Today in the Department of Long-Overdue Name Changes...
Issue 172: Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben's, and Thug Kitchen are finally listening to what Black people have been saying for years.
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Aunt Jemima, the syrup brand, announced today that their products will be renamed soon. No word yet on what they’ll be called, but the rebrand is happening because its parent company (Quaker Oats + PepsiCo, which also made headlines a couple years ago for a weirdly trivializing ad w/ Kendall Jenner about a can of Pepsi solving police brutality) finally realized they can’t keep explaining away the fact that Aunt Jemima — both the name and historical imagery — is based on a racist stereotype.
AdWeek compares the modern brand image to an older version that’s much more clearly, uh, problematic:
(photo via AdWeek)
The name comes from the song “Old Aunt Jemima,” which was sung by enslaved workers and later performed in minstrel shows, often by white actors in blackface. The brand has tried to distance themselves from this over the years by changing the visual on the box (above!), but clearly that’s not enough.
Calls to rename the brand aren’t new: In 1980, the culinary anthropologist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor argued on All Things Considered that “Aunt Jemima” was a myth, a slur, an inappropriate callback to slavery. She noted that the image of Aunt Jemima had been updated in recent years: “If they are worried about her image, I have a suggestion for them: Take her off the box!” NPR has digitized the audio here (which, if nothing else, is a testament to how much NPR sounds the exact same 40 years later).
Maurine Manring, who wrote a book about Aunt Jemima, told NPR in 2007: “Aunt Jemima advertising played on a certain type of nostalgia and a certain type of racial nostalgia, particularly in the first half of the 20th century about how great plantation life was and how great it was to literally have someone like Aunt Jemima who would make the pancakes or whatever for you.”
In a statement announcing the name change, parent companies Quaker Foods and PepsiCo also said they would donate a minimum of $5 million to “create meaningful, ongoing support and engagement in the Black community.”
Uncle Ben’s, the rice brand, will also “evolve,” according to its parent company Mars today. “We don't yet know what the exact changes and timing will be, but we are evaluating all possibilities,” they said.
Also the subject of a recent name-change announcement: Thug Kitchen, the vegan food brand started by two white people who intended to carve out a niche for themselves by being abrasive and vulgar and using Black rap lyrics as image captions to show their gritty “thug”-ishness, but because they’re two white people, ended up making their niche “super racist food brand that continually denies that they’re a super racist food brand.” Cool. They’re changing their name to… something else; they haven’t said yet. But either way, too little too late. I know I’m the one millionth person to say this, but: Jesus, people. Let’s not do this.
