Aunt Jemima...Seriously??

Just when you thought that life couldn’t possibly get any worse, news breaks that Aunt Jemima is being forced into early retirement because of the scourge of political correctness sweeping the nation. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the limp-wristed, gutless invertebrates at Quaker Oats have caved to the jackals of the left and stolen a cultural icon from white America. Oh, and George Soros is somehow involved...

At least that’s the impression I’m getting from Facebook and Instagram.

I would like to propose a slightly different explanation for this Aunt Jemima thing that involves advertising as a reflection of societal norms and how they have constantly changed, often rapidly, throughout the past hundred years. I should also point out the fact, apropos to nothing really, that Aunt Jemima is a truly awful imitation of real maple syrup and shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath.

Ok, so here’s a advertising campaign from the year of my birth, 1958...

Who doesn’t long for the days when a man felt entitled to beat his wife for the mortal sin of serving him stale coffee?

Well, maybe she can open it, but who’s going to be there to show her how to pour it?

Absolutely nothing worse than a poor, fat woman, am I right?

Good to know that there will still be plenty of women’s work in the exciting new space age!

And the ones who don’t are clearly savages.

Why, indeed?

Colored kids?

Wow...good to know that inside his unfortunate dark skin beats a white heart!

Ok, here’s the thing. If any of these advertisements caused you to wince, and I would hope that all of them did, you now understand that our society has evolved from a time when these types of stereotypes were perfectly acceptable to vast swaths of the buying public. No company doing business in 2020 would dream of running ads like these. Why? Because the assumptions behind them have been rejected by the vast majority of their customers. So what about dear old Aunt Jemima? Even she has changed through the years...a lot!

So...tell me again why Quaker Oats’ decision to finally retire the Aunt Jemima Mammy routine is such a horrible example of political correctness? 

Listen, for some of you, the picture of her on a plastic bottle of corn syrup with 16 artificial flavors is a comforting, harmless icon from your childhood and you just can’t understand what all the fuss is about. I get it, I really do. But, I would imagine she represents something else entirely to an awful lot of African Americans. Ask yourself this, if you think it’s wrong for a company to use words like, “Happy days is here. Time fo’ my Dee-licious pancakes ready mixed fo’ you.” Then maybe you can understand why a symbol from an era where that line was thought to be funny and clever might rub modern ears the wrong way.

I think that somehow the world will survive without Aunt Jemima. Chill out people!