KFC Pulls "Racist" Australian TV spot

Can I ask how these foods became so racially charged?

I am picking up that it was something to do with how they were advertised, as well as cultural stereotypes?

Does it mean you guys sort of feel bad about eating them, or is just any reference to African Americans eating them? Or anyone with darker skin?

Just watermelon is my feeling. Fried chicken and maybe ribs, but I still feel both are a stretch.

The watermelon thing is easy. Slaves were often given watermelons to quench their thirst when working long, hot days in the fields. It was a cheap source of fuel -sort of like energy drinks today. Advertising picked up on the image of black people eating watermelons and it became a common commercial motif. Things like this were typical in pre-WWII advertising:




I'm really not so sure about the fried-chicken link.

Thanks, GW.

So...given the racism of the culture then....how come there were, it seems, so many products advertised with black faces/stereotypes?

Wouldn't these reference have put white people off, and were they insulting to African Americans then, do you think?

This becomes one of those delicate dilemmas. Would I offer a black friend some sliced watermelon from my garden on a hot summer day - sure. However, I if I was selling watermelons, I would not ask Snoop Dogg to be my spokesperson.

I don't remember that what takes I heard about re blacks and fried chicken were any result of advertising, or even that it was re KFC, maybe it wasn't re KFC. Also not sure they were straight out conversations or I would remember that better. My closest relative, probably closest person, is black, me pink, but I remember this stuff before she was in my life. ****, maybe it was some fellow landscape architect talking in a room - that makes more sense to me in memory, re city design and the things happening in neighborhoods. Ok, now that I've figured that out, I'll conjecture that's where I heard all that.


Urggh, it might have been true, that those were the businesses that lasted in the dead as doornail business sections of the ghetto/environs. I well remember south LA.

Adds, and the destruction over time.

That's an interesting question and I'm not sure I have the full answer. Black images were used in all sorts of weird ways from about the end of the Civil War until just after WWII. Some people collect black advertising kitsch. You can find all kinds of truly racist images on things such as salt & pepper shakers, string dispensers, doorstops, dinnerware etc starting in the 1870's. I think the images were meant to be cute and even cozy. The original images for brands like Aunt Jemmina pancake mixes or the black cook on the Cream of Wheat box (two very popular foods) were meant to invoke love and caring. The image of the "Mammy" in American culture should probably become someone's PhD paper (if it hasn't already). I think these images appealed to white Americans because it made blacks look harmless and weak. The underlying fear in slave owning white America was the possibility of black uprisings. This fear and mistrust increased after the slaves were freed (thus the era of Jim Crow). I do know black Americans always hated these images. It is well documented by the writings of educated blacks at time, such as W.E.B. DuBois, that they wanted these images to be removed from society. Nothing really happened until the 1960's when the race riots heated up and the US gov't got serious about civil rights. Now it's all just a big scab that Americans occasionally pick at.

Great post, thank you!!

It's sad that past abuses have made the delicious watermelon a fraught food!


I had wondered if they evoked feelings of nostalgia...the "old south" or somesuch in southerners...and if the mammy thing evoked warmth and care. I think Gone With the Wind gave Australians some knowledge about the mammy image.

Is Aunt Jemimah from Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Be odd if a book so condemning slavery, and so influential, should give rise to insulting stereotypes...though I know Uncle Tom is an especially despised stereotype.

Edit. No Aunt Jemima isn't from UCT.


But that explains why I thought she was!!!

Hello? Maybe they were the businesses that didn't close in troubled times, when block after block was dead.. They stayed open. For whatever reason.

Most interesting discussion.
I had buttermilk pancakes with wipped butter and maple syrup (prolly artificial syrup) at the pancake parlour, I think, or maybe a Dennys restaurant years ago.

If you want to see this stuff at it's worst just do a google image search using words like mammy or negro and black advertising. The items were so nasty I decided not to post any.

The irony of Hattie McDaniel's dignified portrayal of Mammy from Gone With The Wind is that her image ended up in many of these racist ads and on household chochkees. Most commonly as cookie jars or doorstops -although the Mammy persona was around long before the book and movie. The character of Prissy was, of course, the typical American image of the lazy, stupid slave who needed to be slapped around to keep her moving. At least Ms. McDaniel won an Oscar.

Check this out for a really good overview of Aunt Jemima:

http://rubytuesdayl.umwblogs.org/author/sunchild/

Scroll down about 1/3 of the way.

Imagine what we do today that's gonna look that distressing in a few years!

Aunt Jemima was the creation of an advertising agency, at a time when well-to-do Americans still employed household servants, who were often, perhaps usually, black. But there have been legitimate black names in advertising, and it is "un-PC" now to mention them. There is a brand of rice products called Uncle Ben's, and at the time of the national election campaign, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima were trotted out as examples of "Uncle Tom" figures. I went to a black political discussion site to straighten them out about Uncle Ben, and did not get a warm reception.

Uncle Ben was a farmer in Texas in the 1880s & -90s, in the east Texas, Louisiana rice belt. His rice was so consistently a high-grade product that it became a by-word. People who wished to tout their own rice would say that it was "as good as Uncle Ben's." Today, his image still appears on the packaging of the company that copyrighted the name, and unlike Aunt Jemima, whose image has been updated, his remains the same.



Racist stereotypes, though, persisted until relatively recently in American history. I still vividly remember seeing a Golden Book in the grocery store which i found very odd. Golden Books was a brand of books for children that one would see in drug stores and grocery stores, and many of them were quite good books. We had a natural history from Golden Books which was surprisingly free of religious prejudice, and assumed both an old earth and evolution. But there was a dark side, too. The book which startled me so was Little Black Sambo. The book was actually written by a Scot who had lived for many years in India, so she was writing about an Indian child. But the story became a symbol of racist bigotry in the United States.



This image is particularly offensive, because it employs the classic "pickaninny" image of racist iconography of the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries.

The only black people i had ever met were a cattle buyer who was a friend of my grandfather, and my other grandfather's chauffeur, and i was unable to make the connection in my mind between these well-mannered, well-spoken adult men and the Little Black Sambo image.

Sad when babies are thrown out with bathwater. I was shocked to see Huck Finn labelled racist!!! Of course, it contains lots of racist material, because of its time and place...but who can fail to see the wonderfully anti-racist message in Huck's terrible guilt that he has been "bad" enough to assist his black friend to escape from the fate of being sold downriver...when Jim's (I think that is the name?) owner was a good old woman who had never done him any harm.

We had Little Black Sambo...but there were palm trees and such, and he must have been Indian, cos that's where tigers are! He certainly wasn't African American.

No, Sambo was not African American. But because of the use of the "pickaninny" stereotype, he became a symbol of racist iconography.

I don't know if you are aware, but modern scholars now believe that a black boy that Samuel Clemens had met was the basis for Huckleberry Finn. Yes, i agree that the message was definitely anti-racist. It has become a lightening rod because of the use of "the N word."

Yes, I got that.

I was just thinking of "our" Sambo.

I think he existed somewhere similar to Neverland, really...no definite country or culture.

Those tigers turning into butter have haunted my psyche ever since!

Don't folk get that the man was writing in the vernacular about life as it was?