The Black Mammy stereotype may have vanished, but the ethos that birthed her is alive and well
PepsiCo had a huge opportunity to to at least lightly attempt to repair a modicum of the harm it did when it purchased Quaker Oats Company in 2001, the food conglomerate that held the Aunt Jemima brand in its portfolio. When PepsiCo announced retiring Aunt Jemima in June of 2020, I thought it was really going to retire the brand and imagine something meaningful in its place. I should have expected less from a company that has made untold millions on minstrelsy, a performance whose very existence is meant to reinforce dehumanization, one of the keys to effect the genocide that is American slavery.
PepsiCo finally announced on February 10 of this year that it would rebrand Aunt Jemima with Pearl Milling Company, a seemingly generic and innocuous replacement brand. But Pearl Milling Company is the business founded by Chris Rutt, the same individual who branded his pancake mixes with the Aunt Jemima character after attending a minstrel show with a white man in blackface by the same name.
It could be argued that if Rutt were living in a more progressive, or less racially violent period of time, he might have named his product after his company, instead of after a brutal stereotype. And if we can imagine ourselves into that hypothetical, Pearl Milling Company could feel like a general middle ground. Problem is, Rutt is a problematic historical figure, and by retaining the Pearl Milling Company name, PepsiCo is effectively upholding Rutt and his historical legacy. A legacy actually has very little to do with flour, milling, or pancakes.
Any scholarly eye on Aunt Jemima comes away with one key point: Aunt Jemima’s success is dependent on the interplay that white America has with Black labor: that the latter contributes to former’s leisure. The palliative smile of Aunt Jemima’s Black face, whether she’s in a kerchief, a headband, or a perm, is a wink to the consumer that white convenience is good, and a Black working woman will always serve as a comforting reminder towards that goal.
When Aunt Jemima underwent one of her many makeovers in 1989, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune asked Quaker why they don’t just change the name, and the spokesperson responded: “That kind of familiarity and recognition is an invaluable asset.”
So, what was PepsiCo to do in 2021, when culture demands that the overt minstrelsy of the face and then name be removed? Retain the ethos and the esprit de corp of that valuable asset, right down to the color and the font, of course. As one of the most successful and profitable brands in history, and there is no way PepsiCo was going to part with the value of that brand. So much for repairing harm.
But in 2021, even the faceless corporate monster of PepsiCo must release the 400+ year grip that whiteness has held on the ideal that Black bodies exist to serve it. PepsiCo had a conundrum. And, with their billions in power, they solved the puzzle indeed: brandish the idea that it’s still OK to be a racist white man that leans on an underclass, especially if it’s in the name of industry and capitalism. In other words: let the ends justify the means — the very ethos of America’s original sins.
The Pearl Milling Company brand, complete with its “since 1889” logo exhibiting a milling waterwheel in a river with a powerful looking structure buttressing it suggests that the prowess of capitalist industry is good, regardless of whatever else was going on in 1889, and regardless of whom that period of history might have damaged via that industry.
What was going on in St. Joseph, Missouri in the year 1889, outside of the keyhole glimpse into that powerful looking mill? Minstrel shows were in full swing as the popular entertainment of their day — there would have been enough of them playing in that small town the autumn night that Rutt had his inspired moment that historians can’t trace the exact one that he so fatefully wandered into. In 1889, Rutt was indulging in the entertainment of his time — when the Black Mammy was a grotesque joke through which “white male anxieties could be exorcised through the taking of a black female body,”as it is so eloquently put by M.M Manring in the excellent book Slave in a Box.
It’s an almost an overly obvious bit of corporate poetry that PepsiCo should choose to stamp Pearl Milling Company on its Aunt Jemima rebrand, stewarding and upholding the ideology that white male invention and industry is good and right, in an era when white male dominance of American culture is being challenged from boardrooms to bedrooms. White male anxieties exorcised, indeed.
Now, when a consumer tosses the newfangled Aunt Jemima into the cart, she can still feel the safe, familiar, and palatable reassurance that whiteness is still viable, vibrant, and right, even if the overt minstrelsy has been removed from the box. The invaluable asset that was, and is, Aunt Jemima is alive and well.
“Don’t worry,” the rebrand seems to say. “We can continue to have our white supremacy, and eat it too.”
