Ferris Bueller’s Day Off actor Ben Stein claimed he missed the “large African-American woman” on Aunt Jemima’s syrup bottle in a video that resurfaced on social media. His ancestors must be proud.
Stein held the syrup bottle in his hands like a trophy, explaining how people used to make breakfast for dinner to the camera.
Actor Ben Stein says he misses the good old days when “a large African-American woman” was on his syrup bottle, but woke corporate culture ruins everything. pic.twitter.com/WkSXUDbRIj
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) February 21, 2023
“Sometimes you would just make breakfast for dinner,” Stein said. “Aunt Jemima, yummy pancake syrup. Now, this used to show a large African American woman chef, but because of the inherent racism of America’s corporate culture, they decided to make it a white person or maybe no person at all.”
He continued, “But I prefer when it’s a Black person showing their incredible skill of making pancakes.”
Right, because adding a mammy caricature to the syrup bottle was to show that Black people could make pancakes.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
According to Ferris State University, the mammy caricature was created during slavery and remained relevant during the Jim Crow era. White America created the mammy caricature to benefit them politically, economically and socially by portraying her as a happy and obese Black woman who adored working as an enslaved person for her white family. No wonder why Stein missed her.
Mammy was used commercially in the early 1870s, with mammy caricatures popping up on coffee cans, cleaning products and baking powder cans. The most successful “mammy” of all was Aunt Jemima. Missouri newspaper editor Charles Rutt and mill owner Charles G. Underwood developed the idea of a “just add water” self-rising flour in 1889. The Aunt Jemima name appeared to them after they attended a minstrel performance, aka Black face show, and heard a song with the name.
Aunt Jemima is a caricature, but Underwood and Rutt employed a real Black woman to portray Aunt Jemima. Nancy Green, a Kentucky slave, was the original face of Aunt Jemima, according to AAREG.
In 2021, Aunt Jemima was rebranded as the Pearl Milling Company during the Black Lives Matter movement. Many people claimed rebranding erased the impact of the women who portrayed them. However, it’s imperative to recognize that those women served as pillars for white people’s racist agenda to keep slavery alive by showing happy slaves.
Hopefully, Stein thinks about that the next time he cries about missing mammy.
