Category: southern foodways

Exploring the Corazón de Dixie with Julie M. Weise

Karen L. CoxLeave a comment

corazonImmigration from Mexico is very relevant to our understanding of the contemporary American South.  It’s also been a political hot potato. To help us understand the history of Mexican immigration to our region, Pop South talks with historian Julie M. Weise, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oregon, about her new book Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910.

PS: For general readers, why does your book begin in 1910?

Mexican-origin people have been a significant part of U.S. history since 1848, when the United States took what is now the U.S. Southwest from Mexico and made those who were living there into U.S. citizens. But 1910 is when the major narrative of Mexican American history shifts from conquest to immigration. The Mexican Revolution began that year, and the upheavals it caused kicked off the first major wave of cross-border migration; this only quickened due to demand for Mexican labor during World War One and the Roaring ’20s. Most people think of this migration having gone only to the Southwest; scholars have explored it also for the Midwest. But when one looks back to sources written at the time, it becomes clear that Mexican migrants were really everywhere in the U.S. during the 1920s — from Alaska to Pennsylvania, and indeed, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. These latter migrations are the subjects of my book’s early chapters.

PS: How has the culture of Mexicanos added to the culture of the American South?

Mississippi even has a "Hot Tamale Trail." Photo credit: Southern Foodways Alliance
Mississippi even has a “Hot Tamale Trail.” Photo credit: Southern Foodways Alliance

The influence of Mexicano culture on Southern culture has, at least until recently, been experienced at the very local level, and at times has even been deliberately hidden; this is part of why it has taken so long for their story to be told by historians. Mississippi’s signature Hot Tamales were most likely first brought there by the thousands of Mexicanos who lived and worked in the Delta in the 1920s-30s; yet, those Mexicano descendants who remained in the Delta deliberately assimilated into the white side of the color line and seldom acknowledged, let alone celebrated, their Mexican heritage. So until recently, the tamales were not closely associated with their original purveyors. Across the river, black and white people who lived in the Arkansas Delta in the 1950s –many still alive today– have vivid memories of the exciting cosmopolitan influence that Mexican workers brought to their small towns during that decade.

PS: What makes the experience of Mexicanos in the South similar/different from other regions of the United States?

During the Jim Crow period, Mexicanos struggled economically everywhere that they worked as low-wage, mostly-rural laborers; the South often provided them a bit more economic mobility than elsewhere but at other times, their economic conditions there were worse. However, the limits placed on Mexicanos’ life chances specifically by race were much less significant in the South than in the Southwest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) was interpreted by courts to guarantee Mexicans’ legal classification as white, but Southwestern locations like Texas and California found workarounds and still solidified Jim Crow exclusion of Mexicanos from the privileges of whiteness.

By contrast, Mexicanos were oppressed by a distinctly non-white racialization in early 1920s Mississippi, but by the 1930s had successfully challenged that status and eventually assimilated onto the white side of the color line. Interwar New Orleans is perhaps best compared to Chicago or Los Angeles, urban locations that also had growing black and European immigrant populations in that period. My research shows that New Orleans is unique among these cities, the only place historians have yet uncovered where Mexicanos’ racial experiences were much closer to those of European immigrants (not just off-white Italians and Jews but even German and French immigrants) as opposed to their Mexicano counterparts elsewhere.

PS: In the current debate over immigration, there is tough talk about building a wall on the southern border of the U.S. to keep Mexicans out.  Historically, how has the U.S. South evolved in its thinking about Mexican immigration to where it now includes support for a wall?

From the 1960s-90s, Mexicanos became an important rhetorical symbol for white conservatives in Southern agricultural towns. Mexicanos came to be seen as a not-black minority with whom white conservatives and Evangelicals could “build bridges” across race lines without directly confronting slavery and Jim Crow. This was an opportunity to make amends for their opposition to civil rights for blacks, while at the same time having a convenient foil with which to criticize blacks’ work ethic. In that sense, the growing population of Mexicanos in conservative parts of the South shaped particular local cultures of pro-immigrant conservatism, which defied (and often butted heads with) national trends in anti-immigrant politics during the late twentieth century. For example, local white conservative legislators would regularly do everything they could to prevent immigration enforcement, and white Evangelicals invested disproportionately generous resources ministering to Mexicanos as opposed to white or black poor people in their communities.

