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It's unusable in the US because there is a brand of pancake mix, fake maple syrup, and frozen pancakes and waffles called "Aunt Jemima." The issue is that when the brand first started, in the 1880s, when it offered only the pancake mix, a picture of an African-American woman, which was racist and unattractive, was featured on the box. She was depicted as a typical "mammy", and in fact, a little later, between 1910 and 1920, the advertising company that was hired created an entire back story for her which stated that she was a former slave who was locally famous in Mississippi for her pancakes and who then divulged her secret recipe to a flour company which then marketed the secret recipe. None of which was true, of course. The recipe was in fact created by a white man.

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This advertising campaign persisted through the 1940s and 1950s and was abandoned only in the 1960s. Aunt Jemima, as pictured on the products, continued to look like a slave until the late 1980s. Nowadays, she looks like any African-American woman, the bandanna is gone and she wears pearl earrings. Still, her name is very associated with racism and most African-Americans hate the very idea of Aunt Jemima. Still, it's too valuable a brand name among whites for Quaker Oats to consider abandoning it.

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Even though many whites are insensitive to what Aunt Jemima represents, her existence still makes the name unusable to them, if only because it's associated with an enslaved mammy.

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Okay, now that I explained the whole thing anyway, here's the Wiki article on it:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Jemima

This message was edited 4/3/2019, 7:58 AM