I: The Mad Copyist Strikes Again!
It all started with another one of those stupid printouts. Some alt-right conservative at work left it on that same empty desk, and I totally ignored that little voice in my head that said Don't do it, you'll be sorry! and read the damned thing.
And I was sorry, because it was all about Aunt Jemima. The black woman on the pancake box. It was headed "Yep, Black Lives Matter," and it told the story of the real woman who portrayed Jemima: a lady named Nancy Green. Supposedly, she was given a lifetime contract to portray Aunt Jemima, was a big hit at the World Expo in Chicago, made lots of money travelling the country, used her fame as a platform to advocate for social justice and equality, and finally died at age 89, a millionaire.
Beneath this celebration of her life is a scathing critique of the decision by Quaker Oats to retire the Aunt Jemima mascot. And underneath that is a picture of Nancy Green, laughing and happy, holding up a plateful of pancakes.
Yeah...No.
According to both Snopes and Wikipedia, two men named Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood bought a flour mill. But there was no shortage of flour in the area, so they experimented with different mixes of ingredients and came up with a self-rising pancake flour. At first they tried to market the flour in bags labelled with just that name, but according to legend, Mr. Rutt went out to see a vaudeville show, and he saw a minstrel act (white people made up in blackface, dressed as black slaves) featuring a man garbed up as a plump "mammy" slave singing a song called "Old Aunt Jemima." Rutt appropriated this name and picture of the minstrel-show character and renamed the pancake mix for Aunt Jemima.
Nancy comes into the picture when the two friends ran out of money and sold the Jemima brand to another company. The new company, Davis Milling, improved the flavor of the mix by by switching a few ingredients and adding powdered milk, so that all you had to do was add water to get great-tasting batter.
To get the word out about this great product, Davis sought out a "mammy" type black woman to act as a living mascot. Nancy Green, born a slave and still working as a domestic for the family who had once been her masters, was recommended for the job by her employer, Judge Walker. She made her debut as Aunt Jemima at the 1893 World's Columbian Expo in Chicago, flipping pancakes, singing songs, and telling stories about her old life "on the plantation." (All made up--her origins were on a much more modest farm.) She was the very icon of the idealized antebellum south, and was so popular that security guards had to be called in to keep the crowds moving along. (That picture, by the way? It's a fake. Not only is it not Nancy Green at the World Expo, it's not even a black woman; it's a self-portrait of a white female artist in blackface and traditional slave garb, titled "Aunt Jemima: I Sang Because They Paid Me." The picture is also cropped--the artist's original has Aunt Jemima chained to a table laden with pancakes!)
So, to be clear: Two white men invented something new, slapped a black slave cook's picture on it, and then sold it to another white man, who hired a black woman to portray that slave cook. That's wince-making all by itself, but it gets worse.
Myths And Moneymakers
Davis, and later Quaker Oats, invented an entire mythology for Jemima: born a slave on a plantation owned by a kind master, she not only invented the pancake recipe, but also used her delicious product as a distraction to keep Union soldiers from harming her master! She also had a husband, "Uncle Moss," and two "pickaninny" children, "Wade" and "Diana." You could cut out paper dolls of the family on early boxes of the mix; later there were rag dolls you could send away for. There were also promotional products such as a shopping-reminder board with Jemima's likeness on it, with pegs next to such grocery needs as flour, eggs, vegetables, meat, etc., and little wooden markers to hang on a peg if you were out of that item; the top of the board carried the caption "Gots To Get."
But The Truth Is...
There's no indication that Green ever became a millionaire from her time as Aunt Jemima; in fact, she was still working as a domestic servant right before she died in an auto accident (a driver lost control and veered up onto the sidewalk, striking Green and killing her). That lifetime contract was bogus, too --she was supposed to go on a tour of Europe, but Green refused to travel over the ocean to another land. That would have been grounds for firing her, and the fact that she later lists her occupation not as "cook" but as "housekeeper" seems to indicate that she did lose her Aunt Jemima status.
She did earn enough to contribute to her church (Olivet Baptist) and to other charities, but that is more an indicator of devotion than of wealth. Whether she spoke up about the social evils of her time is hazy; I doubt she used the Aunt Jemima platform to do that, as it would be out of character for the image Davis was presenting: the cheerful, humble, devoted house slave, so eager to serve up a big stack of cakes at the drop of a kerchief.
So, you see, the original writer of this post was an idiot. The co-worker who chose to share this inaccurate tripe with the rest of us was an even bigger one.
II: The City Awakens, The Racists Howl...
I do love N.K. Jemisin's work. I've spoken of her short story, "The City Born Great," and I'm talking about it again because she expanded it into a novel!!!! It's called The City We Became, and I was so excited to see the notification on Amazon that I immediately went and ordered it from my local bookstore (I only order online if I can't get an item from a brick-and-mortar store).
