consumer that elevated their status of whiteness as compared to Aunt Jemima’s Blackness, calm racial guilt by showing a happy slave, and incite Southern nostalgia. The brand continued to flourish in the 20th century: “By 1910 the Aunt Jemima trademark was known in all 48 states.[and] by 1918 more than 120 million Aunt Jemima breakfasts were being served annually.” Quaker Oats bought the brand in 1926 and continued to grow it, hiring several actresses to represent Aunt Jemima on the packaging, at in-person expositions, and at a restaurant in Disneyland that was created in 1955. The Aunt Jemima brand elicited what Deborah Barker, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, defined as the Southern