Contesting the Aunt Jemima Trademark through Feminist Art: Why is She Still Smiling?

In 1989, Quaker Oats Company, in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Aunt Jemima trademark, made extensive alterations to her face and body. Her image was ‘updated by removing her headband and giving her pearl earrings and a lace collar.’[1] Aunt Jemima, the commodified version of a Southern mammy, has always been a heavy-set, dark-skinned, bandanna-wearing black woman with a broad, teethy smile. This update, according to a company spokesperson, was an attempt ‘to make her look like a working mother, an image the company claimed was supported by test-marketing of the new logo among blacks and whites.’[2] In addition to her change in wardrobe, Aunt Jemima’s hair was straightened, and she appeared visibly older. Micki McElya astutely notes that Aunt Jemima bears little resemblance to actual enslaved women of the antebellum period. Black women did work in white homes, cooked innumerable meals, cared for white children, and surely formed emotional ties to white family members at times, but the mammy was – and is – a fiction.’[3] As Patricia Hill Collins writes, ‘given the short life expectancy of slave women – 33.6 years – and the high mortality rates of Black children – from 1850 to 1860 fewer than two of three Black children survived to the age of ten …,’[4] real mammies, one hundred years ago, probably had very little to smile about.

This article is an analysis of several black feminist artists who have given a voice to the black body we now associate with pancakes and syrup. Who is Aunt Jemima? What lies behind her smile? How have the artworks of black feminists challenged not just the commodity product that she was but also black nationalist discourses around the roles of black women? The works of Betye Saar, Freida High Tesfagiorgis, and Renee Cox have, in the face of practices of ‘negation and marginalization in conventional art history and criticism’[5] created a discourse around the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality which questions this stereotype of black womanhood.

In the preface to Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, Jacqueline Bobo asserts that legions of black women have, historically, been artists without acknowledged art forms. ‘Prohibited by law and centuries-old custom from full participation in established creative endeavours,’ she writes, ‘they preserved in crafting beauty in the midst of racial carnage, community in the face of legally mandated dispossession of both their families and property.’[6] I would like to explore the extent to which Saar, Tesfagiorgis, and Cox have engaged in the aforementioned Aunt Jemima, as a means to also contend with contemporary depictions of black women. More recent works like Sally Stockhold’s Aunt Jemima, I Laughed Because They Paid Me (2008) and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s Aunt Jemima You Can Do It (2010) raise further questions about the politics of Aunt Jemima as a commodified image, and an iconic figure in popular culture.

Importantly, in the 1960s, black male artists – largely operating under a new Black consciousness – tackled Aunt Jemima, largely by incorporating her image into a Black Power, Black nationalist discourse. Joe Overstreet’s rendering challenged the oppressive economic and social structure of America; Jeff Donaldson confronted police brutality and white supremacy in his piece. Murry DePillars brought the aesthetics of Black liberation into the discussion of Aunt Jemima, which by the late-1960s, ‘had been widely adopted as a symbol of pride and resistance to oppression by many African Americans who had not participated directly in political activities.’[7] While their work, coupled with protests and boycotts by black activists, ‘led Quaker Oats to drop the bandanna in 1968 and give Aunt Jemima a headband, in addition to slimming her down and making her look somewhat younger,’[8] her image remained immune to the realities of black women’s lives. This transition from bandanna to headband can also be read as a symbolic ode to the integration of black women into the workforce (as secretaries, typists, or receptionists). By focusing on the black female body but also hairstyle and dress, which ‘during the 1960s had become signifiers of pride and identity,’[9] black feminist art in the 1970s further reconfigured Aunt Jemima’s image, not singularly in terms of her role in a black nationalist discourse, but in terms of who she really is – a black woman. Working under the tenets of a Black Feminist movement, these artists challenged the patriarchy and sexism embedded in American society, but also within Black Nationalist organizations.

