I’m sure that most people can immediately visualise an Uncle Ben’s product, with its vivid orange and navy blue packaging, complete with an image of a smiling, elderly black man. The company’s rice products have been in existence since 1947, and are sold in more than 100 countries. The brand itself is owned by the Mars corporation.

But have you ever stopped to question why the name ‘Uncle Ben’? 

According to their website, Uncle Ben is named in honour of a Texan farmer who was “renowned for exceptionally high quality rice”. However, it’s impossible to escape the fact that ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunt’ were titles given by white slave-owners to older African-American slaves because they did not deem them worthy of the moniker ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Nor the dignity of a surname.  You may have heard of the racial slur ‘Uncle Tom’ - synonymous with servility and submissiveness, it originated at the height of the slave trade and became a popular insult of racist Southern whites.  

Mars has acknowledged (and attempted to deflect) the issue in the past, spending $20 million in 2007 to ‘promote’ Uncle Ben to become the fictional corporate chairman of the company – grand office and all.  Yet they stopped short of granting Ben the title of ‘Mr’ nor the dignity of a surname, leaving him a single-syllable first name away from one of the most enduring insults in African-American history.

The history of ‘Aunt Jemima’, of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, is even more disturbing.  

In 1889, the founders of the brand borrowed the name from a song that they had heard performed by a team of travelling minstrel performers (normally whites in blackface caricaturing the singing and dancing of African-American slaves). Together with the name for their new pancake mix, they decided to use the image of the ‘Mammy’ which, like the idea of ‘Uncle Tom’, was a domestic servant caricature created to serve the political, social and economic interests of mainstream white America during the era of slavery. 

In this case, Aunt Jemima was a plump, devoted and submissive African-American female slave, who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress at the expense of her own. The company even used Nancy Green – a woman born into slavery in Kentucky in 1834 - to impersonate ‘Aunt Jemima’ in its advertising until her death in 1923.

Like Mars, in 1989 the Quaker Oats Company (now the owner of the Aunt Jemima brand) acknowledged the need for change in order to separate the brand from its links to slavery and segregation. So what did they do? They gave Aunt Jemima a pair of pearl earrings and removed her headband.

It is time for such vestiges of slavery and segregation to be removed from our supermarket shelves. 

Join me in signing this petition to call upon the owners of the likes of ‘Uncle Ben’s’ and ‘Aunt Jemima’ to re-brand. We ask that they finally rid themselves of the racist stereotypes that adorn their packaging and marketing materials, in a change that feels extraordinarily overdue.