Paradoxically, the South’s integration into the nation, and the adoption of California-generated images of Mexicanos as unworthy consumers of whites’ tax dollars, has made local conditions and policies progressively harsher for the South’s Mexicanos since about 2005. These movements have been based more commonly in the region’s least “Southern” spaces–suburbs and exurbs–rather than its traditional rural areas, though that may be changing as we speak thanks to forces unleashed by the campaign of Donald Trump. While some say the Southernization of U.S. politics accounts for its rightward turn in the 1980s, it’s the Westernization of Southern politics that accounts for the South’s recent turn to the right on immigration.
Julie Weise
Julie Weise

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Writing Corazón de Dixie while teaching courses on global migration, I began to notice intriguing parallels between the ideas of Mexican workers and their government officials about what migration was supposed to accomplish for Mexican men in postwar Arkansas, and the ideas about migration held by migrants (Spanish, Italian, and Turkish among others) who worked in northern Europe, particularly Germany, during the same period. I am excited to be now learning German and perfecting my French so that I can study the ways these discourses moved across the Atlantic, and perhaps the Pacific as well, in the postwar period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Southern Comfort’s Homecoming

Karen L. Cox1 Comment

Socopic

Last week Kentucky-based Brown-Forman Corporation, which owns the Jack Daniels and Woodford Reserve brands, announced it is selling the Southern Comfort brand to the New Orleans-based Sazerac Company.  Many will see this as a homecoming for Southern Comfort.

The original recipe for the whiskey-flavored liqueur is credited to a New Orleans bartender named Martin Wilkes Heron who created the concoction in 1874, which he named “Cuffs and Buttons.”  Heron later moved to Memphis where he began bottling his recipe in 1889, and renamed it “Southern Comfort.”

Southern Comfort's tie-in with GWTW.

SoCo, as it’s often called, has stiff competition from flavored whiskeys and has seen a decline in sales in recent years.  But it wasn’t always the case.

Southern Comfort enjoyed a major boost in 1939 when it became one of several companies that tied their brands to the enormously successful film Gone with the Wind.  In the case of SoCo, it was the creation of the “Scarlet O’Hara Cocktail.”

The drink, made with cranberry juice and Southern Comfort with a squeeze of lime, was marketed as the “Grand Old Drink from the South.”  The then New York-based distributors of the brand suggested that customers “try it in a Scarlet O’Hara cocktail, but no more than two lest you be Gone with the Wind.”

Because SoCo is sweet, it has long had the reputation of being more appealing to women.  It was certainly a favorite of ’60s rocker Janis Joplin.

So a few years ago, Southern Comfort sought to increase sales among men with the commercial called “Whatever’s Comfortable.”

While the commercial caught people’s attention, it didn’t draw much of a new male customer base.

It will be interesting to see what Sazerac does in its marketing of Southern Comfort now that it’ll be back in the Crescent City. Personally, I’d recommend some heritage marketing that ties it back to the place where it all began.

Cheers!

Portraits of Aunt Jemima in Black and Blackface

Karen L. Cox15 Comments

Aunt-JemimaOne of the most iconic advertising images of the twentieth century is Aunt Jemima, and recently the heirs of Nancy Green and Anna Harrington, just two of the women whose portraits were used as the “face” of the brand, are suing Quaker Oats for $2 billion and future revenues, claiming that not only did Green and Harrington portray Aunt Jemima, they were influential in shaping the recipe.  Attorneys for Quaker Oats are saying “hold on a minute,” Aunt Jemima might be the brand, but she was “never real.”

Yes and no.

The “biography” of Aunt Jemima was the creation of the J. Walter Thompson Agency based in New York. More specifically, it was the creation of James Webb Young, a native of Covington, Kentucky.  According to internal documents of the agency, the story of Aunt Jemima was that she came from Louisiana.  So, yes, the story is a creation.

