LogFAQs > #940966154

FortuneCookie posted...

It's not like a minstrel character appearing in a Popeye cartoon or Bus Bunny wearing blackface for one scene of one short. She was created to play upon the slave/house servant stereotype and was presented as an obese Black woman with a nonsensical dialect: "Lawsee!"

The title of "Aunt" and "Uncle" came about as patronizing terms of endearment because titles of respectability such as "Mister" and "Missus" could not be applied to Black people in the Antebellum South. You could rebrand it as Jemima's Syrup, but why fight to keep a character who offers so little and has such an unsavory past?

I understand the fight against censorship. Mia did nothing wrong and should not have been removed from Land O Lakes. She was an authentic Native American woman designed by a Native American woman. The same does not hold true for Aunt Jemima. She was designed by people who wanted to present an image of Black servitude and conjure up nostalgia over the era of slavery.

Efforts have been made to change that image, but it's not worth holding onto a name or a character with such baggage.

This. also it gets a fair bit worse if you look at the older versions of the ad. Way back when it wasn't just a black lady doing a "mammy" stereotype, it was legit a white person, in blackface, doing a mammy stereotype.

There's way too much baggage there to keep the character around, compared to the no consequence of getting rid of her.