Users on social media are sharing a mislabeled artwork that appears to show a Black woman chained to a table while smiling and holding a stack of pancakes. Users claim the image is a hidden photograph of “the real Aunt Jemima”, referring to Nancy Green, the original model of the famous pancake mix brand. The photograph in the claim is actually a self-portrait of white artist Sally Stockhold, which was staged to make her resemble Aunt Jemima.
According to the Jim Crow Museum , the mammy caricature was used during slavery and the Jim Crow era as proof that black women “were contented, even happy, as slaves”, suggesting “The slavery-era mammy did not want to be free.”
In the book “Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory”, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, associate professor at Emory University, attributes Aunt Jemima’s success to the “happy slave mythology” .“An African American woman, pretending to be a slave, was pivotal to the trademark’s commercial achievement in 1893. Its success revolved around the fantasy of returning a black woman to a sanitized version of slavery”, writes Wallace-Sanders .
In an op-ed for NBC News, writer Michael Twitty discussed his concern over the mixed reactions at the brand’s recent retirement: “As pleasant and formative an experience as the memory of this particular brand mascot might be for some white people, it’s also the root of the problem.” He describes Aunt Jemima’s character “an invitation to white people to indulge in a fantasy of enslaved people — and by extension, all of Black America — as submissive, self-effacing, loyal, pacified and pacifying.
According to Maurice M. Manring, Aunt Jemima adverts sold the idea of “the lifestyle once created for plantation mistresses” made easy by the efforts of female slaves. Manring adds, “White housewives did not aspire to be Aunt Jemima; they aspired to have her. They were buying the idea of a slave, in a box.” .
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