Mars Food North America said this week it plans to speed up its rebrand of Uncle Ben’s rice just days after Quaker Oats announced plans to scrap the Aunt Jemima maple syrup imagery, which depicted a black woman and “racial stereotype.”
“We have indeed been considering a more substantive change and have begun that work even before news of Aunt Jemima,” Sara Schulte, a spokeswoman for Mars Food, Uncle Ben’s parent company, told Adweek. “We are evaluating all possibilities.”
On Wednesday, Quaker Oats said in a statement first obtained by NBC News it “recognize[d] Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype … As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations.”
The Uncle Ben’s name, according to the brand’s website, originated in the 1940s.
“Gordon Harwell, one of the founders of Converted Brand Rice, and his partner were dining in their favourite Chicago restaurant. They were discussing how they were going to market their product to new customers, they began to discuss the legendary Texan farmer, Uncle Ben who was known for his exceptionally high quality rice,” the website reads. “So right there and then, they christened their product Uncle Ben’s Converted Brand Rice. The face appearing on all Uncle Ben’s packaging is that of Frank Brown, a maitre d’hotel (head waiter) at an exclusive Chicago restaurant who agreed to pose for the Uncle Ben’s portrait.”
In recent weeks, several other companies, universities, and businesses have either renamed or scrapped emblems, logos, or branding deemed to be racially insensitive or glorifying stereotypes.
“It’s an image that hearkens back to the antebellum plantation,” said Riche Richardson, an associate professor of African American literature at Cornell University, during an interview on the Today Show. “Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype that is premised on this idea of Black inferiority and otherness. It is urgent to expunge our public spaces of a lot of these symbols that, for some people, are triggering and represent terror and abuse.”