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Portrait of Nancy Green by Arthur Burdette Frost.

Yet it is also true that Nancy Green, then a Chicago domestic, portrayed “Aunt Jemima” at the 1893 World’s Fair and made a career of doing so for nearly twenty years after the fair. More to the point, Green’s face was, in fact, the first image of Aunt Jemima to appear on the pancake box.  The Thompson Agency hired Arthur Burdette Frost, better known for his illustrations of Uncle Remus tales, to paint Green’s portrait.

If she contributed to the recipe, we may never know, but we do know that white women often took their maids’ recipes and passed them off as their own, a tradition that even Paula Deen maintained when she co-opted recipes from Dora Charles, a black woman who had worked in Deen’s Savannah restaurant for years.

It is true that several black women portrayed Aunt Jemima at various state fairs during the early decades of the twentieth century. They greatly assisted the brand by lending an authenticity to the product as being a particularly “southern” recipe.  This was in keeping with the character created by the Thompson Agency, whose story was that Aunt Jemima had been a slave and that she created the recipe that brought her such fame that it caused jealousy among other mammies.

But on radio, it was a different story. In a short program called Aunt Jemima Radio, which ran from 1930 to about 1942, she was portayed by several white women who were essentially doing a radio minstrel act. One of those women was Tess Gardella, an Italian-American actress from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Gardella had played “Queenie” in the stage version of Show Boat, and she parlayed that experience into performing as Aunt Jemima on the radio. She also played Aunt Jemima in a film short.  It is even on her gravestone.

Gardella's gravestone
Gardella’s gravestone
Tess Gardella as Aunt Jemima, early 1930s

Tess Gardella is also interesting because she filed a lawsuit against NBC for allowing an “imposter to broadcast as ‘Aunt Jemima,’ when as a matter of fact she [Gardella] had been using that name for years on stage and air.”  The actress further claimed that she had the right to use the name “by virtue of authority from the Quaker Oats Company.”  She won her lawsuit and nearly $116,000 in damages.

The heirs of Nancy Green and Anna Harrington may have a difficult time in the courts because, unlike Gardella, they did not have a contract.  Still, their lawsuit brings into sharp relief the ways American companies have profited by using images of African Americans to brand their products.

*Some of the ideas expressed in this post are drawn from Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture (UNC Press, 2011), 40-41.

 

American Roadside: The Mammy of Natchez

Karen L. Cox5 Comments
Mammy's Cupboard is located on Highway 61 on the outskirts of Natchez, MS
Mammy’s Cupboard, Natchez, MS

mammyhead

Visitors who travel to Natchez, Mississippi, by way of Highway 61 will be able to see an interesting relic of roadside architecture known as Mammy’s Cupboard. While some visitors just want to stop and photograph the building, locals go there because it’s a great place to get a meat and three and a slice of banana caramel pie that by itself is worth the five-mile drive from town.  For others, the building’s association with a “southern mammy” is enough for them to keep on driving.

Built in 1940, Mammy’s Cupboard originally operated as a family-owned Shell Gas station and convenience store.  It was a good investment at the time. The Natchez Pilgrimage, the spring tour of the town’s antebellum mansions, had grown exponentially since it began in 1932. Tourism to the town exploded following the enormous success of Gone with the Wind, which premiered in 1939. Many Americans who saw the film later went in search of houses like Tara;Natchez offered them that and more.

Today, the gas pumps at Mammy’s have been closed off, but it remains a family-owned restaurant that is primarily open for lunch.

White tourists, of course, were drawn to the Natchez mammy from the beginning.  By 1940, Aunt Jemima–a marketing figure based on a southern mammy–was already the most recognizable advertising icon in the country.  She reminded whites that this kind of happy servitude was still within reach.  For African Americans, mammy icons were a reminder of their second-class status.

Former Howard University Professor Sterling Brown wrote about the figure while traveling through the region in the early 1940s.  In A Negro Looks at the South, he observed:

Weston
Edward Weston’s photo, 1941.

