Ant Jemima, Uncle Ben and “Marshall”

Suddenly, since the outrage caught on-camera of George Floyd, every company is trying to clean up their acts. Heh, lets drill deeper into this for a moment…

I link it to a man by the name of Thurgood Marshall, who was the first non-Caucasian American to become a Supreme Court Justice. ‘Marshall’, is a movie I just finished watching, which is based upon his early years, catapulting him to become an excellent magistrate. At the bottom of my last post is a Black Heritage Month postal stamp in honor of him.

This post is both a review of the movie “Marshall” and of expressions about which I have been holding back, while thinking of how this giant of our legal system highlighted lives that matter – via Brown v Board of Education of Topeka – and how his legacy is revitalized by the current George Floyd movements.

Aunt Jemima’s image has actually been evolving for decades.

In the marketing landscape of Madison Avenue, I applaud and simultaneously wonder how much difference will it make to the new movement, if Quaker Oats (another almost oxymoron of ethnic difference)/Pepsico removes the “Aunt Jemima” from the pancake box, or Mars Corporation removes “Uncle Ben” from the suddenly similarly sensitive rice brand?

And by the way, “Uncle Ben” could’ve been someone’s chef or maybe he was somebody’s real cool uncle! Who knows? One version is that he was a Maitre-d, whose image was admired and copied to a rice brand box (I bet he never received a ‘red cent’ for it either!).

According to Emily Becker in WomensHealth, “In 2007, Uncle Ben was made over as the head of the company as part of an advertising campaign that included changing his blue jacket to a business suit…”

Id’ have a problem if it was , like “Uncle Tom’s Rice” because, as most of us know, there is a book called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, and it was definitely about American slavery and the Negro race, but Uncle “Ben”? not so much. I never heard my parents complain as they stayed true to the brand as long as they lived!
I mean, are the Carolina states upset because they call it “Carolina Rice”?
Some of this seems trite with a preconceived bite. As Munich, Germany marketing expert Pascal Lauscher says, “Why can’t Uncle Ben just be a white guy?” [See “How Germany Dealt With A Similar…”] <a href="http://https://www.dw.com/en/uncle-bens-and-aunt-jemima-logos-how-germany-dealt-with-a-similar-problem/a-53862646” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>

Back to Aunt Jemima, I grew up in New York City and really, never thought about it much. It was always a brand and, yes, it smacked maybe of slavery, but I didn’t dwell upon it. Recently, they took off her bandanna or scarf to make her seem like anybody’s “auntie/ant” – however you pronounce it, lol I’ve always cared more about the contents of the box than the packaging.

I guess there were many female slave “Jemimas”, and I wouldn’t name my daughter that, lol for sure! I wouldn’t do THAT to a girl, or even “Beulah”! To me, those are “black-sounding names” as we’d laugh about it back in the 1970s. This is all the result of a southern USA connotation.

I didn’t think deeply about the name; if their pancake mix tasted good, that’s all that mattered!! Lets try some other names: Aunt Katherine’s Pancakes? Aunt Millie’s Pancakes? Aunt Maria’s Pancakes” Aunt Katia’s Pancakes? Aunt O’Hara’s?
I’d like to know the story of why that company chose to market pancake mix that way; what does slavery have to do with pancakes, for example?

Take breakfast cereals. How about “Cherrios”. Do British people get annoyed about that because that is their way of saying “hello” which is hijacked by American marketing? I don’t think so.
How about the rooster who used to crow promoting Kellogg Corn Flakes – do the animal rights people now have an ax to grind about that, visa v abuse?

You see how many ways one can twist and turn things if you really want to make an issue, or a mountain out of a mole-hill, of something innocently marketed?

Oh, I shouldn’t have written “mole hill” because the Mole Lovers will get upset. We can’t live like this as a society with a sense of humor!

How about “Mrs Butterworth’s” syrup; I never felt insulted by this promotion. Yes, it is a brown-skinned woman on the bottle who used to talk on the commercials like a cartoon, but does she look slaveish? No. She could be my next door neighbor, who makes good maple syrup, or who has a tree out back which gives good syrup, which she shares! I don’t take it as a racist stereotype thing.

