Aunt Jemima Salt and Pepper Shakers
Ethnic Notions. Marlon Riggs
The media item I found were a pair of salt and pepper shakers portrayed after Aunt Jemima. There are two identical shakers, one for salt and the other for pepper, sitting beside each other. They’re wearing white handkerchiefs, white aprons with red poke-a-dots, red dress’s, and a red head scarf. But what makes them so different is the shade of black their faces, hands, and feet are. They are a glossy pitch black.
The Aunt Jemima shakers are just one of many was the United States used to portray the blacks. According to the film Ethnic Notions, black people were theatrically portray to be a much different kind of people. The United States used caricatures of black people in cartoons, television, radio, advertisement, and in our case of the shakers, everyday home necessities. When having all these different views of black people in everyday things; people then just starting thinking that’s how African Americans really are. They never stopped to realize that black people had feeling too, and how they felt when they saw these caricatures of their own people. Seeing these images all over, everyone started stereotyping black people after famous black people like Jim Crow, Sambo, and the common black nanny figure we see for example as Aunt Jemima. With new generations seeing these stereotypes, they then made their own judgments and the lies kept on building. It even got to be so bad that black people in movie would darken themselves more just to fit the stereotypes.
I think that these salt and pepper shakers should be destroyed in one thought but yet kept in a museum in another. They should be destroyed because they show an awful stereotype of how the United States and people used to look at the African Americans. We portrayed them as an inferior race and made them look dreadful in countless cases. On the other hand, if we destroy these precious remains, we could never admit to our wrongs. By destroying them and all the rest of that materials we portrayed blacks as, it would be so easy to say it never happened then. And I would never want that to happen again and want us to learn from our mistakes in history. Because we must learn and understand our mistakes to make sure they never happen again.
The Aunt Jemima shakers are just one of many was the United States used to portray the blacks. According to the film Ethnic Notions, black people were theatrically portray to be a much different kind of people. The United States used caricatures of black people in cartoons, television, radio, advertisement, and in our case of the shakers, everyday home necessities. When having all these different views of black people in everyday things; people then just starting thinking that’s how African Americans really are. They never stopped to realize that black people had feeling too, and how they felt when they saw these caricatures of their own people. Seeing these images all over, everyone started stereotyping black people after famous black people like Jim Crow, Sambo, and the common black nanny figure we see for example as Aunt Jemima. With new generations seeing these stereotypes, they then made their own judgments and the lies kept on building. It even got to be so bad that black people in movie would darken themselves more just to fit the stereotypes.
I think that these salt and pepper shakers should be destroyed in one thought but yet kept in a museum in another. They should be destroyed because they show an awful stereotype of how the United States and people used to look at the African Americans. We portrayed them as an inferior race and made them look dreadful in countless cases. On the other hand, if we destroy these precious remains, we could never admit to our wrongs. By destroying them and all the rest of that materials we portrayed blacks as, it would be so easy to say it never happened then. And I would never want that to happen again and want us to learn from our mistakes in history. Because we must learn and understand our mistakes to make sure they never happen again.
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