From Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty by Cheryl Thompson. Published by Coach House Books in 2021.

In March 2007, just a few weeks after Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomina­tion for president, Mars Inc. launched a rebranding campaign to modernize the image of Uncle Ben, the advertising trademark for its Converted Rice brand. Mars gave Uncle Ben a new look as a business executive with a penchant for sharing what The New York Times reported as “his ‘grains of wisdom’ about rice and life.” This new Ben, dressed in a blue suit with bow tie and cufflinks, looked far removed from the plantation. In one crucial respect, however, Uncle Ben’s biography remained the same: he was still just Ben, a pitchman without a last name.

Ben’s rebranding paralleled a slightly earlier move by the Quaker Oats Company. In 1989, in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Aunt Jemima trademark, the company made extensive alterations to her face and body. Jemima’s updated image did not include her familiar headband. Instead, she wore pearl earrings and a lace collar. Her hair was straightened, and she appeared visibly younger. Aunt Jemima had always been a heavy-set, dark-skinned, bandana-wearing Black woman with a broad, toothy smile. But, according to a company spokesperson, the updated version was “to make her look like a working mother, an image the company claimed was supported by test-marketing of the new logo among blacks and whites.”

Then in 1994, Quaker Oats announced that soul singer Gladys Knight had agreed to represent Aunt Jemima products in a series of television advertisements. Immediately, the singer faced accusations that she was perpetuating a derogatory image of Black women. At the time, however, Knight made a distinction: “I’m not Aunt Jemima. I’m only a spokesperson. What matters to me is what’s inside the box.” Symbolically, a real Black woman with her grandchildren was speaking for an imaginary Black woman. As M.M. Manring, author of Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima, observed, “If Aunt Jemima is recognized as anything more today than Gladys Knight is, then it must be owed more to Aunt Jemima’s past than to her present—no one is buying the product because it is somehow connected with modern black working grandmothers, or Gladys Knight could do the job without Aunt Jemima.”

All Aunt Jemima products are still successful—even without their image—because of the nostalgic sentimentalism attached to the Black servant narrative. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom still haunt African Americans who have achieved celebrity; however, some folks did not see anything wrong with celebrities like Knight singing the praises of Aunt Jemima products. “Aunt Jemima’s critics insult the hardworking women after whom its famous icon was modeled,” wrote Robert J. Brown, in an article for AdAge in 1994, adding, “I remember vividly the women in my community who put food on their tables by working long hours in other people’s kitchens. My grandmother, who raised me, was one of them. I can still see her tying on an apron and wrapping her head with a scarf as she prepared to cook. She was strong and wise, a magnificent woman who commanded respect.” That real Black women were being compared to a fictional Black woman spoke to the power of these images to blur the lines.

In an interview with The New York Times, Vincent Howell, president of the food division of the Masterfoods USA unit of Mars, said that because consumers described Uncle Ben as having “a timeless element to him, we didn’t want to significantly change him.” “What’s powerful to me is to show an African American icon in a position of prominence and authority,” Howell said. Ben was still elderly, and his outfit maintained the same colour palette, but the marketers’ decision to place him inside an executive office and add a wedding band, cufflinks, and a commanding posture meant that we are to read this new Ben not as a passive figure but as a “man in charge.” “As an African-American,” Howell remarked, “he makes me feel so proud.” At the time, market research showed that consumers felt a “positive emotional connection” with both the name “Uncle Ben” and the image, associating them with “quality, family, timelessness, and warmth.” “Because consumers from all walks of life echoed many times through the years that Uncle Ben stood for values similar to their own,” he added, “we decided to reinforce and build on that existing positive connection through the new campaign.”

Over the past fifty years, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Rastus have all been redesigned. Now silent trademark characters, they no longer speak in advertisements and are reduced to headshots, staring mutely from packages. The new millennium has seen the emergence of a new generation of highly successful Black entrepreneurs, moguls, and politicians, such as Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, and in adver­tising, celebrity pitchmen like Dennis Haysbert and Samuel L. Jackson. In various ways, they all signal that the traditional Black consumer trademarks not only needed to be redesigned; they also had to enter the middle-upper class and the boardrooms of America.

All this rebranding, however, has been met with mixed reviews. Luke Visconti, a partner at New Jersey media firm Diversity Inc., told the Times that Mars was glossing over years of baggage: “This is an interesting idea, but for me it still has a very high cringe factor.” Similarly, Marilyn Kern Foxworth, author of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, applauded Mars for trying to update the trademark, but felt the decision to retain essential elements of the Uncle Ben portrait showed they were still trying to hold on to something that folks like her are trying so hard to shed. The ads are “asking us to make the leap from Uncle Ben being someone who looks like a butler to overnight being a chairman of the board,” Kern Foxworth said. “It does not work for me.” “Now that you are a big shot, Uncle Ben, you’re going to need your own private chef,” quipped Stephen Colbert, then host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. “I recommend the Cream of Wheat guy.” Others were even harsher in their critiques. Carmen Van Kerckhove, co-founder of the firm New Demographic, wrote on her blog, racialicious.com: “This rebranding campaign is really the epitome of putting lipstick on a pig. Uncle Ben is still grinning and wearing a bow tie. There’s nothing Chairman of the Board-esque about that image. Uncle Ben still has no last name. When’s the last time you heard a powerful man referred to by his first name? No matter what fantasies you weave about him being the Chairman of the Board, his very name still comes from the culture of slavery.”

Despite these criticisms, the “new” Ben remained perched atop all Converted Rice products as of early 2020. Ben’s Original, without the image, appears in 2021. The irony of this new Ben is that nothing about the Uncle Tom trope is original. Even if his image is removed, Ben—a name now synonymous with service—is still a Tom.

In the digital age, Mars directly tracked consumer interest in the first Uncle Ben rebranding. The interest was undeniable: traffic to the Uncle Ben website soared during the summer of 2007. Unique visits ballooned from 191,000 in the third quarter of 2006 to 3.6 million in the same period of 2007, according to comScore. The image of a servile Black man continued to resonate on a global scale, especially in Britain, where, in 2016, the Uncle Ben’s brand claimed a 40 per cent share of the rice market, with sales of £89 million. The tracking results from the 2021 rebranding will be very telling about whether consumer appetites for centuries-long Black stereotypes have changed.