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  • 2022-04-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Yes, 'Aunt Jemima' Has Been Rebranded to 'Pearl Milling Company' (en)
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  • Aunt Jemima was a brand well known to internet users as a target of online rumors. We’ve checked a number of them — from a photograph that claimed to show Aunt Jemima chained to a table to the claim that Nancy Green died a millionaire for portraying the character. But the Aunt Jemima character was controversial, and one that the brand's owner, Quaker Oats (a division of PepsiCo Inc.), said was based on a racial stereotype. As The Associated Press reported in 2021, the smiling Aunt Jemima logo was inspired by the 19th century ‘mammy’ minstrel character, a Black woman content to serve her white masters. The company once again made its way into headlines on April 25, 2022, when Pearl Milling Company announced a $100,000 grant to No More Empty Pots, an organization based in Omaha, Nebraska that provides food security to urban and rural residents. Around that time, a familiar internet trope also recirculated on social media. After the pancake company rebranded to Pearl Milling Company in February 2021, following the Black Lives Matter protests of the previous year, some internet users argued that the new name erased a great woman from history. That argument resurfaced in April 2022 in a viral piece of copy-and-paste content (known colloquially as copypasta): In its entirety, the copypasta read: At the time the rebranding was first announced, Pearl Milling Company noted that the name had been part of the company history for over 130 years. Pearl Milling Company was a small mill in the bustling town of St. Joseph, Missouri, wrote the company on its website. They produced flour, cornmeal, and, beginning in 1889, the famous self-rising pancake mix that would go on to be known as Aunt Jemima. According to the African American Registry (AAREG), a nonprofit online database of African American heritage around the world, Nancy Green was a Black storyteller and one of the first corporate Black models in the United States. Born in 1834 as a slave in Kentucky, Green was hired in 1890 by the R.T. Davis Milling Company to play a Mammy archetype to promote their new product. She was introduced three years later as Aunt Jemima at the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in the guise of a plantation slave, where it was her job to operate a pancake-cooking display. As AAREG notes, Green was reportedly offered a lifetime contract to adopt the Aunt Jemima moniker and promote the pancake mix (though this may have been part of the brand's lore rather than an actual account.) The branding of Aunt Jemima syrup was not a tribute to this woman’s gifts and talents as the Facebook post claims, but rather the use of her portrayal of a racially stereotyped caricature for marketing purposes: In the decades that followed Green’s death, a number of other women went on to portray the Aunt Jemima caricature, including Anna Robinson and Lou Blanchard (below). (en)
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