Her name is Reagan Escudé. Video of her speech during Tuesday’s Phoenix rally hosted by Turning Point USA and headlined by President Donald Trump has gone viral, with over 4 million views in just 12 hours.
“Aunt Jemima was canceled,” Reagan says, sounding as if she has a lump in her throat. “And if you didn’t know, Nancy Green, the original, first Aunt Jemima, she was the picture of the American dream. She was a freed slave who went on to be the face of the pancake syrup that we love and we have in our pantries today.”
As Snopes points out, in the book “Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory,” Kimberly Wallace-Sanders writes:
At one point the most reliable means of consolidating the country involved inducing a kind of national amnesia about the history of slavery. Aunt Jemima was created to celebrate state-of-the-art technology through a pancake mix; she did not celebrate the promise of post-Emancipation progress for African Americans. Aunt Jemima’s “freedom” was negated, or revoked, in this role because of the character’s persona as a plantation slave, not a free black woman employed as a domestic. An African American woman, pretending to be a slave, was pivotal to the trademark’s commercial achievement in 1893. Its success revolved around the fantasy of returning a black woman to a sanitized version of slavery. The Aunt Jemima character involved a regression of race relations, and her character helped usher in a prominent resurgence of the “happy slave” mythology of the antebellum South.
The Internet decided to school Reagan with history and facts.
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) June 24, 2020