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Agitprop Supports the Narrative
This photograph been making the rounds on Facebook. It purports to be an advertising shot of Nancy Green, the first person to represent the Aunt Jemima brand.
The trouble is, there are no known photographs of Nancy Green. There are photographs of all of the other women who portrayed the character, but not Nancy. This photo is actually a self portrait by artist Sally Stockhold, part of an exhibition in Denver in 2011 entitled Myselfportraits Icons and Absurdities: Photographs of Sally Stockhold. The Denver Post covered the exhibition:
Her central focus has been a group of self-portraits in which she photographs herself as famous and infamous artistic, historical and literary figures, ranging from Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl to Alice Neel and Diane Arbus.
For each of these complex, partially hand-colored compositions, she assembles elaborate sets that often incorporate impeccably crafted backdrops and props that would be worth showing on their own.
The Post further described the reception of the exhibition,
Some curators and other art insiders have been leery of these images because they are contrived, stagey and a little bizarre, but it is exactly those qualities — all intended by the artist — that make them so intriguing.
Stockhold furthers invented history in her description of her “myselfportrait” of Aunt Jemima, titled I Laughed Because They Paid Me,
Green’s new career allowed her the financial freedom to support her family and also to work as an activist for African American causes and anti poverty programs.
Nancy Green’s real story was much less prosaic. There is absolutely no evidence that she was a millionaire, that she supported anti-poverty programs, or was an activist for any cause. She died in 1923 when she was struck by a car while walking in Chicago. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago. She received a headstone after 97 years after a 10-year effort spearheaded by the Bronzeville Historical Society.
This is the only known likeness of the real Nancy Green, a woman born into slavery in Kentucky who found success in freedom, died in an accident, was forgotten in death, and is now being used as a cudgel.
The real story behind the photograph will be lost to the current zeitgeist. Amateur internet historians can be very dangerous. I don’t anticipate that Sally Stockhold will correct the record. After all, a white artist explaining why she put on blackface wouldn’t fit the narrative.
Published in History
I’m sure the false appropriation of the image will be roundly denounced on Facebook, where truth always prevails.
I don’t know who that woman is in the photograph, but she looks like a white woman in blackface.
But I guess that’s okay if you’re doing it for “artistic” purposes.
EDIT: Well, Sally Stockhold is very white, so if that’s her self-portait, then yes, she’s a white liberal woman in blackface. Which deserves one of these:
And why doesn’t she pick up the leg of the table before it’s full of pancakes?
Yeah, just looking the picture I could tell that was not a 100-year-old photo and assumed the lady was white. So, we were supposed to believe the original Aunt Jemima did commercials in chains? Really?
Ah….
She is. She also does yellowface.
The person in that picture is obviously white.
That immediately jumped out at me too. Obvious fakery.
(It looks like that chain could slip right off her foot, too.)
The background (wall, door) is clearly drawn or Photoshopped onto the image (more fake).
More evidence that apparently the only way the woke can sell their position is with fakery and deception.
Families of the original women chosen to portray Aunt Jemima take issue with the rebranding:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/aunt-jemima-families-rebranding
Sally Stockhold as Madame Butterfly.
She is portraying a character from an Italian opera based on a short story written by an American which in turn was based on the French novel Madame Chrysanthème and the tales his sister (a Methodist missionary) brought back from her time in Japan.
I like it. A four-rail carom shot of cultural appropriation.
I thought we were supposed to be afraid of the new technology available to fake graphics and imagery on the internet, all the confusion it will cause.
This one is not even laughable. And insulting to anyone hoping to be outraged by the next black thing. Try harder you guys!!
Shiny, chromium steel chains no less.
So you are saying this photograph is a white woman in blackface?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-stockhold-65b9b813
Just read her obituary. She was 89. She worked as a nurse for a Walker family in Chicago, two brothers of which spread the word among their friends about her pancakes. A milling company found her, got her recipe, and had her making pancakes at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
I always assumed the image was of Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind.
I missed the chain, at first. So the people posting this believed it was an actual advertising image from the time?
Now and then I come across fake ads on the Internet, and am surprised by people who take them seriously. The typefaces are wrong, the design is wrong, the copy is wrong – but it meshes with what they think about the past, which is usually deficient. For a generation raised on screens, they are often unable to parse images. It would make perfect sense to them that ads would show Aunt Jemima in chains, because, well, America.
When they’re proven wrong, they shrug and move on, having learned nothing.
You notice, of course, that it’s a crudely painted back drop.
The first time I saw it, it was cropped so you didn’t see her feet — and therefore, you didn’t see chains. I still thought it looked like a white woman, and then when I tried to find some original images of Aunt Jemima, this never came up in a search.
The photo looks “old fashioned” enough to fool someone, I suppose. Usually the photo was cropped, but when you saw the entire thing people did comment on the chain and didn’t question it.
A
lazyfree “newspaper” in Saint Louis used the cropped image in a story about Nancy Green. A website allegedly dedicated to “truth or fiction” used the photo to tell the “real” story using the photo, and only added in the disclaimer in the last day. I have found that piecing together Nancy’s story is difficult and for people without any real history education the truth doesn’t matter, even for a website called Truth or Fiction.No one points out that this is a white woman.
If you include “Nancy Green” or “original” in the search terms it comes up.
She’s wearing whiteface! Racist . . .
Can anyone remember the name of the older daughter in that novel, Mildred Pierce, the one who felt her mother should be ashamed of earning a living waitressing and baking pies ?
Anyway, when people act like there’s something degrading to black people about the idea of a black woman who’s called Aunt Jemima and who makes superb pancakes, aren’t they implying black people should take on the misplaced shame and self destructive snobbery of Mildred Pierce and her older daughter ?
Next question: why isn’t Poppa John’s Pizza considered degrading to Italians ?
Veda Pierce
Maybe what has to be erased is just the fact that a person who was born a slave died a millionaire. It doesn’t fit the left’s narrative that people who were black were completely discounted and ignored as well as oppressed.