Sweets and chocolates often stir powerful nostalgic emotions within us…
…whether your own sweet history was molded by memories of spending your pocket money on a mix of penny sweets on the way home from school on a Friday afternoon; or your first Halloween where your parents would allow you to go trick-or-treating; or even the long awaited tin of mixed chocolate assortments, bought only at Christmas, and riffling through the selection before your brother nicked all the strawberry ones…there is no doubt that sweets were the currency of our childhood.
We give certain brand names, colours and flavours, personal attachments based on our own sentimentality forged as children. We innocently epitomize our sweet selections with pleasant recollections and cheerfully reminisce with friends about the sweets that we once shared. But as children, we are naive about the world around us. Some of the sweets we chose as children, we might now question as adults, or at least acknowledge, that the packaging and brand names we so fondly remember didn’t always have such innocent origins.
In this mini series of articles (of which I am still researching), I will highlight some of the more questionable, tasteless and down right racist beginnings and designs of some of our favorite confections and companies.
Some candies disappeared for being a terrible product, with the consumers voting with physical tastes rather than moral ones. Some have been long retired due to social protest. And some have re-branded themselves through the decades and have managed to reinvent themselves over several generations so that little to no evidence remains of their original dehumanizing designs.
Arguably some of these sweets are a ‘sign of the times’ in which they were manufactured, often reflecting the abhorrent attitudes to social inequality in communities and countries such as the USA and United Kingdom. Many were produced by companies whose 19th century foundations were rooted in slave-grown sugar imported from the colonies of European empires…
…Regardless of where/when these sweets were produced, or whether these sweets survived or eventually changed to shake off their culturally offensive graphics and slogans, it highlights how ingrained racial prejudices are as to be found in the most seemingly harmless of childhood things…sweets…
These racially insensitive products made by candy makers over the past 150 years have influenced our most innocent infantile choices, shaping popular and consumer culture and in some cases reflect social change.
This is not an expose on what chocolate firms ‘are’ or ‘were’ racist, to scorn whose wealth was born on the back of slave labor, or to criticize individuals for selecting a candy bar that once had an indecent name or image. This is to highlight just how embedded social inequality is within one aspect of ‘normal’ life, how it goes unnoticed in our childhoods, and even how our choices as consumers has, and will, make an positive impact for an equal future for all.
I don’t pretend to be a social historian, or a political writer, but like so many people I am enraged, disgusted, disheartened by the recent, and historic, systematic abuse of power aimed at black and ethnic minority communities worldwide. I know that no one act of mine will make much difference at this stage, or seem like the right one to everyone, but I acknowledge the need for change and to better educate myself, and so I start with a topic I know a little about, and hope to learn, engage and affect change. I will never understand…but I will stand with you.
The British Candy Connoisseur 