Madison Avenue and Black History month

Three black Americans that won’t be celebrated on this last day of Black History Month are American icons. In a way, they are family and household names. They represent brand recognition and have a brand loyalty which their corporate sponsors have spent millions to establish. The family angle is reinforced by their respective names, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima and Rastus, the Cream of Wheat Chef. Maybe not Ratus yet when put lumped together with an Aunt and Uncle, Ratus is like a cousin.

In my youth I thought that I wanted to be a business man and studied Marketing. I found it full of frat people who coasted through college, complacent with gentleman Cs and looking forward to a life of material success in the business world. Many of them did their Marketing “thesis” on marketing to minorities. The ironic thing about them doing this in a mostly white college in a very white state in northern New England is that it was the focus of many senior projects. This type of thing being politically correct never crossed their minds in their studies in a majority of the students. Even in the mid Eighties, when my collegiate peers hit the corporate world, they wouldn’t ever collectively play with the idea of introducing Afro American images like these in today’s market. The idea wouldn’t leave the board room.



I am not going on a limb by saying that these icons are racists. As much as you take a “big moma” looking Aunt Jemima and modernize her, not unlike the morphing of the fifties white icon Betty Crocker into a modern woman; the essence of what she has represented over the ages can’t be forgotten. She still is a subservient minority pitching food products to the masses. Uncle Ben may disappear from the boxes of Uncle Ben’s rice but the stereotypical images of African Americans created by manufactures and advertisers remain immortalized.



I wouldn’t even know that the Cream of Wheat Chef had a name if it wasn’t for Marilyn Kern-Foxworth’s book which "provides a mirror to our past--a past that has been ignored or overshadowed for too long." From the foreword by Alex Haley Kern-Foxworth chronicles the stereotypical portrayals of Blacks in advertising from the turn of the century to the present. Beginning with slave advertisements, she discusses how slavery led naturally to the stereotypes found in early advertisements. From the end of the slave era to the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, advertising portrayed Blacks as Aunt Jemimas, Uncle Bens, and Rastuses, and the author explores the psychological impact of these portrayals. With the advent of the Civil Rights movement, organizations such as CORE and NAACP voiced their opposition and became active in the elimination of such advertising.

Although now in more politically correct times, the Cream of Wheat people don’t make a direct reference to Rastus, it is an emotionally charged name which has a historical legacy. After the end of American slavery, 'Rastus' was used by whites as a generic, often derogatory, name for black men. It became synonymous with the stereotype of the happy, carefree Southern black created by Southern whites to justify continued racial repression. Rastus—as any happy black man, not as a particular person—became a familiar character in minstrel shows. I love Cream of Wheat and I won’t boycott a food product because it isn’t politically correct. Having said that, I can’t ever look at a box of it and have a mental image of how my cousin Ratus was once portrayed.



I realize that to talk of race is a delicate topic and even doing so here I have no doubt offended someone by blogging this subject or posting these images. To those aforementioned readers I say deal with it. To communicate and have a discourse on issues of race is a starting point.