The Ugly Side

This is a bit of an aside from my journey into the vintage world of laundry.

I've been sharing my 1945 breakfast menus with a friend from work. So I was telling her today about the yummy Buckwheat Griddlecakes I made for breakfast yesterday morning and how surprised I was by their color. That they were the color of gingerbread or chocolate pancakes, but had about the same flavor as your regular, everyday pancakes. All of a sudden, something dreadful occurred to me.

Do you remember the Little Rascals films that were popular during the Depression era? One of the characters was a little African American boy nicknamed Buckwheat. Yikes. This must be how the character got his nickname. Just thinking of my breakfast yesterday (and the leftovers I ate this morning) makes me feel smarmy.

This isn't the first time I've come up against racial prejudice since beginning The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Just the other day, I was writing up a little post on this darling canister set I saw when I was antiquing in Connecticut last week. You know the type: Coffee, Sugar, Flour, etc. I giggled when I realized the set included a canister marked "Farina." (That's one family who enjoyed lots of Cream of Wheat at the breakfast table!) Well, I was looking around online for a Cream of Wheat advertisement from the '40s and was disappointed when the only things I could find were these dreadfully racist cartoons then used to advertise the product. All those cringeworthy mammy/pickaninny images. I gave up the search in disgust.

I guess it just makes me think about the barrage of racist images out there during the 1940s. Even the white middle-class housewife - somebody you think of as leading a fairly insulated existence - would have regularly come across these images, whether on the cereal boxes in her pantry, in her women's magazines, or at the movie theater. They were part of the common dialogue among the white men, women, and children who bought these products or lined up on Saturday mornings to buy tickets to the matinee. That the name "Buckwheat" would have been a kind of inside joke to people of the era makes me shudder.

While racism is certainly still present today, we've made long strides as a culture since the '40s. This is one aspect of the good ol' days that I'm very happy to leave behind.