Southern whites imposed the name “mammy” onto enslaved women who nursed white children. The advertising industry played a central role in creating and reimagining the mammy over time, primarily through the now-familiar image of “Aunt Jemima.” This image was originally created for a pancake mix advertising campaign in 1893. Through Aunt Jemima, advertisers constructed a racist visual world.  Former slaves, who were untrustworthy and violent, became happy mammies and contented servants. Advertisers used Aunt Jemima to provoke white feelings of comfort and desire for the old days when enslaved women cooked and cleaned for whites on the plantation. 

Aunt Jemima circulated widely because consumer society began to expand at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, advertisers and newspapers developed images that could be used over and over again with different print text. They called these stock images “stereotypes.” Advertisers organized sales promotions around them. During slavery, they had also used stock images of enslaved women to advertise auctions or rewards for runaways. The images were easy to understand and they were blatantly racist, reflecting dominant white ideas. This practice continues today.

Versions of Aunt Jemima still circulate in popular media. For example, in this television commercial for Pine Sol cleaner, the “Pine-Sol Lady” seems happiest when she can clean other people’s houses with the best product. All of these versions recycled core stereotypes about appearance, language, and authority that undermine African American domestic workers’ cultural and political power.

These representations mask the exploitative role that employers have played. As one historian notes, “Seeing the former slave woman visually transformed into a contented servant absolved everyone of past transgressions and future responsibility toward the freed people.” Icons like the mammy figure are designed to suggest that African American domestic workersA worker who performs paid labor in a home, such as cleaning, cooking, and caretaking. Their labor makes other forms of work possible. will prioritize the care of their white employers. And preserve the interests of capitalCapital is a social and economic relation where workers are commodities who must sell their labor to capitalists. and white society instead of asserting their own authority and defending their own well-being.

Black artists, activists, and social movements have rejected and reimagined the racist imagery of Aunt Jemima for decades. For example, Faith Ringgold’s story-quilt, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima” and Betty Sayre’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.” The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others in June 2020 were instrumental to ending one chapter of this racist icon’s history. On June 17, 2020, Quaker Oats announced it would rebrand, remove the derogatory image, and change the name of its pancake and waffle mix.

Click here and here to learn more about Faith Ringgold’s life and work, and here to hear her discuss the impact of Aunt Jemima on generations of Black women