Activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democrat Barack Obama as a racial stereotype1 on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap.
Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.”2
Playing off the old image of Aunt Jemima, widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype,3 Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.4 It also displays Obama in Arab-like headdress.
The box was meant as political satire, said Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two writers from Franklin, Tenn., who created the mix. They sold it for $10 a box.
1 Caricature n. A representation, especially pictorial or literary, in which the subject's distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.
2 “In the islands of Oceania, the savages who fill the office of priests often indulge the whim of declaring some specific object to be…taboo, that is to say, sacred, and from that point on no one can touch it under pain of sacrilege and of death.” - Louis Veuillot.
3 The Aunt Jemima character was a housekeeper. A lot of women are housekeepers. My grandmother was a housekeeper. Not the most glamorous job, certainly, but honest work. It’s not “demeaning” to be ordinary. The black demand to be depicted only as exceptional (at least by non-blacks) results in the absurd ubiquity on television and in movies of black doctors, black lawyers, black brain surgeons, black rocket scientists, etc.
4 As can be seen above, his features aren’t that exaggerated.
