Culture Ben Stein misses the ‘large African American woman chef’ no longer on his syrup bottle - We all miss Aunt Jemima

Ben Stein misses the ‘large African American woman chef’ no longer on his syrup bottle​

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-02-22/ben-stein-aunt-jemima-syrup-twitter-reactions

Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher is getting slammed on social media for his rant about America’s corporate culture ... and pancake syrup.

On Monday night, Ben Stein, the “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” actor known for his monotone voice, posted a bizarre video to his Truth Social account in which he displayed a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup while blaming the “inherent racism of America’s corporate culture” for making the syrup less suited to his preferences.

“I am about to do something which I sometimes do, which is to make breakfast for dinner,” he opened the video.

“Aunt Jemima, yummy, pancake syrup. Now this used to show a large African American woman chef, but because of the inherent racism of America’s corporate culture, they decided to make it a white person,” he said glancing at the bottle and then realizing there’s actually no white person on the label. “Or maybe no person at all.

“But I preferred it when it was a Black person showing their incredible skill at making pancakes,” Stein, 78, added.

In 2021 PepsiCo Inc. rebranded its Aunt Jemima pancake-and-syrup line as Pearl Milling Company in an effort to eliminate its ties to racist tropes.

Stein’s video appears to have been a promo for “The World According to Ben Stein” podcast episode that aired Tuesday. In the episode’s description, Stein said he sat down with co-host Judah Friedman and Trump EPA chief of staff Mandy Gunasekara “to discuss the effects of woke corporate culture in society and the ongoing war against Aunt Jemimah [sic] as well [sic] other corporate icons.”

“Is erasure the path for progress?” the description reads. “We don’t think so either. Plus we discuss the consequences of weak leadership from the White House and the destabilizing effects that is having on our security interests both here and abroad.”


Harvard Kennedy School professor Cornell William Brooks tweeted, “Don’t pancakes taste as good without stereotypes? Uncle Ben why do you need Aunt Jemima? PS Your name is Ben Stein, hers was Mrs. Nancy Green. Respect.”

“Is anyone surprised that Ben Stein is a racist. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?” tweeted @BobHille.

Actor and stuntman D. Russo chimed in, writing, “‘I like MY pancake syrup served out of a bottle that is a LITERAL RACIST TROPE.'-Ben Stein.”

“Aunt Jemima is based on the common ‘Mammy’ archetype, a plump black woman wearing a headscarf who is a devoted and submissive servant. Her skin is dark and dewy, with a pearly white smile, but please, Ben go on about equality,” tweeted @travis_rexrode.

 

[Rudolf's Friend]

Packaging and restaurants in general had so much more charecter and charm even just 15 years ago. No better example than McDonald's
View attachment 4614638
The toys were better, food better, packaging way more colorful- all of that fucking gone.

Even hotels have become bland and sterile boxes with bland logos that nobody can even tell if its a bank or if its a hotel.

 

[WelperHelper99]

The hysterical thing about the Land o' Lakes packaging is that we just did what we did before: got rid of the Indian.

It's mental: in order to get more diversity... you get rid of diversity. Nothing was offensive with the portrayal, she was rather pretty.

you know, i don't mind that kind of building in the second one if it's like a bank, or maybe a steak house
but it's a fucking mcdonalds
if someone doesn't want to eat a mcdonalds because "the outside is too kiddy", they're retarded

It's globohomo communism, yet ironically, in China, there McDonald's still look nice and have actual comfortable furniture. But we must cut costs for profits you see

 

[ZazietheBeast]

I feel that, but even with Pizza Hut, they brought back the original logo, they returned to tradition- but they still haven't put the hut back on the roof on the new buildings. Things like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben's going the way of the dodo just says something about the lack of creative freedom. There are still artists, but they aren't allowed to create, only alter and subvert what came before. Pizza Hut is one of the few examples of the opposite happening, going back to a better time.

On the topic of the lack of creativity, I'm fairly certain that thanks to woke infesting academia, being creative is the first thing to get gutted. Because to truly write a story or create something meaningful, the person must be able to fully express themselves. Which isn't allowed because of hurt feelings. In the Soviet Union, all stories are mandated by state to be happy and glorified the communist state. The poetry made at the time as well were glorifying machines instead of the workers because to speak of suffering is the truth and they can't have that. Its why they were so critical of the STALKER movie.

Won't be surprised if creative writing is effectively gone in public schools and art is only going for the weird globohomo garbage art you see in corp buildings. This is also why these half-baked artists are buttmad at AI art. Much like Tay, AI art isn't as restrained as the regular 'modern' artist. Hence why you got Victorian art of catgirls. Not helping that many corporations have commissars who will enforce communistic shit that makes any creative work dull and lifeless.

 

[Grundlejungle]

When I was a kid I used our Aunt Jemima bottle as Rita repulsa to fight my megazord, with the bear-shaped honey bottle acting as goldar. The syrup was always pretty shit though.

 

[Zirnwyb]

I still find it funny the removed the blacks and the injun from food packaging but they left the Mexican dude on José Olé stuff. I hope they never go after him because Mexicans might throw a fit like they did when retards tried to get rid of Speedy Gonzales.

 

[HarblMcDavid]

What has always gotten me about the Aunt Jemima unpersoning was that the only way to justify that removal is to suggest that the phenotype of black people is inherently offensive to...black people.

Yes, Aunt Jemima was obviously a black lady. So are plenty of other black ladies. Accurately drawing her, perhaps smoothing out some of the imperfections, is not, cannot, and never should be, considered racist much less offensive. It offends basic intellect to suggest it.

