Removing Stereotypes, or Erasing Peoples?
“Aunt J.” retired to Pearl River, but Betty’s still making cake mixes
I’m not sure exactly what triggered this, although I think it was Kaden N. Thaxton’s travelogue of Mosi-oa-Tunya and something semi-humorous I read decades ago about countries’ historical land ownership in the Middle East (I believe it was in Dave Berg’s (of Mad magazine) Lighter Side series My Friend God ...)* My thought was, “didn’t all of our land structures have names before the people we now call “indigenous” inhabited them? Did Lucy’s people have a name for “Thundering Smoke”? Did the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) have another, older name for Pueblo Canyon? Where do we stop pulling back the layers of names?
This morning, I was considering some of the most recent renaming of brands that had Black characters as brand images. Much of the controversy circled around the use of caricatures (the obese, enslaved mother/utiliwife substitute; the house cook, etc.) and a historical prohibition from using proper honorifics for Black adults (“Aunt” and “Uncle” instead of “Mrs.” or “Miss” and “Mr.”).
There are good reasons to rebrand products whose spokes-images are hurtful, good reasons to rename geographic features whose names are hurtful, and good reasons to revert to previous names to honor those who originally (or at least, previously) settled in and developed a land. (One might here argue that instead of giving new “white names” to geographic features that, for example, use the “S” word for an indigenous woman, we should revert to the names used by the nations we disposessed — or at least, their translations into American English.)
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The problem I see here is, well, Betty Crocker. She is a White woman, once a housekeeper and now a career woman — but she gets to keep her name on her products, and the semblance of respect that provides. Betty Crocker is a (fictitious) White woman, and she is still visible. Aunt Jemima, updated to a career woman and a Black counterpart to “Aunt Betty”, has been all but erased from the face of the earth.
Okay, I’ll admit that Mr. Ben — a Black man — has been allowed to keep his rice expertise, less the historically-demeaning “Uncle” moniker, and Mrs. Butterworth — although defined by her fictional husband’s last name — is still as rotund as ever. But in a world that is finally beginning to understand and appreciate the contributions of Black people to what we often call “Southern cooking” or “American cuisine” (see, among others, Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene)… why are we erasing Black symbols of cooking expertise from the products we are purchasing?
Unless… they were appropriated by White people to make food products seem more authentic, better tasting, etc.? That the fictional characters appropriated Black characteristics to profit White men?
I’m still a bit confused by this, but I think if Mrs. J. had to go, then Aunt B. has to go as well.
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- Written at a time before colonizer countries granted any lands back to the indigenous people from whom those lands were colonized and/or conquered, Berg joked that after the land of Israel was reclaimed by the countries that claimed it before 1948 under the grounds that it was historically theirs, the Jewish people could then claim all of Palestine under similar grounds of historical ownership.
