I’ll be honest, this comment section is confusing. I’m not sure which comment is agreeing with which. Personally I think it’s bad to put slaves on your products but why am I supposed to feel bad about the white people?
It’s bad faith concern. They’re accusing those brands of erasing minorities under the aegis of anti racism. When the original intent of those mascots was appropriation and playing on the black house slave theme.
“The character of Aunt Jemima is an invitation to white people to indulge in a fantasy of enslaved people — and by extension, all of Black America — as submissive, self-effacing, loyal, pacified and pacifying,” Twitty wrote in a recent NBC Think essay. “It positions Black people as boxed in, prepackaged and ready to satisfy; it’s the problem of all consumption, only laced with racial overtones.”
This piece is interesting but even the relatives understand the imagery to be racist.
Because it sounds like her actual relatives didn’t want her memory to be erased.
“Take the logo away, because it is offensive, but my aunt Lillian was a beautiful, intelligent lady that had to do domesticated type of work to make a living,” Harris said. “I just don’t want that erased from my family history because it’s almost like erasing a part of me.”
Only people that have no ability to think for themselves have a need to put others into categories of acceptability based on what the dominant culture around them thinks instead of judging them based on their individual merits.
You need to fuckin go back to school with your “think for yourself” crap if you think anything on the left is justified.
Interesting way to admit that the opinion you hold on this matter was beaten into you by the school system and isn’t the result of your own thinking process.
And no, nothing on the right is racist, they’re not caricatures of enslaved people.
The Sun-Maid girl is quite literally a caricature of a farm worker. No one who actually picks grapes looks like that except in a commercial.
What if someone’s judgement of your individual merits just happens to agree with the dominant culture around them? Or is that not possible? Does the ability to think for ones self necessarily lead to disagreement with whatever is commomly believed? I think that would just be dumbass contrarianism.
What if someone’s judgement of your individual merits just happens to agree with the dominant culture around them?
Oooh, now that would be very convenient, wouldn’t it?
Does the ability to think for ones self necessarily lead to disagreement with whatever is commomly believed?
At the very least, it requires entertaining ideas and possibilities widely believed to be unthinkable, even if you do end up discarding them for lack of evidence.
Probably not going to happen. I watched the review mentioned in this comment and the verdict was that isn’t not particularly flavorful when just baked in the oven, as the can apparently recommends.
Does sound like a decent option for making soup, however. Especially during a pandemic.
I don’t remember the call to get rid of uncle Ben though. It feels like at best the company was trying to get out ahead of it, at worst they wanted to stop paying his family residuals and had an excuse.
Apparently the character was based on a black , so it wasn’t even particularly racist, since many white people also do this job, and it certainly isn’t slave labor (they tend to get very good tips, especially at fine dining restaurants, which the suit and bowtie he was wearing kinda implies he was working at). Therefore I’m inclined to believe the second reason might have been their actual motive, and the supposed racism was just a convenient excuse.
No. That was simply the man who originally posed for the picture. The brand was officially named after a sharecropper. However Uncle was also a common title for an older male house slave. Same with Aunt. Both the original rice farmer and pancake mix inventor were born into slavery and had their products lifted from them by white corporations.
They weren’t stolen in the legal sense. There was a contract but it wasn’t an equal contract. The US actually has a history of this from the Reconstruction period right through the Civil Rights period (about 1865-1965). Especially with black musicians who supported white bands via record companies buying the songs off of them for a pittance compared to what they were worth.
I notice that a lot of people make sense of life using a series of rules. “if X then that means Y!” I think they’re bad at sussing out what’s right by reading the room, and they also can’t make sense of a complex world. They just default to thinking of the world as if we’re in a video game. It’s like they lack empathy or the ability to read humans or something.
That would be true if they were still using those depictions at the time they dropped them. But they weren’t, as you can very much see in the meme that used the most current logos before they were dropped.
Do you work hard at being a dumbass or does it just come naturally?
Are you upset that they didn’t remove the white folk or are you upset that depictions of people that other people decided were problematic were removed?
It’s upsetting that depictions of normal POC without any racist stereotyping or characteristics were found to be “problematic.” Tell me, in what way, are the depictions shown in the meme’s example racist?
PS: Apart from this argument not going anywhere, it’s not even entirely true. Aunt Jemima (now Pearl Milling Company) is directly owned by Quaker Oats (which in turn is owned by PepsiCo). Meanwhile, Uncle Ben’s / Ben’s Original is owned by Mars, Inc., so you’re defending some of the biggest (and worst) food conglomerates on the planet.
Wasn’t the butter one just… A human shaped bottle? Looking at the logo from the beginning until the end it doesn’t look like it’s ever been a thing other than simply a depiction of a black woman. Not even a caricature of such, just like a painting of a person who could totally be real. But maybe what I’m referencing doesn’t have the off-shoot flavors. 🤷🏻♂️
I too enjoy the white privilege of being able to look at something and judge it without thinking about context. It’s fantastic to be able to simplify things to just face value and not think about the racial history behind it. It’s one of my favorite privileges.
Unfortunately, I somehow never got that middle-aged white man’s confidence of instantly knowing what other people should be feeling, better than they do. I must be defective. But it means I tend to defer to the people that are hurt by something to judge if they’ve been hurt or not.
Stfu. It’s not I ain’t heard this, it’s that I don’t accept it, in this limited case. And for someone don’t even know my race to instantly go with the white privilege line is fucking telling.
Ironically, the butter one was actually designed by Patrick DesJarlait, an Ojibwe man, specifically meant to accurately reflect his culture. Here’s an article written by his son about the whole thing:
The Sun-Maid girl is depicted performing a job that’s traditionally associated with slavery. Is depicting white people performing slave labor also problematic or is slavery only bad when it involves people of color?
Also, the job she’s doing is predominantly done by immigrants nowadays. Is depicting her as white not disenfranchising these people by denying them representation?
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