User talk:Blackwarlords

Uncle Ben’s products carry an image of an elderly African-American man dressed in a bow-tie, perhaps meant to connote a domestic servant, in the Aunt Jemima tradition,[2] or perhaps a Chicago maitre d’hotel, named Frank Brown.[3] According to Mars, Uncle Ben was an African-American rice-grower in Texas known for the quality of his rice. Eventually, entrepreneur Gordon L. Harwell, who had supplied rice to the armed forces in World War II, chose the name Uncle Ben’s for his company to expand his marketing efforts to the general public.[4] Mars has not supplied any further biographical detail about original namesake. In early 2007, Mars rebranded Uncle Ben as the still active CEO, presumably of the former Converted Rice, Inc.[5]

Use of African-Americans as company or product mascots for agricultural and other commodities was a common practice in the U.S. in the 1800s, and continues to the present day, though to a far lesser extent. Blacks commonly were associated with rice when Uncle Ben's was introduced. When white South Carolina planters were unable to make their rice crops thrive, it was “slaves from West Africa’s rice region [who] tutored planters in growing the crop.”[6]

In years past in the American South, whites commonly referred to elderly black men as “uncle”, though they were not blood relations. The practice was considered patronizing and demeaning and largely has been discontinued.