New York native Faith Ringgold was one of the first artists to, as Melody Graulich and Mara Witzling describe, ‘embed narratives in her quilts…. All the narrators of Ringgold’s quilts are African-American women who speak with authority in their own voices.’[10] In Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima (1983), Ringgold took control of the Southern mammy stereotype by creating an alternative narrative for Aunt Jemima’s life, linking it to histories of African American migration, marriage, employment, and loss. Her quilt story ultimately turned a stereotype into a personal narrative. In a recent interview, when asked to reflect upon her iconic story quilt, Ringgold maintained that Aunt Jemima is our feminist issue:

To condemn her for being black, fat, having a big nose, that’s nothing that’s not something to condemn a person for. I’m going to re-write her life and I’m going to give her a career and a family, and talk about the important things in her life not the way that she looks.[11]

Is Ringgold correct in saying that Aunt Jemima’s aesthetics should not matter to feminists? Should we care that Aunt Jemima, the epitome/ representation of the “essential” slave on a box, has not stopped smiling in over one hundred years? Using Foucault’s theory of the body as a site of struggle, and the idea that ‘power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in that same body,’[12] I argue that Aunt Jemima’s body politics matter not because of what they are but because of how they are framed, both on the box where she sits, and in popular culture.

Black Nationalism and Aunt Jemima

In the twentieth century, black women faced tough economic realities. Many were forced to hire themselves out as cook, nursemaid, washerwoman, chambermaid, and laundress, not because they so-loved cleaning and taking care of white people’s homes but because these were some of the few occupations available to them. By the 1940s, ‘59.5 percent of employed Black women were domestic workers and another 10.4 percent worked in non-domestic service occupations. Since approximately 16 percent still worked in the fields, scarcely one out of ten black women workers had really begun to escape the old grip of slavery.’[13] When white women entered the labour market en masse during World War II, labour shortages opened up some occupations to black women, many of whom worked in skilled blue-collar and clerical positions.[14] By 1960, however, ‘at least one-third of Black women workers remained chained to the same old household jobs and an additional one-fifth were non-domestic service workers.’[15] Black women did, however, make enormous economic gains between 1960 and 1980. According to Cecilia Conrad’s findings, ‘the median earnings of black women who were year-round, full-time workers increased by 53 percent between 1960 and 1970, by 23 percent between 1970 and 1980 but by less than 10 percent between 1980 and 1990 and between 1990 and 2000.’[16]

In comparison, Irene Browne found that ‘Latinas and white women experienced much steeper increases in wages between 1979 and 1989. While Latinas’ wages fell slightly in the 1990s, earnings for white women continued to rise.’[17] By 1996, for example, the medium earnings of white women with year-round, full-time employment was $4,000 more than black women, and on average $5,400 more than Latina women.[18] Where white women made significant gains in high-wage earning professions such as law, medicine, and academia, it is important to recognize that Latina women continued to battle against ‘the negative images and stereotypes which automatically confine them to [domestic work].’[19] Importantly, however, Latinas in the United States are not a monolithic group. As Antonia Domínguez Miguela asserts, ‘the Cuban population have the lowest participation rate in service works and … Cuban women’s earnings is clearly higher even when the percentage of women in the labor force is lower than that of [Mexican women].’[20] While African American women are also a diverse group, the Aunt Jemima stereotype remains the most ubiquitous image of black women’s labour.

In order to know Aunt Jemima you must understand her prototype, “mammy”. The word “mammy” dates back to southern folklore and literature in the 1820s; it is ‘almost exclusively associated with African American women serving as wet nurses and caretakers of white children.’[21] The idea to create a commodified mammy came from the blackface minstrel stage. In 1889 the creator of a ready-mix pancake product, Chris Rutt, heard the song ‘Old Aunt Jemima,’ performed by a white man in drag, wearing a red-bandanna pretending to be a ‘real’ Southern “mammy” and the idea was born. In 1893, Aunt Jemima made her debut as a real-life person at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago. Portrayed by Nancy Green, an ex-slave from Kentucky (who was previously working as a cook for a judge in Chicago), it was Southern hospitality personified (Fig. 1). In 1923 when Green was tragically killed in a car accident, she was replaced by Anna Robinson, and over the next thirty years several black women were hired to portray Aunt Jemima in advertising campaigns, at the Aunt Jemima Restaurant in Disneyland, and on television.[22] Patricia Hill Collins argues that Aunt Jemima is a ‘controlling image’ of black womanhood because it forms part of a generalized ideology of domination. Aunt Jemima is a completely fictional character but she is marketed as though she were real. Her authenticity masks a history of black women’s exploited labour. Controlling images of ‘black womanhood take on special meaning because the authority to define these symbols is a major instrument of power.’[23]

