After 131 years, Quaker Oats announced this week that it will replace Aunt Jemima’s familiar name and face on all of its products with the logo for “Pearl Milling Company,” a homage to the St. Louis company which first invented the product.
Aunt Jemima became one of the world’s most prominent racist stereotypes thanks, in part, to the brand’s marketing efforts in U.S media outlets including the Yiddish press, which published uniquely Yiddish and Jewish ads to market Aunt Jemima products to its audience.
For immigrant Jews arriving at ports in New York or elsewhere in the country, seeing Aunt Jemima’s ads in the pages of the Yiddish press would have been one of their first introductions to America’s racist tropes.