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‘Racist Things’ exhibit confronts legacy of Black imagery in American homes, culture
African American Museum of Iowa explores the history of stereotypes
Feb. 15, 2025 6:00 am
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CEDAR RAPIDS — For a significant part of America’s history, objects of overt racism made themselves at home in the most ordinary and practical formats.
Salt and pepper shakers of the “mammy” from Eastern Iowa. A “Little Black Sambo” children’s book. Nursery seed posters from Sioux City with raccoons dancing below a caricature of a Black person, holding a written joke that makes the human the punch line in comparison to the animals.
From 1850 to 1950, the insidious images that conveyed stereotypes of Black Americans permeated the American psyche through household items, advertising, media and textbooks.
Called “Black Memorabilia” and “Black Americana” at times, blackface figurines and apparel have had a long run in America. Now, the African American Museum of Iowa is confronting their legacy head-on.
“Racist Things: Hateful Imagery in the American Home”
When: Exhibit on display through Aug. 16
Hours: Noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
Where: African American Museum of Iowa, 55 12th Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids
Admission: $8 for adults, $5 for students, free for children under 5.
For more info, visit blackiowa.org.
“It’s very difficult to look at and very jarring. But to read what’s here is to really try and understand the roots of things we’re dealing with today,” said Felicite Wolfe, curator of the exhibit. “The ideas, the thoughts between Black people and Black bodies, how they were viewed, brings us to the modern day of how things are the way they are. It’s to have an understanding of where this stuff stems from.”
Long after their popularity started to wane in the 1950s at the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, it’s still not hard to find such objects. Visit any number of vintage thrift shops or take a look at some modern-day advertising, and the legacy of racism is just within reach.
Just last year, a Heinz ad in the United Kingdom was axed after using imagery hearkening to the age of minstrel shows — a Black person with darker skin whose lips are covered in bright red ketchup.
In 2020, Uncle Ben’s rice was rebranded to Ben’s Original. In 2021, PepsiCo followed suit with Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup products.
“It’s still happening in advertising today and people aren’t aware of the imagery,” Wolfe said. “We were not taught any of this, and it’s still happening.”
Some characters were purportedly based on mythology about a person’s early beginnings in a kitchen, where they loved to cook their signature specialties. But in many cases, they were nothing but a spin on an age-old tool for racism: the minstrel character.
“Aunt Jemima was not a real person. She was a product,” Wolfe said.
The exhibit topic, chosen by a community survey after being on a list of potential topics for several years, is part of the shift at Iowa’s only museum dedicated to Black history. Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Wolfe said the community has demonstrated more of an appetite for “hot topics” and exhibits that relate to modern themes.
“The fact that it’s still hanging around points to how ingrained it is into our culture,” Wolfe said. “The emotional issues, the physiological issues the Black community deals with today is intergenerational trauma, which this is part of. The trauma still exists today because it’s never been dealt with openly and honestly.”
The nature of its pervasiveness lies in the memories of who the memorabilia was often held by — like beloved relatives.
“I think it’s just nostalgia for a lot of people. (People will say) my grandmother had that in her kitchen,” Wolfe said. “Nobody wants to think what they did was bad. Or you really don’t think about it.”
Broken down by types of products, and types of rhetoric, exhibit visitors can navigate the history line of “Racist Things” through minstrelsy, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” psychology, pseudoscience and theology.
They can learn how churches justified racism, how school textbooks legitimized racial pseudoscience and how advertising played an outsize role in the harmful caricatures that were the only connection between groups in segregated America.
“When you’re living segregated, your only contact with someone who doesn’t look like you is through these images,” Wolfe said. “That gets ingrained.”
She hopes it brings a new awareness to consumers — and an appetite to learn more.
Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.
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