Aunt Jemima brand to change name, remove image that Quaker says is ‘based on a racial stereotype’
The Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix will get a new name and image, Quaker Oats announced Wednesday, saying the company recognizes that “Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype.”
The 130-year-old brand features a Black woman named Aunt Jemima, who was originally dressed as a minstrel character.
The picture has changed over time, and in recent years Quaker removed the “mammy” kerchief from the character to blunt growing criticism that the brand perpetuated a racist stereotype that dated to the days of slavery. But Quaker, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, said removing the image and name is part of an effort by the company “to make progress toward racial equality.”
“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a press release. “As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations.”
Kroepfl said the company has worked to “update” the brand to be “appropriate and respectful” but it realized the changes were insufficient.
Aunt Jemima has faced renewed criticism recently amid protests across the nation and around the world sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
People on social media called out the brand for continuing to use the image and discussed its racist history, with the topic trending on Twitter. In one viral TikTok, a woman named Kirby discussed the history of the brand, saying “Black lives matter, people, even over breakfast.”
Aunt Jemima is “a retrograde image of Black womanhood on store shelves,” Riché Richardson, an associate professor at Cornell University, told the “TODAY” show on Wednesday. “It’s an image that harkens back to the antebellum plantation … Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype is premised on this idea of Black inferiority and otherness.”
“It is urgent to expunge our public spaces of a lot of these symbols that for some people are triggering and represent terror and abuse,” Richardson said.
In a 2015 piece for The New York Times, Richardson wrote that the inspiration for the brand’s name came from a minstrel song, “Old Aunt Jemima,” in which white actors in blackface mocked and derided Black people.
The logo, Richardson wrote, was grounded in the stereotype of the “mammy … a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own.”
The company’s own timeline of the product says Aunt Jemima was first “brought to life” by Nancy Green, a Black woman who was formerly enslaved and became the face of the product in 1890.
In 2015, a judge dismissed a lawsuit against the company by two men who claimed to be descendants of Anna Harrington, a Black woman who began portraying Jemima in the 1930s, saying the company didn’t properly compensate her estate with royalties.
Quaker said the new packaging will begin to appear in the fall of 2020, and a new name for the foods will be announced at a later date.
The company also announced it will donate at least $5 million over the next five years “to create meaningful, ongoing support and engagement in the Black community.”
Daina Ramey Berry, a professor of history at The University of Texas, said the decision to drop the name and the image of Aunt Jemima is significant because the brand normalized a racist depiction of Black women.
Aunt Jemima, she said, “kept Black woman in the space of domestic service,” associating them with serving food under a “plantation mentality.”
Berry also said it would be misguided to lament the change by Quaker as a loss of representation for Black women.
The criticism of Aunt Jemima’s image, she says, “is about the representation — the stereotypical and traumatic and abusive ways in which we are represented.”
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Image Source:*nbcnews.com/
Source:nbcnews.com/
