Rolling Thread on Race 2020

xp: mixing non-racist material in with your racist material does not make your racist material any less racist

Mordy, you edited out this parenthetical from my post deliberately:

(who got the name Aunt Jemima from attending a white minstrel show and hearing "old Aunt Jemima")

Come on.

You called it a white minstrel show what am I missing??

also the black entertainer was making minstrelsy and knew the work had racist dimensions

Yeah, it's not like black entertainers had lots of options on their approaches at that time. The entire thing is racism all the way down and continuing to insist that you can sanitize that history by removing the most obviously racist elements is some bullshit.

From 2007: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247739524_Aunt_Jemima_is_Alive_and_Cookin'_An_Advertiser's_Dilemma_of_Competing_Collective_Memories

The two white guys were at a white minstrel show where a white person in Blackface sang the song in question. It was written by a Black man, but the white dudes were inspired by hearing it that night.

i thought aunt jemima was racist before but mordy's argument has made me realize it's more like a vortex of racism, wheels within wheels

I guess we won't be polling the new brand name

I vote for Uncle Mordy's High Fructose Corn Syrup (Now with 50% Less Racism).

who the fuck buys pancake syrup

I don't understand pancakes

I only buy tia nopales' agave

https://i.imgur.com/HYprj5U.png

At least Mordy taught us a new word today.

but what are they like? what are their favorite movies and tv shows?

Ah yes, showing us graphs of who is buying the syrup to say what?

Go into any (corner store/deli/whatever you call it) in any poor, predominantly Black and POC neighborhood in the US, and you'll find one type of pancake syrup: Aunt Jemima. It's not like there's a whole lot of choice. So that poll doesn't mean much.

The thing boggling my mind is that in my world, I have been making snarky jokes about Aunt Jemima getting a perm for 30 years with Black friends while apparently the White people around me were going "finally we have a Black person on our pancakes and syrup that we can feel proud of; yay representation!" without even the slightest bit of irony

Ah yes, showing us graphs of who is buying the syrup to say what?

alfred literally asked?

seemed rhetorical, idk

we're all gonna have a good healthy laugh about this in fifty years when we reminisce about the days when we allowed companies to market their products to us using smiley cartoon characters on their food labels like we were toddlers

my limited understanding of american history leads me to the conclusion that when what consumers consider broadly racist changes, the repercussions tend to happen quickly and loudly and are almost always long overdue.

the bottom line with aunt jemima is that the brand had no meaningful resonance with the majority of its buyers and lots of attached disreputability; it's an outdated corporate logo with no value and was long overdue to be chucked. I hope whatever VP of marketing in charge of the property gets fired for their sheer ineptness at not dealing with this issue the instant they were hired.

(and just to make the point myself before someone else does: sure, it's the bestselling brand of syrup but I would put that up to Quaker's reach and distribution and not the logo... more to the point, if it was a logo of any value, Quaker would have fought harder to keep it, qed they've already determined internally that the risk/reward isn't worth it.)

i'm pretty sure the first question during a job interview for the VP of marketing at Aunt Jemima's is "you're not going to change Aunt Jemima, right? because we made a blood pact with the owner of the washington redskins to never, ever change or learn"

xp

i'm not sure i'm following your logic on this one, ulysses.

people have been asking them to change their racist logo for many years. so clearly they DO think it has value

i'm saying it did have value for a considerable period, then it ceased to have meaningful value for quite some time but its negative symbolism was considered manageable enough to make it not worth rebranding and now they think the value is less than the risk.
NB: i am not an expert on corn syrup

i mean, hey, maybe someone at pepsico had an ethical epiphany that a logo founded on a racist caricature with a name that has become historically synonymous with racially charged servitude is inexcusable and decided that taking a business loss is the right thing to do but maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan, I doubt it.

Lost in all this is that fake syrup sucks.

and is pointedly marketed people with disproportionate risk of diabetes!