Importantly, while Aunt Jemima is read as the symbolic embodiment of black women’s domination, as bell hooks reminds us:

Discussions of gender roles in black communities, particularly those that spontaneously erupt in response to a specific cultural product or event, do not begin with a focus on defining sexism, how it functions within patriarchy and within black communities and households.[24]

Black women have, historically, been blamed for the problems facing the African American family. The 1965 government study known as the “Moynihan Report” for example, directly linked, as Angela Davis asserts, ‘the contemporary social and economic problems of the Black community to a putatively matriarchal family structure.’[25] Further, Patricia Hill Collins argues that ‘just as the mammy represents the “good” Black mother, the matriarch symbolizes the “bad” Black mother. The modern Black matriarchy thesis contends that African-American women fail to fulfill their traditional “womanly” duties.’[26] As such, another fiction about black women is that they are  failed women.

Where white women were ‘stuck’ in their homes as housewives and homemakers, black women had to leave their homes to take care of someone else’s, so ‘outside work for African-American women took place inside the homes of white women.’[27] This dichotomy was affirmed in popular culture, especially in Hollywood films where black actors portrayed mammy on the big-screen. For example when Ebony, the glossy general-interest magazine for African Americans, appeared in 1945, one of the first areas it criticized was the repeated casting of black women as maids and menials in Hollywood. In a 1948 article the magazine lamented: ‘For all its self-professed righteous reforms of recent years, Hollywood is still sticking to the same old stereotypes of moon-faced maids and groveling menials, zoot entertainers and bug-eyed Stephin Fetchits in casting Negroes.’[28] The article specifically pointed to Louise Beaver’s role as Delilah Johnson (an Aunt Jemima look-a-like) in Imitation of Life (1934), and Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939). In reality, Beavers ‘personally [hated] cooking and housework. When she was called upon to flip griddle cakes in Imitation of Life, a cook had to give her lessons in the art.’[29] But as a dark-skinned, heavy set black woman in Hollywood her choices were few – either she portrayed a mammy, maid, or menial or she did not work. By the 1950s, television continued to depict black women as maids in white homes.

In Beulah (1950 to 1953), Beavers, in the title role, portrayed ‘a dedicated, loving black housekeeper [nurturing] a white middle-class family. Following the pattern established by her film and fictional predecessors, she cheerfully dispensed homespun wisdom along with nutritious meals to the white children and their parents.’[30] Black activist and civil rights leaders’ protests in the late 1950s and the early 1960s liberated black women ‘not only from the backs of buses but also from white kitchens.’[31] Male artists argued that the black domestic servant should no longer accept a menial position; instead, she needed to become a militant, fighting not only for herself but for her husband and brothers. Joe Overstreet’s New Jemima (1964), Murry DePillars’s Aunt Jemima (1968), and Jeff Donaldson’s Aunt Jemima (and the Pillsbury Dough Boy) ’64 (1963-64) ‘all moved beyond ridiculing the trademark as a demeaning continuation of slave iconography to appropriate it as a symbol of the necessity of physical resistance to white domination.’[32] Their works also reveal how patriarchy and sexism were embedded in the Black Power movement. While ‘black cultural nationalism staunchly opposed racial oppression, it uncritically incorporated dominant ideologies about White and Black gender roles into its domain assumptions.’[33]

