Brodigan - June 19, 2020 at 08:37AM
After Thursday's cancellation of Aunt Jemima, I'm learning all sorts of things about my breakfast food I didn't know. Like how this "racist imagery" is actually based on a real person, who, over a century later, a corporation decides, in the name of virtual-signaling, to cancel, just so everyone leaves them alone. I asked yesterday if this empty symbolism actually impresses anyone, and I found someone who most definitely is not impressed: Aunt Jemima's great-grandson Larnell Evans Sr.
"This is an injustice for me and my family. This is part of my history, sir," Larnell Evans Sr. told me. "The racism they talk about, using images from slavery, that comes from the other side — white people. This company profits off images of our slavery. And their answer is to erase my great-grandmother's history. A black female. … It hurts."
"She worked for that Quaker Oats for 20 years. She traveled all the way around the United States and Canada making pancakes as Aunt Jemima for them," he said. "This woman served all those people, and it was after slavery. She worked as Aunt Jemima. That was her job. … How do you think I feel as a black man sitting here telling you about my family history they're trying to erase?"
It's like with people wanting to cancel "Gone with the Wind," the movie that is responsible for the very first African-American Oscar win, in the 1940s, where she had to sit segregated from the other actors and actresses. That's an important moment in our history. Hearing more about the history of "Aunt Jemima," both as a brand and an actual person, is important to our history as well. Yes, OUR history. Because black history is America's history, even the parts that make us uncomfortable.
Call me closed-minded, but I don't think that history should be erased just so white liberals can feel good about themselves on Twitter.
from Steven Crowder Says
