OLD-TIME RACISM

If you ever feel that someone is being too politically correct, take a look at these examples of subtle cultural racism that most people once considered “harmless.”

SAMBO’S RESTAURANT

In the 1960s—at the height of the 20th century’s civil rights movement—millions of Americans regularly ate at one of more than 1,000 locations of this family restaurant chain. Originally, it was named for the owners, Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett, but the restaurants’ theme and decor used images from an old children’s book called The Story of Little Black Sambo. And although the word is traditionally a nasty slur against African Americans dating back to the 1850s, the book was about a boy from India—whose skin isn’t brown, it’s black-black. By the 1960s, customers started to complain that the paintings of a dark-skinned child that decorated the walls of Sambo’s (taken from the book) were offensive, so restaurant execs changed the art so that Sambo would more closely follow Indian stereotypes—they lightened the mascot a few shades and gave him a jeweled turban.

Throughout the 1970s, many cities passed laws banning the use of the name Sambo’s, forcing the company to change the names of multiple locations to the Jolly Tiger and, later, to No Place Like Sam’s. There’s only one Sambo’s left, and it’s in Santa Barbara, California.

DARKIE TOOTHPASTE

Beginning in 1933, the Hawley and Hazel Chemical Company distributed a brand of toothpaste called Darkie. The box features what’s clearly supposed to be a minstrel show performer: a guy in blackface, a top hat…and flashing his shiny white teeth. It was sold with that name around the world for more than 50 years. In 1985 Colgate bought the company that manufactured Darkie and in 1989, responding to public pressure, changed the brand name to “Darlie”—a change small enough so that consumers could still identify the product, but big enough so that the name could no longer be identified as racist.

SIAMESE TWINS

It’s hard to get people to stop calling things what they’ve always been called. For example, the medical syndrome once called leprosy is now properly referred to as Hansen’s disease. Similarly, conjoined twins used to be called Siamese twins. That’s because the first time most people heard about two babies born attached were Chang and Eng Bunker, two conjoined twins who became famous when they toured the United States in the 19th century as a “freak show” attraction. The Bunkers were Chinese, but born in Siam (now known as Thailand), so they were billed as “Siamese twins.” Use of that term today is considered offensive to both people from Thailand as well as conjoined twins.

The 85 richest people on earth own about as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest.

PICKANINNY PEPPERMINTS

Dating back to the 1700s, “Pickaninny” (from the Portuguese pequenino, “little”) was a racial slur used to describe dark-skinned African children, particularly slave children. In 1899 the chocolate company Whitman’s (which is still around today) debuted chocolate-covered Pickaninny Peppermints. The packages featured smiling black kids (one of whom is eating watermelon) and sold well with little backlash… until 1939, when NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall wrote a letter of complaint to Whitman’s. Their response: “We feel that the term connotes a cute Negro child” and that to throw away all of the unused packaging “would be quite a hardship.” But Marshall persisted and, four years later, Whitman’s discontinued the product.

GHETTO BLASTER

Before everyone carried the entirety of recorded music around on their smartphones, one of the few ways to enjoy tunes on the go was with a portable stereo, colloquially referred to as a boombox because they were loud. Those things were mostly speaker, and required about 10 D-cell batteries to work. Introduced in the United States in the late 1970s, within a few years they found a market with urban youth, who could not only listen to them at home, but could carry them around on the subway and down the street, blasting tuneage for all the world to hear. They were a big part of hip-hop and urban African American youth culture, which led to the widespread, pejorative use of the phrase “ghetto blaster” to describe those portable stereos.

CHINESE CHERRY AND INJUN ORANGE

Introduced in 1927, Kool-Aid dominated the powdered drink market by the 1960s, by which time the brand was owned by the conglomerate General Foods. In 1964 Pillsbury tried to break into that market with a Kool-Aid knockoff called Funny Face. Just as Kool-Aid had a kid-friendly hook of a mascot—a sentient, man-sized pitcher of Kool-Aid—Funny Face brought its own flair. Each flavor had a memorable name with an anthropomorphized fruit pictured on the envelope. In addition to “Goofy Grape” and “Freckle-Face Strawberry,” Funny Face was available in “Chinese Cherry” and “Injun Orange.” The cherry character sported stereotypically slanted eyes and buck teeth, while the orange one wore a headdress and “war paint.” Before the year was out, Pillsbury pulled those two flavors and replaced them with “Jolly Olly Orange” and “Choo Choo Cherry.”

Roman emperor Caligula threatened death to anyone who mentioned…