“Outside of Natchez, as a come-on for tourists, is the Mammy Gas Station and Barbecue Stand. With clean-cut features, a trim waist, and an elegant hoopskirt, a tall erect statue of a Mammy stands there, fronting the highway so proudly that her bandana seems out of place.  My host explained why: the yarn goes that she was intended to be a Southern belle, but when the bodice was poured, the bust filled past all planning.  Natchez objected to the breasts being so pendulous, and the statue’s complexion was colored to a deep chocolate.  Hoopskirt and waist and features still belong to the belle, but it is a colored girl, Egyptian-like, who welcomes the tourists to Natchez and invites the white natives to barbecue.”

In the more than seventy years that Mammy’s has been open, her skin tone has grown lighter in appearance–more white than black. She was still rather dark in the early 1990s, but has since become very fair–perhaps a tacit acknowledgement by the owners that the dark skin was at best inappropriate, and worse, an offensive reminder of the not-too-distant past.

mammypostcard
Postcard, 2013

Yet if you were to stop by Mammy’s Cupboard today, you’d still be able to get a postcard of the restaurant from the days when she was still dark.  It’s a small reminder of William Faulkner‘s oft-quoted line from Requiem for a Nun. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

What it means to be a “soul sister” in a southern kitchen

Karen L. Cox1 Comment
dora-charles-paula-deen
Dora Parker, the woman Paula Deen called her “soul sister.” Photo credit: New York Times.

I encourage readers of Pop South to read today’s New York Times op-ed by Rebecca Sharpless providing historical perspective on Dora Charles, the woman Paula Deen called her “soul sister.”

Ms. Charles, who helped open Deen’s restaurant Lady & Sons as well as train other cooks who worked there, was recently interviewed by the Times about her relationship with Deen.  That interview is, in many ways, even more revealing about who Paula Deen is than the deposition she gave in the lawsuit brought against her by a white woman, Lisa Jackson.

I also encourage you to read Rebecca Sharpless’s book, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (UNC Press, 2010). It’s a great read.

Paula Deen, Uncle Bubba, and the Silence Over Sexual Harassment

Karen L. Cox8 Comments
Paula Deen with her brother Bubba Hiers, co-owners of Uncle Bubba's Oyster House.
Paula Deen with her brother Bubba Hiers, co-owners of Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House.

The Paula Deen fiasco that has unraveled over the past several days has me thinking about her brother Earl “Bubba” Hiers.  Specifically, where the hell is Uncle Bubba?  Because if you take a look at the original lawsuit, he is the one who needs his ass kicked all the way to Tybee Island for the hostile work environment created at the restaurant that carries his name.

To be clear, I still believe Paula Deen needs to be held accountable.  And for sure, she needs to offer a more sincere apology–one that doesn’t suggest that it’s about someone who wants what she has.  (See the the analysis of her Today Show interview.)  That may be true, but it doesn’t let Deen off the hook for her own racial missteps.

What boggles my mind, though, is the extent to which Paula Deen goes to cover for the men in her life, especially her brother.

In the lawsuit, we learn that her companies and her restaurant Lady & Sons is essentially a “Boys Club.”  And the boys, it turns out, behave badly.  Especially Uncle Bubba.

The lawsuit, moreover, isn’t just about a work environment damaged by racial slurs.  It’s very much about the ways that sexual harassment created a hostile work environment for women.

First, it is abundantly clear from the allegations that Uncle Bubba is the primary culprit for making racial slurs.  Yet what is also clear is that he regularly engaged in inappropriate workplace behavior and often used foul language when speaking to women or about women.

According to the lawsuit:

–Karl Schumacher, who is in charge of compensation for employees allegedly said that “women are stupid because they think they can work and have babies and get everything done.”

–Bubba Hiers allegedly either brought pornography to the restaurant or openly watched pornography “on the kitchen computer” where it was visible to several employees;

–Bubba Hiers allegedly made several sexual jokes in the workplace, criticized the “fat girls” who worked in the restaurant, told Lisa Jackson she had “nice legs” and to bring in photos of herself from when she was younger; and suggested that the restaurant staff be replaced with “Hooter’s girls.”;

–Lisa Jackson also alleges that Bubba Hiers “[grabbed] her face and [kissed] her and [spit] on her;”

And on, and on.