Along these same lines, what do you think the new nickname of the storied NFL franchise, “The Washington Redskins” should be? I’d hate to see them lose their color scheme and logo entirely, so I suggest something like “The Mattaponi” (they are a native American Indian tribe indigenous to the D.C region).
Our youthful, energetically accurate about how the system has had its knee on our necks for centuries generation, should keep a narrow focus upon how American policing policy has always been about protecting systemic supremacy of a minority of insecure Caucasians in the United States.

Back to breakfast cereals, do the gays get offended now by “Fruit Loops”? How about the Irish being offended by “Lucky Charms” now, because the Irish are very self-deprecating with a great sense of humor? Then there is “Tony The Tiger” visa v “Frosted Flakes”? Again, an Animal Rights or Animal abuse cause?? Nyet. Come on, people! Stop the madness and have some laughs.

As for the movie, “Marshall”; I give the movie five (5) stars because of its great acting, historical positioning, educational value and portrayal of the roots of the greatest black American to hold jurisprudence on our United States of America Supreme Court, to date, which we never knew about. “The only way to get through a bigot’s door, is to break it down.”, Judge Marshall accurately said. I recommend it.

10 Reasons Why “African American” (Black) Males Are Getting Shot By Police In America These Days

“When I say ‘Do Not Cross’, I MEAN it!”…

Have you ever noticed that the news rarely, reports of an “African-American” girl or female being “shot by police”? Why do you think this is? I offer now 10 or so reasons why the “African-American” males of the early twenty-first century are being shot by police and some of them will answer the question I posed above.

1. Child Support Laws authored and promoted by the then powerful late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who was thought to be a “brilliant” and even-handed Liberal at the time whose ideas about how “minorities” (in other words black women) pimped the system by having many children on the larger (white) populace’s dime. His Welfare Overhaul ideas, enacted circa 1990, led to the current Child Support Laws and explosion of Family Courts who suddenly had more than lame divorces to adjudicate and which led to:

2. The disintegration of the traditional modern black American family thereafter, which:

3. Criminalized, disgusted and disempowered black American men (if they could not affor to pay Child Support) at about the same time that significant numbers of Caribbean (Jamaican and Haitian especially) and African immigrants began to infiltrate those of us black Americans who actually were born and raised here within the fifty states.

4. These laws emboldened women of color (and all American women, by-the-way) to have children out of wedlock (further disenfranchising the men) by removing the previous stigma of illegitimacy. This is the exact opposite effect that the Moynihan/Hillary Clinton camps desired, in my opinion; they facilitated the disintegration of the traditional American family unit! Now, these boys are growing up without the traditional male father in the home who would train them to respect authority and the role of police in society, and as soon as they encounter a situation where they might be acting-out and are “busted” doing so by the cops, they do not have that lesson in their heads that says, ‘give respect to the officer’, and that leads to the worst outcome all too often.

5. The lack of Truant Officers or as some school districts liked to call them, “Attendance Teachers”. Somewhere in the middle nineties, around the time that political correctness, spawned by the Bill Clinton Presidency, was introduced, the Truant Officer became a budgetary casualty across the nation and nobody pushed back against the decision. “Its too mean to make a kid go to school!” some must have said. I tie that into:

6. The lack of sensible and moderate Corporal Punishment and encouraging children to “report” discipline by their parents to outside agency strangers whose only agenda is a paycheck as intruders in situations whose genesis they have no clue about. There are some things better left within a family to iron-out and discipline is one of them!

7. Today’s lowered educational standards and philosophies. Are students even required to begin the day’s lessons by standing, facing our flag and reciting The Pledge of Allegiance to the United States anymore? If not, then that is another huge miscalculation of training the little wild animal beings that are our kids!

8. Television news coverage of these incidents which lack even implied educational lessons by those who report them. Where are the produced Public Service Announcements (“PSAs”) of yester year that provided the moral reminders to us all not to (“litter” for-example) do certain things in the spirit of a better community for us all? That void only leads to:

9. The “copy-cat factor”. Too many bad behavior events in today’s world are the result of acts by too many with mental illness walking amongst the larger and generally sane population, who see and hear this junk and decide to duplicate it so that they too can be “famous”. How ridiculous! However, a whole attitude about rounding-up and putting mental cases in institutions must be revisited and the clock turned back to some of the practices of the pre-politically correct era.