But as I was waiting for my book to arrive, I got curious; so I had a really quick look at the reviews.
Yikes.
There were a lot of reviews for this book, and there are always a few grumblers in the stack of any collection of opinions; but I was amazed at the low-rated review titles: "A Disgrace." "This Is Racist Garbage." "Good Premise, But Excessive Focus On Race, Gender, Etc. Gets In The Way." By far, the biggest complaint in these reviews is the amount of setup time Jemisin uses to tell us about the main characters' ethnicity and culture, as well as their gender and sexuality.
How's This For A Statistic?
White people in NYC make up only 42.7% of the population. The percentage drops to 32.1% if you remove the white people who have some Latino or Hispanic in their ancestry. Black people make up 24.3%, while Latino/Hispanic folks make up 29.1 percent, and Native Americans comprise 0.4 % of New York's population. (These stats come from the US Census Bureau, 2019 estimates.)
Now, think of any movie or book with NYC as the setting. How often are any of the leading heroes any race other than white? I'm not talking about "best friends" or cab drivers or store clerks; I mean the actual heroes.
Not many, huh?
And when the hero(ine) is some other race or culture, more often than not, he or she is portrayed in a stereotypical role: The single black mother. The lonely private eye. The teen trying to break out of the urban core. The last positive portrayal of a black man in a blockbuster movie that I have seen was Agent J in "Men In Black," and even then, the young man starts out as a cop chasing a bad guy, and later on he is used as comic relief (when the alien is giving birth)!
With the percentages I cited, there ought to be, statistically, more people of color as stockbrokers, scientists, professors, accountants, architects, and lots of other professions besides "cop" or "server" or "cab driver" in New York. And in fact, there are. But you would never know it from reading your average book or seeing your average movie.
So Jemisin's tactic of coming right out and telling you that the gay art gallery director is a Native American of the Lenape tribe is actually very appropriate. In fact, she turns the stereotypes completely upside-down: The only cab driver you meet in the novel is a white woman, and the monster fought by the heroes is called the Woman In White (because that's how she manifests to those she tries to entrap)!
So Why The Anger?
*Sigh.* I cannot even pretend to know what is in these folks' minds. All I have is an educated guess, which is that "white people have always had center stage, so that's the way it's supposed to be." Which is, of course, untrue. But I suppose it's scary to think that you are losing your majority status...and even scarier to think that the way you have treated others is about to round the corner behind you and bite you right in the ass. And scared people are dangerous, as Yoda pointed out in The Phantom Menace: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate...leads to suffering."
III: Why Black Lives Must Matter
I was talking to one of my bosses about people appropriating the culture of Native Americans; his amused response was, "What culture?" That really floored me, because even as a kid I had studied various Native cultural expressions: jewelry, money (yep, some tribes had beads that were used as a means of exchange), clothing, agriculture, government, intertribal sign language...it was all so complex and fascinating, and here's this white guy sweeping that all away with two words!
The thing is, you hear the same, or similar, about black culture. It either doesn't exist at all, or it's portrayed as inferior to the cultural accomplishments of white people. Never mind that nearly all of the music we listen to has its origin in black culture. Rock and roll is a direct descendant of jazz and rhythm and blues, and the first writers and performers of rock were black--Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, and Little Richard are the ones who immediately come to mind, but they aren't the only ones. And before anybody says "country and western," need I remind you of how much rock, soul, and even hip-hop have influenced the form? There are country versions of soul songs all over the place (I Can Love You Like That; If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Want To Be Right), to name just two), and country songs that use hip-hop beats and even spoken rhymes (This Is How We Roll, for one; Chillin' On A Dirt Road, for another). We have appropriated black music since time out of mind. And yet, when Lil Nas X did a cool number called Old Town Road, it wasn't "country" enough for the Billboard Country chart! I mean, seriously?!
But there is a worse thing than devaluating a group's culture, and that is devaluating their very lives.
For Me, It Started With...
...Rodney King.
Maybe because I was too young to have lived through the Civil Rights marches, so I hadn't seen the police dogs and fire hoses and police brutality of that time.
But everybody knew about Rodney King, because some brave soul had a camcorder and got the bad stuff on film. Oh, the older Civil Rights stuff had been filmed by "official" news folk, and it was important; but this was just an ordinary citizen who shot the footage and then shared it. It marked the beginning of the "citizen watchdogs" who have used cameras and cell phones to bear witness to the evil that hides in the shadows.
And it turns out that much of that evil is done by the very people who are supposed to be our protectors. My childhood was full of the image of Officer Friendly, the kind policeman who would guide you home if you were lost, or help get your cat out of a tree. But this was not the image that black people saw; instead, it was the cop who stopped them if their car was new (because how could a black person afford a car like that? He had to be a thief/pimp/drug pusher!), called them "boy" (because criminals don't deserve to be called "Mister"), and beat them up and ran them in on the flimsiest of charges (He sassed at me! That's disrespect! And squirmed...that's resisting arrest!).