So, what’s much more clear now from Paula Deen’s deposition is that while she used a racial slur herself, she enabled the men who worked for her to continue their behavior by either ignoring the complaints brought to her attention, being willfully unaware of how her restaurants operated, and now, covering their asses–especially her brother Bubba.  This pisses me off, because while Deen is apologetic about the racial slurs, she hasn’t offered one apology for the sexual harassment.

But then, the media has ignored this aspect of the lawsuit as well as “Uncle Bubba’s” behavior.

Fortunately, we have reached a point in our society where many of us can rise up (and have) to say “no” to racism.  But we have NOT reached that point when it comes to sexual harassment.  In the public trial of Paula Deen, everyone’s been silent on this point. The media, Paula Deen, and her sons. Of course, Uncle Bubba has been silent about everything and is hiding behind his sister’s imaginary hoop skirt.

I, for one, think Earl “Bubba” Hiers needs to be held responsible for his behavior.  He should be dragged through the court of public opinion, too. The fact of the matter is that he’s gotten off easy.

If Deen’s use of a racial slur has proven there are consequences for doing so, then why not the same when it comes to sexual harassment?  There needs to be consequences for that, too.

That day can’t come soon enough.

Paula Deen’s Recipe for Self-Destruction

Karen L. Cox4 Comments
paula-deen-300
Paula Deen

There’s not enough butter to cover up or improve the bad taste that Paula Deen has left in people’s mouths since they learned that the South’s most famous cook admitted to using the “N-word” as well as making other racially insensitive remarks. Twitter lit up with fake recipe titles attached to the hashtag #paulasbestdishes, skewering Deen for her racial insensitivity.  “We Shall Over-Crumb Cake” and “Massa-roni and Cheese” are just two (and, frankly, kind) of hundreds of examples.

Her comments came under oath as she was being deposed by attorneys for Lisa Jackson, a former employee who is suing Deen and her brother Earl “Bubba” Hiers, along with Deen’s company, for alleged “violent, racist, and sexist behavior.” The full details of the complaint, in fact, are much more alarming and disturbing and go well beyond racial epithets.  Yet for now, the focus is on Paula Deen’s racist comments, and for good reason.

Deen has presented herself and has been marketed as the “face of southern cooking.”  Her shows on the Food Network, her cookbooks, magazines, and product endorsements have made her a household name and a multimillionaire. She is a very public figure and has to know that what she says and does will be publicly scrutinized.  And if she didn’t, she certainly knows it now.

So what did she say?  Under oath, she admitted to using the “N-word.”  She also said she wanted to plan a “really southern plantation wedding” for her brother Bubba Hiers.  Her inspiration came while visiting another southern restaurant where black men wore white jackets and black bow ties.  She was impressed, she said, because “that restaurant represented a certain era in America.” And when Jackson was brought in to assist the famed southern cook with preparation for Hiers wedding, she alleges that the following conversation with Deen occurred:

“Well what I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts and black bow ties, you know in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around. . . Now that would be a true southern wedding, wouldn’t it? But we can’t do that because the media would be on me about that.” (courtesy of Talking Points Memo)

The media is on her, alright. And so are a lot of Americans who have taken to social media to let her know just what they think of her comments and her, personally.

Yet what I’m interested in here, as someone who blogs about the South in popular culture, is Deen’s supposed naiveté about the use of the N-word and her misinformed (to say nothing of outdated) view of what she believes represents a “really southern plantation wedding.”

First, there’s her use of the term “nigger.”  Deen, who is 66 years-old and grew up in southwest Georgia, knows exactly what the term means and knows full well that historically, it’s been used as a pejorative. In fact, she admits to as much under oath, saying “things have changed since the ’60s in the South. And my children and my brother object to that word being used in any cruel or mean behavior.”  Though, apparently, it’s okay to use in a joke. Well, now that she’s been caught using it, she’s being forced to consider that it’s not a laughing matter, y’all.

