43. Oh my, where do we even begin with Cream of Wheat? How do we explain this smiling, reassuring face we see on every trip down the cereal aisle?
In 2015, some may wonder how there could be any issues with this iconic figure. Today, chefs are celebrities, so to us, it may seem a positive thing to see an African American in full chef’s garb assuring us that Cream of Wheat is something we ought to have on our breakfast table.
But there’s another side to the story. It starts in the 1890s, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, an hour’s drive from the Canadian border. A flour mill, seeking to stave off bankruptcy after the Panic of 1893, developed a new product, a breakfast porridge generically known as farina. This “Cream of Wheat” caught on, and by 1897, the company had to move its operations to Minneapolis, the milling powerhouse, to keep up with the demand.
One of the mill’s officers, Emery Mapes (1853-1921), had some commercial art and advertising experience, and had put a face on the product: a chef named “Rastus.” And that’s where things get uncomfortable.
Why “Rastus”? It’s an extremely uncommon name. In the 1870 Census, for instance, there were only 42 in the entire country, and only four of them were identified as black or mulatto. But the name had become intricately linked with African Americans by the conventions of the minstrel show.
The “Rastus” character was happy, simple, and often skating on the wrong side of the law. An 1887 Harper’s Weekly cartoon, for instance, combined a couple stereotypes to create an “Uncle Rastus,” hauled before the judge:
In the early 1900s, “Rastus” had become a movie character as well. In the 1910 comedy “How Rastus Gets His Turkey,” Rastus successfully steals his family’s Thanksgiving turkey, but does so in a clumsy, buffoonish way. Of course, true to the minstrel show tradition, Rastus is played by a white actor in blackface:
Cream of Wheat spent a lot on advertising, and hired well-known artists to create a wide variety of images of Chef Rastus at work. Many might be seen as “slice of life” Americana, and are not inherently offensive, such as this one of the chef at work in his hotel kitchen:
But others played to the demeaning stereotypes of the time. In a particularly shameful 1921 example, Rastus brings his own message, set in ignorant minstrel dialect:
On the face of it, the ad makes no sense. The Chef, in his immaculate cooking wear, is supposed to represent the product’s quality and purity. At the turn of the century, led by the Kelloggs and C.W. Post, cereals were considered to be “health” food, both delicious and wholesome.
So what’s the advantage in having its chief spokesman sound like an imbecile? But such were the contradictions of the Jim Crow/Minstrel Show era. If the Chef had to speak, he couldn’t be shown as speaking as an intelligent, knowledgeable person. That wouldn’t fit the Rastus side of the stereotype.
In this 1916 ad, Rastus’ face appears next to the stereotyped character of the little black kid who’s able to escape the bulldog because he’s eaten his Cream of Wheat, but loses the apples in his pockets, which we’re supposed to assume he’s stolen:
And in this 1929 “A Case of Desertion” ad, we find Cream of Wheat combined with the classic “watermelon” stereotype:
There was also a Mrs. Rastus. I don’t know if she was ever named. She is presented as a “mammy” figure, similar to the Aunt Jemima artwork of the period, complete with bandana and apron. Believe it or not, this is one of the more humane versions:
At one level, then, many Cream of Wheat ads represented this theme of the infantilization of the black population. Before the Civil War, part of pro-slavery propaganda was that the enslaved people were happy. (And many owners would go to extreme lengths to hide whipping and other torture scars that would evidence otherwise). After the Civil War, this turned into the sentimentality of the minstrel shows and the “Brer Rabbit” stories (which also included a Brer Rastus character). The popular media image of African Americans in general, and men in particular, was that they were happy, harmless buffoons who did not need to be taken seriously:
That’s never entirely disappeared. Even in 2013, Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson reflected on his relationships with black folks back in the old days, and declared that “they was happy” under Jim Crow.
So what’s the moral of the story? After all, it’s 2015, not 1915, and things have changed. Yet many of us, whether our heritage goes back to Africa or Europe, feel obliged today to specify that #blacklivesmatter precisely because it seems that in some very important ways, our society doesn’t act like they do matter, and we don’t seem to be addressing key issues.
So what about the Cream of Wheat guy in 2015? The ads don’t call him Rastus any more, with all of that baggage, he’s not presented to us as a household servant (see part 2!!), but rather, purely as the Chef, in a day when chefs are heroes. So maybe he’ll survive. And maybe that’s ok,
But it’s good to think about it anyway. In this election cycle, some have tried to write-off such discussions as “political correctness,” which is assumed to be bad. But representation is important. Media depictions and characterizations play a big role in shaping not only the self-image of African Americans but also the image and perceptions of the majority population, i.e., the folks who have to take the lead in shaping the laws that ultimately decide whether black lives matter, or not so much.
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