Added to that scary image is one I didn't know about until recently: the trigger-happy cop.
A Different World
Cops live in a totally different world than most of us do.
For a police officer, the people s/he meets come in two flavors: Good and Bad. What defines either of these flavors depends on his background and his training.
For many decades now, black people have been portrayed as poor, dirty, lazy, ignorant, dope-addicted, raping, thieving, murdering...criminals. The reason their neighborhoods are run-down is that they don't care about revitalizing them; their schools are inferior because the parents don't want to get involved. Never mind the underhanded banking practices that prevented blacks from getting start-up business loans or mortgage/improvement loan approvals. Never mind "white flight," where white people moved their families to the suburbs so their children didn't have to go to school with black children. Never mind the food deserts, where full-service grocery stores are far away and the nearest food is processed crap from a convenience store on the corner. Never mind that the most a black urban-core inhabitant ever sees of his municipal tax money is the police cars that show up to arrest a man or woman for the three joints in their pocket, or the (possibly) unlicensed firearm, or just because they had a bad attitude. The garbage trucks show up on a hit-or-miss basis, the potholes get larger every year, the murders remain unsolved...but there are always plenty of cops. And chances are, those cops are going to be white, with the mindset of Us and Them, Good and Bad.
And when you have the attitude that darker skin equals Bad, that's when the fear/anger/hate sets in.
Statistics That Made Me Blink...And Then Cry
According to Statistica.com, there were 999 fatal shootings of civilians by police in 2020. Of those killed, 226 were black. Do the math, and you see that there the ratio is 1:4.42 (rounded to the second decimal place), so slightly fewer than 25% of police kills were of blacks.
But blacks make up only 12.1% of the population of the United States--13% if we add in the multi-racial blacks. That means that black people were killed by police about twice as often as whites or other ethnicities.
And why? Because they were criminals? Tell that to Breonna Taylor. Police in Louisville used a no-knock warrant at her home because they thought she was part of a drug ring. When the cops showed up at the house after midnight, both Breonna and her boyfriend asked who was there, but got no answer. When the officers used a battering ram to bust in the door, the boyfriend, now up and headed for the door, fired his (legally-registered) gun at what he thought was a home invader; Breonna--unarmed--was shot as she accompanied him. She had no criminal record and only circumstantial ties to the ex-boyfriend who was the real target (and who was found at another location).
Or how about Tamir Rice? 12 years old, and armed only with a fake gun. Only problem was, the toy didn't have that orange tip on it that tells everyone it's a fake. After this kid was seen aiming the toy gun at people, someone called 911 about it. The caller told the dispatcher that it looked like a kid and the gun was probably a fake, but the dispatcher failed to relay that info to the two officers sent to the site. When they arrived at the scene, the cops yelled at Tamir to show his hands; instead, he reached back as if to draw his fake gun, and one cop shot him in the torso. Witnesses say the cop car hadn't even come to a full stop before the boy was shot. What's more, when Tamir's 14-year-old sister tried to get to her brother minutes after the shooting, she was cuffed and thrown to the ground by the officers (and she wasn't armed with anything!).
Yeah, But...
Okay, this is where people start second-guessing.
Breonna was hooked up with a drug dealer (at one time), so of course she was under suspicion.
Tamir didn't have that orange tip on the fake gun, and he didn't obey the officers, so of course he was going to get shot.
Michael Brown shouldn't have been walking in the street.
George Floyd shouldn't have been passing a counterfeit twenty...
...And on and on it goes. There's always an excuse for a cop killing a black person.
But what I want to know is, which of the incidents I just named was worth a civilian dying from a cop's bullet (or knee to the neck)? When the hell did so many cops start thinking it was okay to be Dirty Harry?
When did we lose sight of the fact that everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?
When did the phrase "To protect and serve" not apply to an entire race of people?
Because it doesn't, you know. Somehow, the idea that black people commit more crimes has seeped into the public consciousness and sprouted like mildew, and the result is that the police think that black people are more dangerous than white people. Neither of these things is true, and if people would actually look at the statistics, they would see that. But the stats remain hidden, and the myth holds sway.
And that's why we need organizations like Black Lives Matter: because for a long time now, they haven't. When a black person killed by the cops is belittled, criminalized, brushed off...when that happens, people watching these tragic events get to shrug and pretend that the human being who lost his or her life wasn't important. They weren't sons, or wives, or daughters, or loved by others--they were only criminals...
Epilogue: The Color Of Karma Is Black
I'd like to end this with a poem. I wrote it after getting fed up with the dehumanization of black people shot by police:
This blogger has been keeping tabs on unarmed black victims of police brutality, whether with a gun or without. Check it out here; it's incredibly sobering:
https://www.reneeater.com/on-monuments-blog/tag/list+of+unarmed+black+people+killed+by+police