I have a sneaking suspicion that given the power she wields because of her wealth and celebrity, she didn’t think that using that term around one of her employees would matter, especially when that employee’s job depended on it.  Based on her responses to attorneys’ questions, it appears as though Deen felt she only used the n-word to describe, not hurt. She seems to believe that what she said was innocuous, and it didn’t even occur to her that a fellow white southerner might have a problem with it.  As it turns out, not only is Lisa Jackson white, she has biracial nieces.

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Deen’s idea of a southern plantation is straight out of a Hollywood movie from the 1930s. Pictured: Bill Robinson with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel (1935)

Deen’s desire to give her brother a “really southern plantation wedding” is also problematic, because she’s out of touch with reality to say nothing of southern history. What she described, according to the complaint, was essentially Hollywood’s version of a southern plantation from movies of the 1930s.  Her reference to Shirley Temple films was a dead giveaway.  In 1935, Temple starred in two films set in the Old South, The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel.  In both, her co-star was Bill “BoJangles” Robinson who, like in Paula Deen’s image of the South “of a certain era,” is seen wearing jacket and bow tie.

The “certain era” she recalls, of course, isn’t the plantation South at all.  As one of my peers rightly noted: “As a southern historian I’ve seen a great many 19th century slave photos and none included tuxedo clad slave waiters.”  Indeed. What Deen described in her testimony is a 1930s pop culture version.  In essence, what she hoped to recreate for her brother Bubba was a wedding scene straight out of a Jim Crow era film.

According to her attorney, Paula Deen “does not condone or find the use of racial epithets acceptable.” Such a statement is to be expected now that her own use of racial epithets has been exposed, because her southern cooking empire is very likely in jeopardy as a result.

Deen’s experience is a lesson to us all that we do not live in a post-racial America. At the same time, we should not assume that racism is simply a “southern” problem. Unfortunately, given Deen’s association with the region, the popular perception of a monolithic, racist white South rears its ugly head. Yet, what I hope doesn’t get lost in all of this is that while Deen feigns to represent the South, she is not representative of the entire region. Another southern white woman, after all, is responsible for calling her out and holding her feet to the fire.

What Happens When a New York Company Tries to Brand “Southern Style” Sweet Tea

Karen L. Cox3 Comments
Southern Style Sweet Tea from AriZona by way of Brooklyn, NY.
My friend’s Southern Style Sweet Tea from AriZona by way of Brooklyn, NY.

Recently, a friend and I were having lunch when I noticed an image on the side of her AriZona “Southern Style” sweet tea.  It caught my attention because of the image used to brand this tea as southern–19th century steamboats on what we can probably assume is the Mississippi River.

I find it interesting that in 2013 that a company determined that it would associate “southern” with antebellum paddle-wheelers that were used to not only carry travelers, but tons of cotton cultivated by thousands of slaves. That’s when I did my research and discovered that AriZona had originally used an even more offensive image to suggest “southern style” when the product came out in 2008.

Back then, the tea was branded with the image

The original image of AriZona's Southern Style Sweet Tea featured an antebellum plantation.
The original image of AriZona’s Southern Style Sweet Tea featured an antebellum plantation.

of the “big house” of a southern plantation, with a southern belle in the foreground.  It was reminiscent of early advertising that incorporated images of the Old South–advertising tropes that are more than a century old. The original can rightly drew the ire of consumers for promoting an image of the Old South and the slavery that’s associated with plantations. It forced the company to change the image and make a public apology.

But why did the company approve the image of a plantation in the first place?  Why did they follow it up with another image from the same era? I’d argue that it’s because the company, founded by two guys from Brooklyn, have no sense of American history nor do those in charge of its marketing understand modern southern culture.  Rather, they rely on the same tired tropes of the South. Clearly, there’s some sense that the South not only hasn’t made it into the 21st century; it never made it into the 20th!

So, to marketing firms above the Mason-Dixon I say this:  Come visit and quit relying on tired stereotypes.  You’ll thank yourself and you won’t make stupid mistakes like AriZona.