Cue my post about corner stores and delis in primarily Black and POC neighborhoods above

i feel like anyone who has ever heard burn, hollywood, burn kind of knows what has needed to happen to this “brand”

i was trying to think of where we’d had this conversation before and i was like OH YEAH

OMG I WANT THIS AMAZING RONALDINHO BOTTLE OPENER

whole wheat mix is pretty good

and James "We're Not Defunding the Police" Clyburn is a bigger problem

In September 2012, The Guardian posted a story on its facebook page regarding models wearing Aunt Jemima earrings on a catwalk at Dolce and Gabbana during Milan fashion week. As the article points out, ‘some might argue that they’re harmless, even cute, but there’s nothing cute about two white men selling minstrel earrings to a majority non-black audience. There wasn’t a single black model in Dolce and Gabbana’s show, and it’s hard not to be appalled by the transparent exoticism in sending the only black faces down the runway in the form of earrings.’Aunt Jemima is still our feminist issue because she stands for the continued silencing of black women’s exploitation around the world. As one of the most recognizable images of black women globally, why aren’t more people enraged by the fact that she remains frozen in time? As The Guardian aptly concludes, ‘when you’re explicitly pandering to such a shameful era of western racism and colonialism, it’s time to move on to the future.’I could not agree more. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, we need to place the ‘diverse patterns of Black women’s activism within the border zone of Black feminist nationalism/ Black nationalist feminism … as well as within a broader, global framework of feminist nationalism...in order to create space for much needed dialogue among Black women activists … as well as alliances with other groups of racial ethnic women.’58 Aunt Jemima is not a Black feminist issue; she must be the issue of this generation of feminists, artists, and activists, and then perhaps we will finally be able to wipe that smile off her stereotyped and fictional face.

https://www.drcherylthompson.com/aunt-jemima/2020/6/23/contesting-the-aunt-jemima-trademark-through-feminist-art-why-is-she-still-smiling

are POC who aren’t black or indigenous included in BIPOC?

never heard 'BIPOC' until a month ago, now the term is everywhere and I guess it has replaced POC??? what was wrong with saying POC? is this referring to a different group of ppl? is it B and I POC or is it B or I POC or what? does anyone see BIPOC and not think 'bisexual POC'?... for real who is in charge of changing these terms every few months?? its getting a liiiiittle silly no?

https://www.rd.com/article/what-does-bipoc-stand-for/

I was familiar with it for a few years now, from academia and academia-adjacent social media, as a term meaning "Black and/or Indigenous People of Color." Specifically used in postcolonial contexts, on the assumption that there are shared axes of oppression and histories of contestation. Never really seemed like a problematic concept to me, but if people are using it as a one-to-one replacement for "POC" in their vocabulary then they're obviously missing the point entirely.

The couple of times I've seen it, it was used as an ostensibly more exact replacement for POC, to mean "black, indigenous, AND people of colour", like Neanderthal's link says.

Yeah I'm doing some google scholar searches now ("bipoc" appears a few times within articles citing Lawrence & Dua's influential 2005 paper, but no earlier than 2017) and it's looking like my interpretation of it as a term specifically coined to push for a rapprochement between Indigenous and Black antiracist movements is not the majority understanding!

are Jews bipoc

xp Neanderthal i had heard some conflicting accounts but this is what i understood (from the link you sent), thx

BIPOC stands for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” It seeks to highlight the Black and Indigenous communities and, as the BIPOC Project explains, the “unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a United States context.”

why isn't it IBPOC

never heard 'BIPOC' until a month ago, now the term is everywhere

I never heard people saying 'never heard 'BIPOC' until a month ago' until a couple of years ago, now the sentiment is everywhere

are Jews bipoc

in most cases no, we are not

why isn't it IBPOC

fwiw in Canada, I've seen a push to order it this way

xp sorry to belabor but this is actually pertinent to me and i would like clarification...

do you mean by 'in most cases no' that most jews themselves aren't BIPOC but some are (i.e. darker skinned sephardi), or that certain people would consider jews 'POC' and certain people would not? i have heard differing views on the latter point.

What is a context where it would be necessary to use this term, i.e. where you need to refer to all people of colour as a group but also need to highly the distinctiveness of two sub-groups?

fwiw in Canada, I've seen a push to order it this way

What is the argument for using this term in Canada? What is the unique relationship to white supremacy held by black Canadians vs all other people of colour? I understand that slavery existed in the Canadian colonies until a few decades prior to Confederation, but I don't think the majority of black Canadians are descendants of slaves or that anti-black policy plays the same kind of foundational role in Canadian nationhood?

*highlight

xpost I am not an expert on Canada or Canadian histsory, but I was under the impression that the majority of Black Canadians trace their ancestry to Black communities throughout the New World (Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Trinidad, etc) that were originally established as slave colonies.

I can't speak to the specific legal or policy challenges those groups have encountered as Canadians; but I don't think it's like, wildly intellectually dishonest to characterize them as "Canadian Descendants of Slavery" just because the 'slavery' part was historically and geographically distant from the 'Canadian' part.