Riché Richardson is an associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University and an artist. She is the author of "Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta" and co-editor of the New Southern Studies Series at the University of Georgia Press. She is on Twitter.

Amid the current efforts to remove the Confederate flag as a symbol from state and federal buildings and to divest from its commercial circulation as a product and commodity, it is also important to remember that a host of products lining grocery store shelves to this day, including Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix and Aunt Jemima Syrup, are also very much linked to Southern racism.

In 1923, the United Daughters of the Confederacy actually wanted to erect a monument to this plantation myth embodied by Aunt Jemima.

Families, including children, still encounter Aunt Jemima on trips to the grocery store where products are marketed under this trademark by the Quaker Oats Company in the 21st century. Numerous writings have examined the development of the Aunt Jemima logo in 1889 by Chris L. Rutt and Charles G. Underwood for their ready-made pancake flour mix at the Pearl Milling Company; the logo’s inspiration by Billy Kersands’ minstrel song “Old Aunt Jemima”; and the logo’s eventual purchase and establishment as a trademark by the Quaker Oats Company in 1925, where it remains one of the longest continually running logos and trademarks in the history of American advertising.

This Aunt Jemima logo was an outgrowth of Old South plantation nostalgia and romance grounded in an idea about the "mammy," a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own. Visually, the plantation myth portrayed her as an asexual, plump black woman wearing a headscarf.

Few moments have underscored the continuing influence of the plantation myth, and its impact on Confederate scripts of slavery, more profoundly than the nearly successful effort of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to erect a monument in honor of the "faithful slave mammies of the South" in the nation’s capital in 1923.

It is about time for there to be some honest conversation about what is at stake in continuing to market products even nowadays under names such as “Aunt Jemima.”



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