The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

Do you know the true reason that Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and Mrs. Butterworth have to be purged, along with the likes of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom?

Because they are smiling and displaying happy faces and clearly happy.

For the left, the only good "Negro" is the "Negro" who is enraged, who is on edge, and (last but not least) who votes for the Democratic Party. They must hate their country for all the injustices, real or alleged, that they (or that their ancestors) have suffered, and be in the legions working for the Social Justice Warriors' "fundamental transformation of the United States of America." Seething with rage and resentment, the only good "Negro" is the "Negro" who is part of the SJWs' Permanent Outrage Machine.

As Walter Williams wrote in The Jackson Sun,

The news media people and their liberal allies know the facts, but they need to promote the appearance of injustice to keep black people in a state of grievance.

This is why Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglas are absent from the 1619 Project. Not only did they see America as fundamentally good, they acted in a pretty reasonable manner most of the time and they were more than willing to work with white people. Meanwhile, Tim Scott, the epitome of a black man who rose from poverty to prominence, did not even receive an invitation to participate in the 50th anniversary commemorations of MLK's Lincoln Memorial speech. (Incidentally — not really — all three happen(ed) also to be Republicans.)

• Related: Witness the Unbelievable Amount of Racism That Exists Among Conservatives and in the Tea Party

So what is wrong about Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and Uncle Remus and the Land O'Lakes maid isn't that they are caricatures — or that their “history and storyline are steeped in extremely problematic and stereotypical racist tropes from” the 1940s, the 1930s, the 1900s, or earlier — but that they are blacks who aren't in a state of grievance and outrage.

As Dennis Prager writes repeatedly, the trademark of the Left is the absence of even the minutest sign of gratitude in their lives. Uncle Ben, Uncle Tom, and Uncle Remus display signs of gratitude as well as of happiness and, indeed, basic human goodness, and, for the left, that is a no-no (in fact, t'is an outrage).

Certainly, nobody is advocating that anybody, black or white, ignore the injustices against themselves or others, past or present. But in their depictions, Ben and Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth are not appearing in public. Is it impossible to imagine that, no matter how they behaved in public during the day and no matter how many injustices they may have encountered (and perhaps protested against), in the privacy of their homes, Ben and Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth let down their masks, cool down, smile, and relax as they prepare dinner for their families with rice and pancakes?

The Hill's Marty Johnson:

Mars and Conagra announced that they would be changing the logos of Uncle Ben's rice and Mrs. Butterworth's syrup, respectively."The Mrs. Butterworth's brand, including its syrup packaging, is intended to evoke the images of a loving grandmother. We stand in solidarity with our Black and Brown communities and we can see that our packaging may be interpreted in a way that is wholly inconsistent with our values."

What does all this really say? It says that minorities must be treated like children (presumably, because they are like children) and coddled.

The movement turns out to more a white thing more than anything.

When Native Americans were asked about changing the name of the Redskins football team, fewer than 10 % felt offended by the term. (And why should they? Why, indeed, should they feel anything but pride? When one names a sports team of pride, one chooses a name that respect. For instance, no place anywhere would anybody call their sports team the  N•••ers (the N-word), or, conversely, the Crackers; but they might call them the Zulus, or the Ashantis, or the Persians (conversely, the Spartans or the Vikings or the Saxons), to depict a warrior people, or a warrior tribe, which has shown, and is celebrated for, its warrior skills.)

In a short online video from Prager University, a white student walks through a California campus dressed in traditional Chinese attire and gets excoriated and yelled at again and again for being (dressed like) a racist. In the second half of the video, he walks up to Asians (and Asian-Americans?) in the street and, finally, through Chinatown. There, he meets nothing but merriment. At worst, he gets a "You should watch out because it might be interpreted as racist", i.e., others, that is to say whites, might call it racist.

As for the families of Lillian Richard (who served as a model for the Aunt Jemima character), they are opposed to the rebranding move. This led the Babylon Bee to run a tongue-in-cheek article entitled Activists Fight Racism By Driving All People Of Color Out Of Pop Culture.

In the case of the

black chef on the boxes of Cream Of Wheat [his] is an image of a real person, too. The late Frank L. White was a chef in Chicago. In 1900, his picture replaced the breakfast cereal's previous mascot — "Rastus," a racial slur for a black man.

So, in other words, the company reacted to racial stereotypes back 120 years ago, and reacted, appropriately, one could say, by — can you believe it?! — replacing a stereotype with a real person.

Indeed, all these characters turn out to be not stereotypes at all but real people. With regards to the Land O'Lakes maiden, Mia was never a stereotype, affirms the Native American (!) son of the Ojibwe artist who drew her originally.

Likewise the slave invited by Honest Abe to shed his chains and rise in the Emancipation Memorial, criticized for being a stereotype, happens to also be based upon a real person, as described by Ken Masugi at the American Greatness website in his article Lincoln's New Assassins:

Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.

 … the Commission charged with coming up with an appropriate memorial and raising funds from freed slaves—yes, the mob would be desecrating the memories, labor, and donations of enslaved Americans [!]

If an Italian, a Frenchman, a Cambodian, or a Nigerian were to dress up as, say, a Viking, why should I feel offended? Why should I care?

But you don't understand, I am told that the SJW actions are frightfully important because they "help play an important role in eliminating racial bias."

Except, the truth is, as we have seen, few minorities actually give much of a spit.

When René Goscinny was criticized for his depictions of blacks in the Asterix and Lucky Luke comics, the man who lost half his family in the ovens of Auschwitz reacted with anger at being called a racist.

And the whites in my comics?! Have you taken a look at them, the whites in my comics?!

How about the happy Fenians, who saunter through the Irish countryside for the benefit of a soap brand? ("Tip o' the mornin', lassie!") Should they vanish too? Who are we supposed to replace all these people with? On edge gangster types from the Hood, from the Indian reservation, and from Dublin's slums — growling and gnarling, with a scowl on their face? (I suppose they could, they should, all be saying, something  to the effect of "Buy my maple syrup, you dirty cracker, or you're a goddamned racist!")

I have often summarized the Left's positions thus: it's all about private lives (race, sex, etc), not public policy, and demonstrating that you are better than your neighbor.

In an unbelievable moment with Donald Trump's press secretary, a (white) journalist asked whether, for the benefit of blacks, the president shouldn't push for Juneteenth to be made a federal holiday.

What's wrong with Martin Luther King day? We need another federal holiday, based on a freeing of slaves which took place in only one of the 13 or so slave states (Texas)?

More importantly: Don't Americans today know that Juneteenth would never have been possible if not for the likes of Abraham Lincoln. Ulysses Simpson Grant, and Colonel Hans Christian Heg?

Well, all over America the statues of those Americans have been defaced and torn down.  Perhaps, before you make more for more plans for another holiday, you should refrain from acting like a spoiled brat (whatever the color of your skin) and tearing down the statues of those who took up arms, put their lives at risk, and lost said lives against the slave power and secession.

The SJW movement is right about one thing, though. There is not much of anything that I want to to do for blacks. Do you know why? Because I think that blacks are grown-up citizens who are able to get by — and to thrive — without help from me.

So who is the true racist here? The conservative who does not want to help (or not to help excessively) because he considers blacks as equals who? Or the person or the leftist (whatever the color of his skin) who goes "Awwww, poor l'il black people. It's so outrageous, it's so sad… Poor N•groes who cannot get by without help from the government and from leftists like me…"?

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619