In Overstreet’s piece, Jemima wears her identifiable red bandanna, is barefoot and heavy-set, but her characteristic smile is equally matched by an automatic rifle that she grips in an erect position (Fig. 2). In essence, Aunt Jemima is not the defeminized mammy of the trademark, who is there to serve and nurture white people, but a bad girl who is seductively mesmerizing and luring men with her sexuality.[34] The gun likely also symbolizes the violent ‘by any means necessary’ spirit that embodied the Black Panther movement. In contrast, Donaldson and DePillars depict Aunt Jemima as a fighter who is literally not going to take it anymore (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). Donaldson’s rendering is of an unarmed Aunt Jemima who is defending herself from the raised club of a white police officer. Meanwhile, Doris Witt sees DePillars’ representation as ‘a bare-breasted, domineering, and obviously angry black woman bursting forth from a box of pancake mix, spatula raised in preparation for using it as, one surmises, a weapon.’[35]

While their appropriations of Aunt Jemima differ, all three seem to use the trademark for their own transgressive purposes; she is, as Witt writes further, ‘an efficacious and/or representative comrade in the struggle against (bourgeois) white oppression only to the extent that ‘she’ can be iconographically revisioned as a ‘he’ and symbolically returned to the male-dominated minstrel/vaudeville stage.’[36] Her muscular frame in Donaldson’s piece, coupled with the image of an Afro-wearing African American man, which sits atop Aunt Jemima’s right shoulder in DePillar’s rendering, all point to the symbolic return of Aunt Jemima to the male domain. Each also points to how, as Ed Guerrero argues, ‘a politicized black women’s agenda was generally submerged under a male-focused black nationalist discourse aimed at rediscovering and articulating the mystique of a liberated “black manhood”.’[37] Beyond inverting Aunt Jemima’s body to stand as an aggressive masculinized figure, black female artists gave her a voice, for her own purposes, not merely to aide others in the struggle for Black liberation.

Black Feminist Interventions: Aunt Jemima is More than a Mammy

In many ways black women were, from the start, outside the Second Wave Feminist movement. When white women were mobilizing in the 1970s, black women, ‘especially those from the working class, expressed far less allegiance to feminism and to [the] feminist slogan [‘The Personal Is Political].’[38] Many African-American women saw no need to campaign for empowerment. As Lisa Farrington astutely notes, ‘they believed themselves to be already “liberated” because, unlike so many of the white middle-class proponents of the women’s movement, their presence in the work force was strongly felt, although their jobs earned them far lower wages and inferior working conditions.’[39] Black feminists like the Boston-based Combahee River Collective, ‘pointed out that racism remained such a pervasive force in the lives of Black women that it limited Black women’s ability to ‘look more deeply into our own experiences and define those things that make our lives what they are and our oppression specific to us”.’[40] The politics of black liberation and the politics of feminism, Lisa Farrington writes further, ‘was keenly felt by Ringgold, who by 1970 had reshaped her aesthetic outlook to focus more definitively on feminist subject matter.’[41] In 1972, Los Angeles-born Betye Saar decided to make Aunt Jemima her femininst issue.

‘You wouldn’t expect the woman who put a gun in Aunt Jemima’s hands to be a shrinking violet,’ said New York Times columnist Kathryn Shattuck about Saar in 2006.[42] In truth, Saar is not a militant; her use of guns and handgrenades was more a matter of getting people’s attention. She began collecting derogatory black memorabilia (i.e. salt and pepper shakers, cookie jars, ashtrays, and notepads) in the 1960s, becoming ‘among the first of a now overwhelming group of African-American antiques colletors who reclaimed these objects.’[43] When Saar, along with other artists, was invited to create a work of art around her heroes, as she recalls, ‘I wanted to do something that was about a woman and I wanted to make my protest feelings heard through this piece.’[44] The piece in question is the mixed media assemblage, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) (Fig. 5), which became her signature work. In it, multiple Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix trademarked images serve as backdrop to a very dark, heavy-set, eyes bulging, wide-grinning Aunt Jemima cookie jar. The cookie jar appears as an overt critique of white America’s love affair with mammy. Within the belly of the cookie jar sits the third smiling Jemima, who holds a mulatto baby in one arm, while a Black Power fist cuts through the image. With a broom in one (black glove wearing) hand, a small pistol in the same hand, and a rifle in the other, Saar’s Jemima stands not only for Black Power but also for Black Feminism. Saar’s piece speaks to bell hooks’ famous quote that ‘when race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominant races … affirm their power over intimate relations with the Other.’[45] In her reading of this piece, Lisa Farrington poignantly observes that:

the baby cries and its brows are deeply furrowed with anxiety. This is hardly a conventional rendition of the subject, which traditionally portrays Mammy as a helpful cargiver to white children. Instead, Saar offers her viewers a disturbing alternative – a child of mixed race, the product of the Mammy’s forced submission to her white master and a signifier of the enslave woman’s servile status as breeder and chattel.[46]

Art historian John Tagg reminds us that critiques of art must include critiques of the ‘repertoire of legitimate objects with which art histories have engaged.’[47] The fact that Aunt Jemima has been beloved by whites for over one hundred years in the form of cookie jars, rag dolls, and mixing bowls, matters. While on the surface Saar’s use of the stereotype seems to depoliticize the work’s message, ‘the political threat emerges precisely because her armed Aunt Jemima is otherwise identical to the cookie jars created by White America: obese, black, and smiling. The potential for rebellion, her portrayal might suggest, is already contained within the stereotype.’[48]

Following Saar, Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, an artist, scholar and historian of African and African American history, took on projects devoted to the African American narrative and cultural memory. In what became her signature piece, a pastel entitled, Aunt Jemima Matrilineage’s (1982-3), Tesfagiorgis displayed a Black feminist politics, and an Afrocentric politics. In fact, she also coined the term Afrofemcentric art to signify ‘the principles of harmony – a harmony of ides and images, of predictable and alternative materials, and of race and gender substance.’[49] The piece seeks to ‘imitate that the Aunt Jemima trademark has repressed origins in West African cultures.’[50] Tesfagiorgis’s painting reflects a collective awareness that Aunt Jemima is not merely a trademark owned by a corporation; she a black woman who comes from Africa. Behind Jemima’s image stands the truth: Black ‘cooks were made, not born, contrary to the white southern stereotype, and they arrived in their profession through a variety of means.’[51] As Robert Henkes aptly notes, ‘Even though the Aunt Jemima stereotype remains, its image is subordinated in Tesfagiorgis’s pastel.’[52]

In September 1994, Aunt Jemima’s advertisers, in their first national television campaign since 1990, hired singer Gladys Knight and two of her grandchildren to speak for the Aunt Jemima brand, ‘which meant that a real black woman was speaking for an imaginary black woman.’[53] Jamaican-born Renee Cox used photographic imagery to contest the contemporary trademark. In her first one-woman show at a New York gallery in 1998 Cox made herself into a black superhero named Raje; she appeared in a series of photographs, the most notable of which was entitled, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben (1998) (Fig. 6).[54] A likely response to this act of speaking from a fictional place, it depicts two figures from contemporary advertising – Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix and Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice products (a stereotype of the docile black male servant). In the forefront of the image is the superhero Raje, and behind her stands two other black superheroes. With their arms linked in solidarity, both of the women are slender and athletic, they are wearing swim suits (Raje wears a full piece in the colours of Pan-Africanism – red, gold, black, and green – the other a black bikini), and long black boots, and the black man wears red and gold shorts. While Raje’s gaze is direct, the others cast their gaze upward. The women’s hairstyles are also highly politicized (Raje wears dreadlocks, the other an Afro), and each has sharp blades protruding from their fingers. The message of Cox’s piece is clear – black women (and men) must free themselves from the bondage of commodity culture. But if, as Manring asserts, ‘Aunt Jemima lives on because white Americans like having a mammy,’[55] to what extent are black women also complicit in this love affair with mammy?