10. And finally, I point to excess Caribbean migration and illegal immigration which began during the Ronald Reagan Presidency and the infamous “Boat People”. I guess intercepting them and turning them back for repatriation was all a sham. What’s more is apparently these individuals were allowed into our society without mandatory schooling about how we black Americans, the descendants of American slaves, had already fought for and won our civil rights during the days of the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ebonics be-damned, there is no need to re-segregate ourselves and have to riot and damage what we’ve collectively built since then – all over again.

10a. “No home training” to respect what an officer asks them to do when stopped while driving.

This is not to say that the Cops bear no responsibility for how these situations escalate, nor that teen Caucasian American males are not shot while acting-up. That segment of the population does not take to the streets to “protest” every time it happens. They more likely seek legal help (available to all of us) and work the system behind the scenes. However, in this post 9/11/2001 era of Policing in America, it is even more important not to have a close encounter with any law enforcement Officer.
**Pickhit: IMO there is a difference between “black Americans” (like me) and “African Americans”. Maybe a post for a later date?

Your thoughts or additional Reasons?

When It Was Just “Bombings”, Not the “T” Word

History is the most important subject your children must learn and study. Don’t think so? Well pay attention to what is happening right under our noses these days…

There was a time, not so long ago, that when a group exercised its agenda upon the innocents with explosives or gunfire, it was just that: a “bombing” or “shooting”. Shit, when I was coming of teenage, the civil rights movement in American begat any number of groups from the so-called “left” who would, when they felt they were being ignored, would blow up the establishment’s shit on the regular! Ever heard of the Weather Underground (“Weathermen”), Symbionese Liberation Army (world famous for the kidnapping of publishing heiress, Patricia Hearst in 1974), Black Panthers, Puerto Rican F.A.L.N, the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City duo and others?

Now and since the cowardly declaration of war attack by Osama Bin Ladin et al, on September 11, 2001, any act of stupidity by a mentally ill person who kills innocents is labeled “terrorism” by the news media. But is it really? The then American President Bush re-coined the phrase, I believe, and that vernacular should change in-order to improve our understanding within the discourse.

Can we not revert back to when we had different terminology for assorted barbaric behaviors? Every nut with a gun is not a terrorist. More than likely, it is a “copy-cat” mentally deranged person who, because of current technology, that allows one to perpetually view negativity on television, who decides to act-out their perceived bullshit violent psychosis which drives them insane in a similar manner!

This same American news “cycle” has, in a backdoor way, encouraged these crazies to act-out not only here but in place like Nice, France. Who says that petty thief truck driver is a “terrorist” but not just a NUT-JOB who should have been institutionalized and on medications? We will never know because now, due to the perception that the every violent character is a “terrorist” mentality which has filtered from government into law enforcement, and now the police shoot (or blow-up, as in Dallas, Texas recently) to kill instead of wound, therefore we collectively lose access to psychoanalyze the individual’s deep, true intentions and what really inspired them. I would bet good money that their acts are not borne so simply out of just religious hate.
It is time to pull-back from the brink of religious-borne anarchy and/or [in the USA] race wars now. They are killing instead of capturing.

You will notice, if you read the subtitles or pure audio in the video below, from shortly after the 9/11 event, the coward Bin Laden himself, uses the word “terrorist”. For American news media and the President to copy his words and perpetuate them into the syntax to this day in 2016, is a damn shame and News Directors’ heads should roll. The English language has so many other adjectives to describe and simultaneously educate the populace than the fodder they have been using from the enemy, which is dividing the country and world.

Every bombing act is not an “Isis” event these days, just as back in the 1970s, during the black American Civil Rights movement, my friend, Imhotep Gary Byrd said, “Every Brother Ain’t A “Brother”…

C’mon, People! Do your homework! Teach your children well and to study HISTORY – so that the mistakes of the past are not made again! Our “leaders” in the USA have let the modern “Trojan Horse” enter our sphere. We, the People, cannot be “terrorized” unless we are in fear! Media know that spreading the fear of “terrorism” sells products.

Please add your comments.

