Saturday Morning Lessons

My mother’s employment for as long as I can remember was that of a home attendant, also known as a “home health aid.” For her, this job primarily entailed caring for the elderly needing assistance. She worked for various Home Attendant agencies, sometimes multiple agencies simultaneously, to have weekday and weekend shifts. She worked twelve hour shifts, so I would only see my mother sometimes as she raced out of the home in the morning and in the evenings as the last of the family to return home. She would generally key herself in, sometimes wielding groceries, sometimes just bearing the length of the day. Rather often, she would poke in my bedroom door frame, rummage through her purse, and throw a chocolate bar, lollipop, or some other goody at me. It was a small but sweet reminder that she thought about me, too, during a long day of caring for others. Or at least, this is what a young me would tell myself in taking for granted that the consistent completion of shifts meant she was also caring for her family all day. It was easy to take this for granted as she never emphasized the relationship between the two herself.

During weekends when my mother was not working, she would regale me with stories from work while making me breakfast. One recurring tale was that anytime she ran into a young woman just getting started at the agency, she would go right up to them and tell them to quit the job and enroll, or re-enroll, in school to pursue a different career. Often remarking that it was not a job she would want her daughter to do for the rest of her life. For her, the job was sufficient for a Caribbean immigrant with limited formal education who needed to contribute financially to raising three kids in Brooklyn, NY. Sufficient for a mother who wanted to maintain her family’s transition from a one-bedroom apartment that our family of five occupied for at least the first six years of my life. Insufficient for young women whom she thought, as she did with me, had all the opportunities in the world before her if she excelled at school. These tales would then culminate in a reminder that I was to pursue something different than her, something she could be proud of, something that wouldn’t wear her baby down. This warning also entailed discouraging me from part-time service work as a youth, which I could not entirely avoid once I was in college, more to her dismay than my own. My mother would impart this lesson to me while mixing the powdery contents of a box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix. She’d ultimately present me my piping hot stack with the companion bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup, which I discovered only in my adult life was not real maple syrup. At the time, neither my mother nor I knew that she was ultimately serving up a contradiction for breakfast.

Syrup and Systemic Oppression

In 2020, amidst public outcry against the execution of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Quaker Oats changed their controversial “Aunt Jemima” brand to “Pearl Milling Company.” While Quaker was not alone in making a public statement as a corporation in response to this political moment, what makes the company different is that its original name and icon were based on a controlling image of Black women. Aunt Jemima was both a brand name and a foundational archetype, also sometimes referred to as “mammy,” that dictated the expected and preferred role of Black women during slavery and dictated what occupations and behaviors “best-suited” Black women post-emancipation. Initially, Quaker Oats used an enslaved Black woman, Nancy Green, to promote their products with in-person cooking demonstrations. Over time, they attempted to extricate the Black woman from the mammy image in their branding, but the so-called evolution was wanting. Noteworthy in Kevin Byrne’s Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age (2020), in which he describes the brand’s evolution from American chattel slavery, Byrne names the Aunt Jemima tagline, “I’se in Town, Honey!,” as a declaration of omnipresent racism. Black feminist thought has long interrogated these enduring and pernicious racist and sexist images due to their insidious origins and the ongoing normative and political power of these representations.

Despite the insidious origins of this brand’s iconography, this announcement by Quaker Oats, as well as others like it, was primarily met with, at best, indifference and, at worst, accusations of distracting from making progress on the “real” matters at hand (state-sanctioned anti-Black death and violence). Within this decision to make a distinction between something like state-sanctioned violence and racist-sexist advertisements lies the belief that the enduring presence of something like the Aunt Jemima image is less worthy of redress as they do not pertain to matters of immediate corporeal harm. Part of what I hope to capture in my research is that the failure to recognize the harms linked to matters of oppressive representations precludes the possibility for understanding both their unique harms and their role in corroborating a variety of material harms. Turning to Black feminist thought reveals epistemic harms, perceptual harms, moral harms, recognition or definition-based harms, how these coerced and crafted deficits endorse and bolster systemic harms, and the myriads of affective distresses this all produces. Ultimately, oppressive representations are not mere shadows of oppressive structures but exist as a co-constitutive element worthy of redress. Turning to Black feminist thought further reveals the importance of critical engagements with controlling images by understanding the nature of these images and unveiling opportunities for resistance.

