Crystal Bridges presented Toni Tipton-Martin as a distinguished speaker during one of their conventions. Toni Tipton-Martin has focused her career on building a healthier community. She is a culinary journalist and has written the book The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Toni Tipton-Martin is the first African American Food Editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and has won several awards: the 2016 James Beard Book Award, the 2016 Art of Eating Prize, and the recipient of a 2015 Certificate of Outstanding Contribution to Publishing from the Black Caucus of the Library Association.
The convention allowed Toni to speak out about the negativity African American stereotypes bring onto America and to influence the audience to increase tolerance of racism. The specific stereotype she is focusing on is what the food industry created: the Aunt Jemima Cookbooks. Toni believes the brand did not create the respect African American cooks deserved during the time of slavery. She spoke about her book, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, and how its purpose was to bring back respect to African Americans and what they did for America during the slavery era.
The book focuses on the prejudices and double standards the brand "Aunt Jemima" represented about African American cooks. It linked African American women to this stereotype and never paid honor to their contributions of harsh labor during this period of history. Toni acknowledges that the African American women did cook, but it wasn't because they had to. They expressed their skill and art for others, especially during one of the most hardest time in history. Toni calls attention to their contributions and compares the Aunt Jemima, she wishes was the stereotype, with Betty Crocker.
During the speech, Toni also depicts several advertisements that traveled around the country supposedly portraying the African American women. These images only portrayed African American women as grotesque, unflattering, and never showed the hardships these women endured in order to cook. Toni wanted to fight this intolerance and she realized she had to work with cookbooks during the slavery era, where she then found the cookbook The Blue Grass Cookbook. This book illustrated the combined effort of African American and White women working together in Southern Kitchens. This was the cornerstone of Toni's work and hoped for this to be the new symbol of culinary wisdom. After collecting a handful of books, Toni announced that African Americans understood the food practices and weren't the submissive race, other Americans believed them to be. These cookbooks demonstrated that there was a tolerance capable for Americans.
This TED talk dealt a lot with discussion from my Food Politics course. We discussed several things, especially stereotypes focused on African American women and Aunt Jemima. Our discussion surrounding stereotypes dealt with the four destructive stereotypes: the mammy, sapphire, jezebel, and matriarch. These stereotypes are specific in certain ways, which is harmful for members in the group. In class we discussed "stereotype deviant behavior" which is a violation of the norm. This affected African American women by classifying them as only these four characteristics and nothing else. From this discussion, we transitioned from how the "Aunt Jemima" company profits off of the mammy stereotype. The controversy around Aunt Jemima depicts how the name Jemima was a derogatory term against slaves, and how it was a mockery of having your own "mammy." This discussion also talked about the speech Toni Tipton-Martin gave and we discussed what her main purpose of the speech was about. African American women are heavily impacted by the stereotype the "Aunt Jemima" brand created, as well as prolonged.