Recently, Sally Stockhold’s Aunt Jemima I Laughed Because They Paid Me (2008) satirized the black slave motif by depicting a barefooted Southern mammy in traditional red-diamond print bandanna, holding exceedingly large pancakes with her right ankle chained to the table. Aunt Jemima is also wide-mouthed, laughing hysterically (Fig. 7). The irony of the piece is that while Aunt Jemima may have ‘served’ the public, and got paid to do so, she was still enslaved, both literally and figuratively. Another contemporary print by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Aunt Jemima You Can Do It (2010), is a play on the 1940s ‘We Can Do It (aka Rosie the Riveter)’ ad campaign to encourage women to work (Fig. 8). Fazlalizadeh’s rendering calls for a reconfiguration of how we view Aunt Jemima – as first and foremost, a labourer. But why is it, even in these contemporary renderings, Aunt Jemima is still smiling?

In September 2012, The Guardian posted a story on its facebook page regarding models wearing Aunt Jemima earrings on a catwalk at Dolce and Gabbana during Milan fashion week. As the article points out, ‘some might argue that they’re harmless, even cute, but there’s nothing cute about two white men selling minstrel earrings to a majority non-black audience. There wasn’t a single black model in Dolce and Gabbana’s show, and it’s hard not to be appalled by the transparent exoticism in sending the only black faces down the runway in the form of earrings.’[56] Aunt Jemima is still our feminist issue because she stands for the continued silencing of black women’s exploitation around the world. As one of the most recognizable images of black women globally, why aren’t more people enraged by the fact that she remains frozen in time? As The Guardian aptly concludes, ‘when you’re explicitly pandering to such a shameful era of western racism and colonialism, it’s time to move on to the future.’[57] I could not agree more. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, we need to place the ‘diverse patterns of [Black] women’s activism within the border zone of Black feminist nationalism/ Black nationalist feminism … as well as within a broader, global framework of feminist nationalism...[in order to] create space for much needed dialogue among Black women activists … as well as alliances with other groups of racial ethnic women.’[58] Aunt Jemima is not a Black feminist issue; she must be the issue of this generation of feminists, artists, and activists, and then perhaps we will finally be able to wipe that smile off her stereotyped and fictional face.

Notes

[1] ‘Aunt Jemima’s Historical Timeline’ The Quaker Oats Company, accessed September 26, 2012, http://www.auntjemima.com/aj_history/

[2] See M.M. Manring Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998) p. 172

[3] Micki McElya  Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007) p. 4

[4] Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990) p.98

[5] Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis ‘In Search of a Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists’ in Jacqueline Bobo (ed) Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001) p. 146

[6] Jacqueline Bobo ‘Preface: Bearing Witness’ in Jacqueline Bobo  (ed) Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001) p. xv

[7] Susannah Walker ‘Black is Profitable: The Commodification of the Afro, 1960-1975’ in Philip Scranton (ed) Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001) p. 262.

[8] Manring Slave in a Box (1998) p.169

[9] Carla Williams ‘Naked, Neutered, or Noble: The Black Female Body in America and the Problem of Photographic History’ in Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (ed) Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2002) p. 192

[10] Meldoy Graulich and Mara Witzling ‘The Freedom to Say what She Pleases: A Conversation with Faith Ringgold’ in Jacqueline Bobo (ed) Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001) p. 186

[11] Faith Ringgold: Aunt Jemima Focus, YouTube video, 3:06, posted by visionaryproject, 22 March 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1AXCF2h3cQ

[12] Michel Foucault, trans. Colin Gordon et al. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings: 1972-1977 (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) p. 56

[13] Angela Davis Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) p. 98

[14] For more of a detailed discussion on black women’s occupational gains see Bette Woody Black Women in the Workplace: Impacts on Structural Change in the Economy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992) p.50-58

[15] Ibid p. 98

[16] Cecelia A. Conrad ‘Changes in the Labor Market Status of Black Women, 1960-2000’ in Cecilia A. Conrad and John Whitehead (eds.) African Americans in the U.S. Economy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) p. 157

[17] Irene Browne ‘Introduction: Latinas and African American Women in the U.S. Labor Market’ in Irene Browne (ed) Latinas and African American Women at Work: Race, Gender, and Economic Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999) p. 5

