Fuck Aunt Jemima

I’m troubled reading white people post they are upset they are losing Aunt Jemima.  You’re that attached to a corporate logo?  Have you lost your freakin’ mind?  Get on ebay, they’re selling Aunt Jemima clocks, wall hangings and jackets, buy all you need.  I think by the time you take it out of the box you will realize you were ridiculous

I’m reading if we destroy our history, we’re doomed to repeat it?  When was the last time you saw a statue of George III in the United States?  Anyone want to take bets as to when we become part of England again?  Florida was part of Spain.  New York was part of Holland.  Anyone think we’re going back?

Someone asked about Gone With the Wind, are they taking Gone with the Wind from us?  I remember the first time GWTW was on television.  It was mid-1970s.  We sat around the television as a family and watched it, true story.  I believe it opens with a slaves in the field scene.  Even in the 1970s my parents saw that and said “OMG, this is terrible.  This is going to disturb people.”  Ask your children and grandchildren if they’ve seen GWTW and what it meant to them.

And then you’ve got the whole issue of the Confederacy.  Every year, from the time I was 10, until I was 16, I took a road trip with my grandparents.  We started in Florida and went to Canada, but as we made our way to Canada, we spent a fair amount of time in Kentucky, with my grandfather’s parents and then in Detroit, with other relatives.  Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky were full of Civil War sites, battlefields, markers.  In Detroit I asked where the Civil War stuff was, one of the relatives said, “We won that war and we don’t talk about it here.”  The Detroit relatives had originally been Kentucky relatives.  They moved, during the Depression, and stayed.  My grandfather’s parent had also moved to Detroit during the Depression, but they retired to Kentucky. 

I like history.  I have visited numerous plantations, which are museums.  They sell books you rarely see, written by emancipated slaves and collections of the stories of emancipated slaves.  I’ve bought and read a lot of those books.  I think there’s a big difference between museums of Southern History as opposed to statues of losing generals in the cities where they were defeated, Aunt Jemima and the Confederate flag on your truck.  If flying the Confederate flag on your truck is not intentionally meant to be racist it, at a minimum, reminds me of high school kids who tell you they are Wiccan or Buddhist.  I remember one saying that in my house and my daughter said, “You’re not Wiccan.  Are your parents Wiccan?”  They were not.  “What do you do as a Wiccan?  What do you believe?  Do you go to Wiccan church?  Or did you just pick that so you wouldn’t be like your parents?”  Or do you fly the Confederate flag to be just like your parents? 

One of my friends posted yesterday the Civil War was not only about slavery.  She read that.  I’ve read and heard that too.  I read and heard it so much I asked my cousin who’s a history professor at a college in Kentucky.  I asked him right on FB, I could probably find that post.  He said there would have been no Civil War had the issue not been slavery. 

I recently responded to a Save Aunt Jemima post where a commentator said racism comes from families.  My Grandpa’s grandfather was in the Confederate Army.  I have never known a finer man than my Grandfather.  Each and every day we were together, he was so good to me. 

We were genealogy hunting in a Kentucky cemetery where we came upon this marker.  I was 13 years old.  Grandpa told me Calab was a slave.  Calab died when he was about 20 years old.  Calab is buried in the same cemetery as my great-grandparents and my great-great grandparents.  Calab's is the only slave grave in that cemetery.  I look for Calab’s marker every time I go to that cemetery.  I asked Grandpa how Calab died.  Grandpa said he probably got sick.  How come they aren't sure how old Calab was? That stone bothered me.  I stared at it for a long time, wondering about Calab, and his relationship with R.C. Robertson.  What was it like at the cemetery when they buried Calab?  Where was Calab's mother?  And then, on that day in June of 1977 my grandfather said the only thing he ever said to me that was terrible and wrong.  Grandpa justified slavery.  He said it wasn’t so bad.  Slaves were expensive.  They cost as much as a car.  You take care of your car; they took care of their slaves.  And I was quiet, for I was a bookish, nerdy, glasses-wearing, high IQ, Grandpa-loving girl.  And I thought about it, and Grandpa’s logic was terrible.  What Grandpa said was wrong.

How can you be such a wonderful person and make such a terrible statement?  Is it because your grandfather was in the Confederate Army?  Would it be okay if you had been the slave, as expensive as a car?  Jimmy Carter says you have to take people, like his father, and relate them to their times.

That’s the only racist remark I ever heard out of my grandfather’s mouth EXCEPT my grandparents called Brazil nuts by an impermissible name.  I can’t tell you that name because if a white person says it, lighting strikes us dead, google it.  We told Grandma and Grandpa they had to say Brazil Nuts.  We corrected them every time they said the wrong words and they got it pretty quickly.

I think there are terribly racist families, but I think, when I was growing up, I was more touched by systemic racism than overt racism.  We were so segregated when I was growing up in Lauderdale-By-the-Sea.  My grandparents owned a motel. They had several employees who were black. Black people were not allowed in Lauderdale By the Sea after dark.  If an employee worked late my grandfather or my father, drove them home. Normally they would have taken the bus. It is striking that looking out for the black employees was a job for the men. If an employee was staying the night, which was not unheard of, my father or grandfather called Town Hall to report a negro was sleeping over and explained why. We were doing this in the 1970s. 

When I was in fourth grade, 1974, my elementary school was desegregated. I was not close friends with any black children. The chance of me marrying a black man was zero. I was a nerdy, bookish, not rebellious young woman.

I was 34 when I had my daughter. My daughter heard not one word of racism in my house. She didn't know racism existed until they told her about Martin Luther King Jr. in Kindergarten.  When I picked her up from school that day my daughter was horrified. We talked about it for a long time. I think we talked about it for days.  She kept saying, "You knew this, and you didn't tell me? How could you know this and not tell me?" "YOU'RE FIVE YEARS OLD AND IT NEVER CAME UP. I wasn't trying to withhold information from you." When my daughter was in preschool, I picked her up one day and she told me she met the boy she was going to marry. I said, "Tomorrow, show him to me." She did. I told her, "I think you picked the best one."

White people, get over yourselves, kick Aunt Jemima to the curb. She can’t possibly mean that much to you.