You’re a baby, then you’re a kid, then you’re a teenager. My kid years were mostly in Seattle, especially toward the end, and there was a window of time when we started to go places without adult supervision back then. This was unusual for us. Our parents always told us to stay indoors when we were alone. If my father got back to find the door unlocked, he would say the same refrain, “Well, you’re all raped and murdered.”
But his ass left town to try and sober up from the drugs and alcohol, leaving our mom alone with us, and slouching on her responsibilities as much as she could get away with. It led to some really bad situations, but at least when we got out and started roving Beacon Hill, none of us did get raped or murdered. I’m not sure how we had some pocket change to work with, but we had some pocket change, and used it to buy candies in the one to twenty-five cent range. If I recall this right, individually wrapped atomic fireballs, jawbreakers, and now&laters would run one to five cents, later a dime. Laffy taffies more like a dime, and a tiny box of candies would be a quarter.
Those boxes were cool. Cute designs that probably remained unchanged between the 1960s and 1980s, a half-handful of candy versus those single bites you’d get for a nickel. There were boston baked beans, cinnamon imperials, jawbreakers (smaller than the individually sold ones), lemonheads, alexander the grape, and cherry clan.
Those last three were all made on the same idea. Sweet and sour, waxy color shell around a chewy white core. Of course, they had artificial lemon grape and cherry flavor and the corresponding colors. Let’s see what those cute little boxes looked like, shall we?
The fight against racism is a long and winding road, and sometimes it seems like the work will never, ever end. The way things unfold is sometimes surprising. As I reflect, it feels really weird this particular flavor of racism lasted so long. A few decades ago, people were calling attention to the trope of Asian girls in cartoons always having a stripe of dyed hair, like, what’s this shit about? Seems like small potatoes compared to things that were happening a decade before that.
Remember the big advertising push from the Dick Tracy movie in 1990? How merch and tie-ins were omnipresent in a nearly unprecedented way? They were aiming for a repeat of what Batman had achieved the year before, but failed big. I don’t know if it was part of that campaign or just some local programmers trying to capitalize on that hype, but a 1960s era Dick Tracy cartoon started rerunning on my local channel 13, KCPQ. I’m not sure what was wrong with my young brain, but I watched that shit.
By that shit, I mean this shit:
That show featured Dick Tracy sitting behind a desk calling henchcops on an anachronistic wrist video phone. His henchcops, who did all the work for him, were racist stereotypes, like Joe Jitsu up there. Maybe because they were good guys and always won, the fact they were racist cartoons didn’t register the same way it did when Bugs Bunny was clowning on a racist stereotype of a black person. Maybe I was just racist? I don’t remember being like that, but so very many people are blind to their own shit.
I was a teenager by then, fourteen!
Again, I’m just thinking about how cool and progressive we all felt about ourselves in 1990. Jim Crow was in a history book, vanquished by saintly MLK. And yet, here this was, on TV, in front of my young eyeballs. It ain’t funny. I wonder if some Rupert Murdoch affiliate is going to bring the show back for a third go now…
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I vaguely remember Lemonheads (mostly because someone vaguely in my orbit (housemate of a friend?) had a huge tub of them in college in the 90s, to the point they couldn’t get rid of them and were offering them to anyone), but that Cherry Clan is pretty bad (I don’t remember those).
About the same time frame, something came up about racist sportsball team mascots. I was not the most aware person, but even I could see the Cleveland, OH baseball team mascot was bad, and did not understand how people could defend it, let alone get mad at those criticizing it.
Remember the Calgon(?) “Ancient Chinese Secret” tv ads?
Now that made me think would racist sweets Germany’s shops had on sale in the 80s, when I was a kid and teenager.
Can’t remember much, but I suppose it’s part or my white privilege when shit like that doesn’t register.
There was the “Sarotti Mohr” (moor) used to advertise chocolate. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarotti#/media/Datei:Sarotti-Mohr.jpg According to Wikipedia that one was finally changed into the golden skinned Sarotti Magician about 20 years ago.
And then there is the still ongoing discussion about the name for “Chocolate-coated marshmallow treats” (Wikipedia says that’s the English name…) which traditionally were sold as Moore’s Heads (also unofficially called Ne…-kiss). Most producers changed that name to something like Choko-Kiss but some smaller manufacturers still don’t see the problem. Really should boycott them, but I’ve never seen these brands anywhere around here and I can’t stand that particular sugary crap anyway.
A quick web search only brought a few more examples for products that I have never heard of anyway. I was quite interested to find out that “Uncle Ben’s Rice” I definitely remember is now sold as “Ben’s Original” without a picture of a black slave on the package.
As to the cartoon, well yeah, the comics and cartoons on TV used ugly racist caricatures left and right back then. Most was older stuff, still printed and repeated, but the current productions also had enough of it. Don’t know at what age that registered for me. It was just part of the “language”, it was just the way these characters were always drawn, it was the way they were easily recognisable as who they were. A poison that contaminates everything so that you get used to the taste and do not notice how it dissolves your brain. I realise more of that shit now than when I was a teenager, but I got no illusions that there is still more the eyes in my pale face do not see. (Actually looking slightly red today, yesterday was a bit sunnier than predicted…)
I remember the Dick Tracy cartoons from my youth in the early 1970s. Surprised that they were reshown in the 1990s.
Speaking of candies … did you have “ni**er babies”?
They were small licorice things, in the shape of a vaguely humanoid … shape.
When buying cheap candy, they were (I think) 5 for a penny.
I am 70 years old.
A thing I remember about Dick Tracy, most of the villains were deformed.
Congenital, accidental, whatever …
loch – i feel like i saw that calgon shit once somewhere, but do not fully remember it.
mordred – i’ve heard a lot about the prevalence of “blackamoor” imagery in european culture. my first exposure to it was a dip into the renn faire nerdry of heraldry.
andrew – big time. this was when star trek: the next generation was new, improving on a lot of the social issues of the original series. and on the same day, what could children see?
chigau – jeezis fucken xrist… good point on the deformed characters. i heard the bbc had a newish policy regarding characters with facial scars and skin conditions?
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Lemonheads were great!
The only one of those I’ve heard of is Lemon Heads, and I never saw any of those in person that I can recall. But I’m not seeing what this is supposed to be a racist stereotype of? It doesn’t look like any sort of caricature I’m familiar with. It’s just a lemon with a really weird face.