[18] In 1996, where Puerto Rican and Cuban-American women’s median annual earnings was $22,000 as compared to $25,000 for White women, women of Mexican-origin made $17,000, women of Central and South American-origin made $18,720, and other Latina women made $18,300. The average difference in median annual earnings between these Latina women combined as compared to White women was $5,400. See Ibid p. 5

[19] Antonia Domínguez Miguela ‘Empleadas’ in the U.S.A.: Latina Domestic Workers Negotiating Power among Boundaries of Race, Class and Gender’ in Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy (ed) Culture and Power: Cultural Confrontations (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza 1999), p. 300

[20] Ibid p. 302

[21] Kimberly Wallace-Sanders  Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008) p. 4

[22] Along with Anna Robinson, Rose Washington Riles also performed as Aunt Jemima throughout the 1930s; in the 1940s and 1950s, actresses Aylene Lewis and Edith Wilson portrayed her in public and in television spots. The last woman to portray Aunt Jemima in public was Rosie Hall; she died in 1967 and was not replaced.

[23] Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 7 and pp. 67-68

[24] bell hooks Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990) p. 76

[25] Angela Davis Women, Race & Class (1983) p. 13

[26] Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought (1990) p. 73-74

[27] Patricia Turner Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994) p. 54

[28] ‘Movie Maids’ Ebony (August 1948) p. 56

[29] Ibid p. 57

[30] Patricia Turner Ceramic Uncles (1994) p. 53

[31] Ibid p. 56

[32] Doris Witt Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 44

[33] Patricia Hill Collins From Black Power to Hip-Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Philadelphia; Temple University Press, 2006) p. 107.

[34] Marilyn Yarbrough and Crystal Bennett provide a detailed discussion of the three black female stereotypes – mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire. See Marilyn Yarbrough and Crystal Bennett, ‘Cassandra and the ‘Sistahs’: the Peculiar Treatment of African American Women in the Myth of Women as Liars’ Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 3 (Spring 2000) pp. 625-657

[35] Doris Witt Black Hunger (1999) p. 44

[36] Ibid p. 45

[37] Ed Guerrero Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) p. 91

[38] Patricia Hill Collins From Black Power (2006) p. 163

[39] Lisa A. Farrington Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 150-151

[40] Patricia Hill Collins From Black Power p. 164

[41] Lisa Farrington Creating (2005) p. 151

[42] Kathryn Shattuck ‘The Artist Who Made a Tougher Aunt Jemima Hasn’t Softened With Age’ New York Times September 12, 2006, accessed June 25, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/arts/design/12saar.html?_r=1&ref=arts.

[43] Lisa Farrington Creating Their Own Image (2005) p. 164

[44] Betye Saar: The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, YouTube video, 5:02, posted by by visionaryproject on Mar 22, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJvyFBcvD4

[45] bell hooks  Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992) p. 23

[46] Lisa Farrington Creating Their Own Image (2005) p. 164-165

[47] John Tagg Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) p. 42

[48] Doris Witt Black Hunger (1999) p. 50

[49] Lisa Farrington Creating Their Own Image (2005) p. 151. Also see Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis ‘Afrofemcentric: Twenty Years of Faith Ringgold’ in Michele Wallace (ed) Faith Ringgold: Twenty Years of Painting, Sculpture, and Performance (1963-1983) (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1984) p. 17

[50] Ibid p. 49

[51] Rebecca Sharpless Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010) p. 11

[52] Robert Henkes The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1993) p. 114

[53] Manring, Slave in a Box (1998) p. 177

[54] See ‘Renee Cox Bio’ http://www.reneecox.net/bio.html

[55] Ibid p. 183

[56] ‘There's nothing cute about accessories that make light of colonial imagery’ The Guardian 26 September 2012 [accessed September 17, 2012, https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/fashion/fashion-blog/2012/sep/26/dolce-gabbana-racist-earrings?post_gdp=true.]

[57] Ibid

[58] Collins From Black Power (2006) p. 154