Quaker Oats is taking Aunt Jemima off the shelf?
First black person I ever saw was a woman paid to depict ever-smiling Aunt Jemima and appear at an all-white Alexandria supermarket to promote sweet syrup on pancakes. Also, summers we’d see an occasional black servant, shopping for some rich white people vacationing in our fair lake city. We gossiped about such an oddity.
That was pretty much the extent of my inter-racial experience. So when our renown choir director proposed that our quartet appear in blackface and sing a blatantly racist song about African Americans caught stealing corn from a white man’s field, I was all for it. Um. We didn’t sing "African Americans." The N word was right there in the lyrics. We memorized them and I enthusiastically sang the bass lines. I could sing it today -- if I had a willing group.
Our sophomore quartet was quickly supplied with the school’s handy black-and -white minstrel show grease paint. We didn’t win the talent show, but we got a big round of applause from a packed gym largely as ignorant as we were.
I am the only surviving member of that black-face, white shoe quartet; Paul, Steve and Mike are gone, as well as our esteemed director.
But I think they would all agree today that we’ve got a lot to learn about systemic racism.
