The 130-year-old Aunt Jemima brand is coming to an end, says Quaker Oats, which said “We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype.”
From NBC News:
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 that 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.
