In the early 1900s, racist imagery was widely used in consumer products—even Valentine's Day cards—and relied on caricatures and stereotypes to create humor. Harvey Young, Jr., an Associate Professor at Northwestern gave a talk last year on racist V-Day ephemera and had this to say:

They capture in a material object the racial discourse occurring at the moment...You can really get a sense of how common and everyday and widely accepted these cards were. It gestures to this past moment when racism was more apparent in society.