In my work, I do this by accounting for the history of controlling images in the Black feminist tradition. This history includes proto-conceptions that predate the introduction of this terminology by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, later popularized by Patricia Hill Collins, such as sexist-racist myths, sexual stereotypes, and racial-sexual stereotypes. More often than not, proto-conceptions rely upon a common language: mammies, jezebels, sapphires, or monikers that function as the shorthand to capture this complex ideological scourge. Furthermore, given Patricia Hill Collins’ efforts to formalize this common language with her work on controlling images, I track the development of this term across her corpus as those who engage it seem to arrest the theory as it’s articulated in Black Feminist Thought. I instead demonstrate its evolution from its inception in Collins’ work in 1986 to its latest articulation in her work in 2019. I also do this work by interrogating how controlling images are appropriated in related philosophical discourses, such as the works on stereotypes and epistemic injustice, epistemic violence, etc. In one respect, there is a tendency to use marginalized thinkers as mines for examples to bolster arguments without recognizing the distinct theoretical contributions made by these thinkers. In another respect, when theoretical contributions are recognized, their scope and impact are considered unrepresentative and only narrowly applicable. These are just two troubling tendencies, to name a few. Therefore, I also work to amplify the unique philosophical import of these marginalized thinkers and how robust engagements with their work can be quite mutually clarifying for those desiring to bring this literature together.

Teaching Interlude

In the fall of 2024, I had the incidental pleasure of taking over a feminist philosophy course halfway through the semester. I agreed to do so under the condition that I could essentially teach texts I engaged with in my dissertation to facilitate its completion. This experience made me realize the relevance of teaching this work. I primarily taught the course as a survey on how Black feminists have theorized oppressive representations. The course took students through 1.) early expressions of controlling images in Black feminist thought, 2.) the formation of controlling images as a concept, as popularized by Patricia Hill Collins, 3.) various accounts of the harms elicited by controlling images, and 4.) theoretical and artistic attempts to resist controlling images.

In unit one, students read various accounts such as Claudia Jones’ critique of the mammy in “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” (1949) and Angela Davis’ critique of the matriarch image in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1971). In unit two, students followed Collins’ concept development across her articles, books, edited volume contributions, and editorial work. In unit three, we discussed various accounts of the harms elicited by controlling images, including Audre Lorde’s analysis of how the “angry black woman” image, an outgrowth of the sapphire image, stifled women’s political organizing in the feminist movement. We also turned to Melissa Harris-Perry’s account of myths, which demonstrated how controlling images disrupt opportunities for personal and political recognition and their affective life as an arbiter of shame. Finally, in unit four, we read and viewed theoretical and artistic ways to resist controlling images, which included Cheryl Dunye’s reinvention of a fictional mammy in her film The Watermelon Women (1996) to Kara Walker’s mediation of the mammy in her installation “A Subtlety” (2014) which fuses the mammy image and the jezebel image into one controlling image chimera.

While the students were thrilled to be pivoting towards a more expansive engagement with Black feminisms, after having a more general survey in the first half of their course, neither the students nor I anticipated the relevance of our course for understanding the concurrent election season. Students went from reading accounts of the mammy and the modern mammy to unpacking in class the significance of Drew Barrymore’s heartfelt plea to Kamala Harris that, “in our country we need you to be Mamala of the country,” which left Harris at a loss for words. Even outside class, a student emailed me a screenshot of a TikTok they viewed over the weekend. The subject line read “Seeing Class Conversations in Real Life.” The student described that the TikTok video itself was of a rally for Donald Trump, but what the student wanted me to see was a comment that read “Get that Jezebel out of office” with several emojis expressing elation. At the beginning of the class, students expressed an inability to understand why friends and family could confidently tout that Kamala was unqualified to be President of the United States of America because she “slept her way to the top.” They couldn’t comprehend where this sentiment originated. Where was the evidence? As we read hooks, Collins, and Harris-Perry, we got to discuss how controlling images don’t rely upon data or reason to enact such multiplicitous forms of epistemic violence and how such images define the imaginative possibilities of Black women’s democratic participation.

Though I was glad our class functioned as a space where students could better understand their current political moment, what I found most instrumental about their parallels to the election was that merely occupying such positions of power cannot free Black women from these images. With that, we cannot escape critical engagements with these images and how they effectively attempt to provide a fixed and totalizing narrative of our lives. Suspicion of their effects and affects, even in its seemingly more banal forms as mascots for our economical and expeditious breakfasts, are necessary for all movements concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples. In times like this, where private corporations feel the need to loudly roll back all initiatives and programs related to anti-racism or diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s not implausible to wonder, will Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the like return to haunt our fridges and cupboards again? Time, seemingly quickly, will tell.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.

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