She had slightly bigger lips, a big smile, and "nappy hair": she's black, this is somewhat to be expected. She couldn't do anything about that, nor should she need to, and if I was her, I'd want my beaming face on the front of the pancake box or syrup bottle too.

I can't find a single offensive feature or trope in the drawing used in branding, nothing is exaggerated, simply drawn to recreate a completely expected and normal real life origin.

Real life is not anime and you can't just color swap the same person and call it a day: it simply wouldn't look like Aunt Jemima if you took a white person and fucked with the hue and saturation.

It would look like Nick Rekieta dressed up as Drexel.

But nobody in charge knows the word "no", nobody has a spine, and an entire generation of broken children are silver-tonguing their way to complete cultural destruction with nobody to stop them. Aunt Jemima was merely a power play to keep their appetite for destruction sated.

 

[Jarolleon]

you know, i don't mind that kind of building in the second one if it's like a bank, or maybe a steak house
but it's a fucking mcdonalds
if someone doesn't want to eat a mcdonalds because "the outside is too kiddy", they're retarded

Makes me wonder if the real reason for all the modern drabness is that everything is marketed towards jaded millennials now. The birth rate is too low for marketing strategies designed to dazzle children to work anymore, so all the cheerful kids stuff gets gutted. Or is there an ESG bonus for using a drab commie aesthetic? There was some moral outrage against companies aggressively marketing junk food to children 20 years ago, maybe that helped this trend along

Also LMAO at none of the lefty responses bringing up that Stein is the same clown behind Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. They missed such an easy dunk

 

[Space Lazer Shark]

I still can't wrap my head around the obsession to sterilize every aspect of society into a bland, soulless husk of the past.
Not to sound like some dickwad that goes on and on about the "good ol' days" but even on the web there's been this push to sterilize logos and site layouts.
Sure it looks clean and professional but it loses a lot of the identity associated with a particular logo.
Suppose being painfully bland is the hip new thing now, i want to see some sites do wacky shit that at least makes it a little more memorable.

 

[Still Exceptional]

Ya know, it'd be hilarious if someone convinced these companies that racists are the only ones happy about them getting rid of iconic black mascots.

"Finally I can make some decent pancakes without having to look at a nigger on the box! Thank you Pearl Milling Company for fighting to make America white again!"

It would be funny as shit.

 

[Cybertonia]

Did you know that in no way at all was Aunt Jemima even a real person? She's 100% an advertising creative, not even loosely based on anyone who existed at all.

"We banned this thing that we came up with, because we came to an internal decision that we think it offends people we never met before. Aren't WE so great?"

 

[Jack Awful]

Only retards use anything but 100% maple syrup on their pancakes and waffles.

You shouldn't be eating pancakes and waffles enough for the cost to be an issue.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

It's interesting to think that generations of rich white babies grew up sucking on big black tiddies.

Now I am hungry.

 

[Dial M for Misgender]

I don't believe for a second that this man eats "breakfast syrup".

 

[Battlefield2142EU]

I guess I'm too autistic to understand why clownworld cancelled the fat nigger syrup lady. Was she not gross enough?

Jemmia was too motherly, traditional feminine for BLM. BLM is run by literal Troons who hate fit black women.

 

[greenthrowaway]

Did you know that in no way at all was Aunt Jemima even a real person? She's 100% an advertising creative, not even loosely based on anyone who existed at all.

"We banned this thing that we came up with, because we came to an internal decision that we think it offends people we never met before. Aren't WE so great?"

And it actually hurts their marketing because now they are just globohomo brand #45 of #800. People bought Mavis Beacon and believed she was some Hatian computer scientist who was taking her typing/computer school international through software. It's a more personable story than some dudes in a california garage writing software to sell to schools and families. Hell most chef brands outside of Chef Boyardee were marketing creations, and even then had to soften up his image and character to make it mass marketable.

 

[Merowinger]

Yeah, I really don't get why they removed them all. It's crazy was like a handful of people twitting on twitter can do.

 

[Coptakhenaten]

Did you know that in no way at all was Aunt Jemima even a real person? She's 100% an advertising creative, not even loosely based on anyone who existed at all.

"We banned this thing that we came up with, because we came to an internal decision that we think it offends people we never met before. Aren't WE so great?"

Aunt Jemimah the character while fake was actually originally based on real people who played the role for years: Nancy Green, Anna Short Harrington, Lillian Richard

Real people played the role of Aunt Jemima. The company proceeded to fuck them over constantly apparently, but they were real people who were actual entrepeneurs and Nacy Green was even a freed slave. The families are furious over the erasure of their legacies. Now it's replaced by the cold inhumane engines of a milling company. Their commercials are especially shallow and fake, with platitudes of "memories" and "childhood" like it's all warm and nostalgic when the truth is obvious Aunt Jemimah's syrup was HFCS addled shit they basically destroyed a positive representative for african americans for globohomo industrialism.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

Waxing nostalgic for goyslop logos and architecture is peak clown world.

 

[Pissmaster]

Packaging and restaurants in general had so much more charecter and charm even just 15 years ago. No better example than McDonald's
View attachment 4614638
The toys were better, food better, packaging way more colorful- all of that fucking gone.

Here is a photograph of a McDonalds in Washington, D.C. taken in 2021. The McDonalds has fully converted to brutalist architecture that resembles a prison, while a fat guy with a COVID mask sits on a bench looking at his phone as a fat guard in military fatigues and a COVID mask stands there with a gun that's over half his size.

 

[round robin]

I work with a lot of black people and some of them had a debate about this very thing the other day and they all pretty much agreed that it was fucking stupid and they liked aunt Jemima and uncle Ben and all of the other black food mascots, they don't see anything wrong with them. The consensus was that it was naïve whites pretending like they know what blacks want better than blacks.