Popeye's New Aunt Jemima

Dear BFDiary,

Most of my days are filled with reading, but I can't lie. I'm not yet willing to give up shows like Law & Order SVU and Real Housewives of New Jersey, Atlanta, DC... So I guess that makes me a a doctoral student silly enough to make time for TV (at least for now). Since I'm switching back and forth between critical theory and cat fights, Patricia Hill Collins and Andy Cohen (by the way, the Housewives of New Jersey Reunion was bananas!), feminist ideology and Food Network challenges, the lines in my head tend to blur a little. Since, I'm actually studying the media, this works well for me (not so much for someone studying say clinical psychology).

Just the other day I was reading a book by a woman who is a journalist and decided to write a particular piece with a somewhat "scholarly" feel. She discussed the traditional role of the black woman as Mammy as personified through, you guessed it, America's favorite woman to have at the breakfast table, Aunt Jemima. If you know anything about the history of black images in media then you probably realize that Aunt Jemima had a big makeover not too many years ago. She dropped that stubborn 100 pounds that was weighing her down, invested in some Ambi skin "lightening" cream, and ditched the head rag to show off her new perfectly coiffed curls. I guess this is supposed to make even black people feel comfortable eating her breakfast. The writer I'm referring to, however, said that Aunt Jemima's presence had nothing to do with the rag. Ummm, whose she fooling? The rag, complete the ensemble, kept us from seeing the part of her that we call her crown, her glory. Just like the weight kept us from seeing her beauty and sensuality and the wide smile kept us from seeing her pain, her discontent, and her quiet resistance of her position as the go-to woman in someone else's house.

Fast forward to 2010 and I'm watching Popeyes reclaim their place as the only "bonafide" fast food fried chicken joint of America through a woman named Anne. Sure, she has a more modern hairdo (sometimes), but she's also in an apron. She's calling it her fried chicken, which couldn't be further from the truth. Popeyes came to fruition from a white guy named Al Copeland in 1972, mind you he was probably using a recipe some black woman that had worked for his family at some point may have influenced, but the point is, she'll never see a check.

The point of this post isn't to hate or get you to stop supporting these brands (your personal consumption is on you), rather, I want to draw your attention to the black femme body as a marketing tool for comfort foods. Are the women who put on "mammy" acts at Aunt Jemima cooking demonstrations around the nation, and, is Anne chosen because their great actors? I don't think so. It's all about the look. It's all about America's comfort with the image of black women. Within our national memory, the black woman has been (re)presented as a jezebel, as sapphire, and of course, as mammy. Relishing in our resistance to buck tradition and taint the status quo we reproduce these images, even after we've been clued in to how destructive they can be. So that in 2010, Aunt Jemima resurfaces on my chicken box.

I just can't be down with that. What recent representations have you seen that you want to publicly denounce? I'd love to hear your thoughts.