For The “Black Lives Matter” Crew, You Are Late! “People Who Are Darker Than Blue”

As we again commemorate the only true Black American (descendants of slaves) Holiday in America, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Day here on January 18, 2016, I think it timely to resurrect the late musical genius of Curtis Mayfield, who would want to point-out his words to this latest generation of look-a-like black immigrants who did not get the message that we already fought and WON this battle. “Black Lives Matter” is taking the USA back in time to where we were. DO you homework, stay in school till you get a University degree and behave yourselves, you new, Caribbean and African can brown-skinned peoples! Dr. King’s real birthday was January 15, 1929, by the way. Another famous Capricorn leader like Muhammad Ali and even Confederate General Robert E. Lee!

“We people who are darker than blue
Are we gonna stand around this town
And let what others say come true?
We’re just good for nothing they all figure

A boyish, grown up, shiftless jigger
Now we can’t hardly stand for that
Or is that really where it’s at?
We people who are darker than blue

This ain’t no time for segregatin’
I’m talking ’bout brown and yellow two
High yellow girl, can’t you tell
You’re just the surface of our dark deep well

If your mind could really see
You’d know your color the same as me
Pardon me, brother, as you stand in your glory
I know you won’t mind if I tell the whole story

Get yourself together, learn to know your side
Shall we commit our own genocide
Before you check out your mind?

I know we’ve all got problems
That’s why I’m here to say
Keep peace with me and I with you
Let me love in my own way

Now I know we have great respect
For the sister, and mother it’s even better yet
But there’s the joker in the street

Loving one brother and killing the other
When the time comes and we are really free
There’ll be no brothers left you see

We people who are darker than blue
Don’t let us hang around this town
And let what others say come true

We’re just good for nothing they all figure
A boyish, grown up, shiftless jigger
Now we can’t hardly stand for that
Or is that really where it’s at?

Pardon me, brother, while you stand in your glory
I know you won’t mind if I tell the whole story
Pardon me, brother, I know we’ve come a long, long way
But let us not be so satisfied for tomorrow can be an
An even brighter day”

Songwriter:
Curtis Mayfield

Lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

All HUMAN lives DO matter in the physical world; we must embrace the heavy lifting – without violence, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King did – in order to live together. Are you up to being smart instead of ignorant due lack of extensive historical education? The lives who are traditionally celebrated the most are the ones who uphold the standards of manners, respect for authority, etiquette, follow the simplest of rules in society and embrace peace. Maybe choose a different slogan? I liked “Power To The People” from the 1060s and 1970s…

Finally, I’ve noticed that too many people I talk to business-to-business do not know Monday is a Federal Holiday! This is troubling on many levels as too many businesses choose to ignore it and conduct business as-usual – some spitefully (see “Red” states). Doing this undermines the fact that President Reagan signed it into law in 1983 after it ran the gauntlet of the U.S. Congress. If you have a sales business, why aren’t there “King Birthday” sales, for example? Jus’ sayin’…

“…And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!”

If You Could Choose Your Skin Color, Which Would You Choose?

I thought this was “settled”!  Then came a lull and apparently Uncle Sam allowed too many colored immigrants to become “citizens” without qualifying them as to the history of how American Blacks fought to overcome segregation and conduct ourselves correctly while raising our kin to do likewise. The police are not our enemies – this is not the 1960s!  So to you newbiees, Cocoanuts from the Caribbean and you from wherever you are who is reading this post, I ask, “If you had a choice of skin colors, which one would YOU choose?”

I remember when this song came out and WWRL AM 1600 in New York City (Woodside, to be exact) played it.  It was a cause célèbre because the late Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions had, once again, articulated an argument musically that was going on at the time. I don’t agree with all of the words the lyrics have to say, but the song, unfortunately, still resonates today.

Therefore, it amazes me that it is still a source of American political and social illness here in 2015!

Yet I know why: I am like Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions in that we are Black Americans; descendants of slaves on this continent who came up via the American south lands and whose parents ultimately and after the American Civil War into the beginning of the twentieth century, migrated northward on the east coast. Over time in the mid-to-late twentieth century, “the man” [angry white man establishment who still did not want to embrace us, who were never any threat to the slave master] allowed a whole influx of similar looking people from Caribbean and continental Africa into the continental USA, who have no clue as to the struggle or gains we made and that Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions sang their song unto.

“With just a little bit more education and love for our nation would make for a better world for you and for me.”

Please choose your choice of skin colors in the “comments” below – and I will tell you mine, which I told my parents, waay back in the 1960s when I was a little boy! They were surprised, lol

ALL lives matter.