Glory Foods introduces the new Shirley

Karen L. Cox1 Comment

Several of you followed my posts about the ad campaign for Glory Foods in which a woman named Shirley appeared in commercials and on the company website as a mammy-like character coming in to save the day in a white woman’s kitchen.  Since that time, the ad campaign developed by the Brandon Agency of South Carolina has proven to be an epic fail–the television ads have been withdrawn and Shirley no longer walks across the company website with that “Lawd, honey” kind of persona that takes you back, WAY BACK, to the Aunt Jemima of old.

Shirley has returned, though, but now in a toned-down version of her former self.  Instead of rushing in to help the white woman as she did in the original commercials, Shirley is actually demonstrating recipes in her own kitchen!  The production levels of these videos, which are not commercials, suggest that they are clearly done on a smaller budget.  This is too bad, because now Shirley is a much more respectable personality.  Why didn’t the Brandon Agency (whose entire leadership team is white) show her that respect to begin with?  I am left to wonder if it has something to do with the fact that McCall Farms (which now owns Glory Foods) and the Brandon Agency, who represents the company, are both located in South Carolina–probably the least progressive state in the Union when it comes to race.  Let’s give them the benefit of a doubt and say that it is unfair to stamp them with the “they’re from South Carolina” stereotype.  Then I’m still left to wonder, why? And, why not develop new commercials and give Shirley a second chance, but this time as the respectable woman she is meant to be?

Here’s the new Shirley:

The Glory Foods Campaign Revisited: An issue of both race and gender

Karen L. Cox16 Comments
An image of “Shirley” is unavailable as are the television ads.

Recently, I wrote about the poorly-conceived marketing campaign for Glory Foods by The Brandon Agency (see: Black Domestic in a Can), a campaign that introduced a new generation to the stereotypical “black woman as mammy,” and reminds us of the Aunt Jemima of old.  If this weren’t bad enough, the campaign also works as a critique of white women’s abilities in the kitchen.  Miss White Lady, in one Glory Foods commercial, is a frustrated failure until a black woman (known as “Shirley” in radio ads and on the company’s website) shows up to save her in time to impress dinner guests.  In another commercial, Miss White Lady also fails to satisfy her bratty children.  And once again, she must be saved by the modern day mammy.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It should.  Fans of The Help will recognize in Shirley two different characters from the book.  In one commercial, Shirley is essentially Minnie who rescues the bumbling, naive, and helpless character Celia Foote who cannot cook to save her life.  In the second commercial, Shirley is something of a mix between Minnie and Abilene.  She’s sassy like Minnie, but like Abilene she also fills the role of surrogate parent–taking charge and getting the children to “eat their vegetables.”  Clearly excited about this campaign, Dan Charna, vice president of operations for Glory Foods is quoted as saying, “We hope everyone will invite Shirley into their kitchens via Glory Foods products.” (See, The Businesses Journal, April 11, 2012)

Thank goodness Dan Charna didn’t get his wish. The television campaign for Glory Foods, while it fails to understand the complex history of mammy in the kitchen, also insults white women by suggesting that they can’t cook and need help with their children.  As one woman of color suggested in a discussion of these ads on Facebook, “It serves nobody to depict a ‘hapless white woman in the kitchen’ nor a ‘buxom black cook in the kitchen.’ It’s demeaning not only to each race but to women in general.”  And from another woman of color, “There are [many] other ways you can sell Glory Foods without the maid/Jemima/mammy aspect. And I fail to believe that only white women are helpless when it comes to soul food.”

So, in sum, the campaign strikes a nerve on issues of both race and gender.  And that’s too bad, because if Glory Foods makes a good product–and I have no reason to believe it doesn’t–then why resort to southern stereotypes of both black and white women?

The Latest:  Since posting and tweeting about this ad campaign, the Brandon Agency has pulled the ads from television and YouTube, and “Shirley” no longer walks out onto the Glory Foods website to introduce herself. So, what does this mean?  Neither the agency nor the company were able to “see” what I and others saw before rolling out this new campaign, and seem caught off guard by the criticism.  To its credit, the agency is reassessing the campaign.  So, we shall see.