Bigotry is still a huge part of the world today, as seen by mass incarceration, today’s hate crimes, and the fact that Coronavirus has sparked a wave of anti-Asian racism. These days, though, companies at least try to avoid branding themselves as racist through the use of explicit stereotypes, particularly when it comes to mascots … unless, of course, you’re talking about the U.S. sports industry, which just won’t stop exploiting Native American culture. Because, face it, while you’d never see a baseball team in the 21st century that named itself after a racial slur for black or Jewish people, the MLB still has the Cleveland Indians. And from 1948 to 2019, the Indians advertised themselves using a red-skinned caricature of an indigenous man, dubbed Chief Wahoo. Chief Wahoo had drawn decades of protests from Native American groups, according to The New York Times, but these arguments went ignored until pressure from the commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, finally sunk in. 

The team itself, though, continues using this problematic name. So does the NFL’s Washington Redskins, as explained by The Washington Post, who have their own offensive logo, despite years of campaigns pointing out how this stereotyping does real harm to real people of indigenous descent. The NFL has shown little sensitivity to the matter, if not outright hostility, as exhibited by their 2017 decision to have the Washington Redskins host a Thanksgiving game, according to The Nation.

Many problematic mascots have, in the past century, gone the way of the dodo. Others persist to this day. Aunt Jemima, the pancake and syrup brand owned by Quaker Oats, belongs to the latter category.

As explained by The Atlantic, the symbolism behind the Aunt Jemima brand and mascot is directly connected to racist sentiments and linked to a problematic sense of nostalgia for segregation, Jim Crow, and so on, usually among those who didn’t have to suffer the hardships of these times. Aunt Jemima’s name first arose from a minstrel song, and as Riché Richardson explained for The New York Times, Aunt Jemima herself is still portrayed as a “mammy,” which is a plantation-era stereotype of a de-sexualized, overweight, maternal black woman, who cheerfully cares for the plantation owner’s children instead of rebelling against the bonds of slavery. Despite these problems, and the many arguments that persist, Quaker continues to use Aunt Jemima in the 21st century, though the company has tried to alter the imagery associated with her.

Budweiser likes to proclaim itself the “king of beers,” but slipping sales in the last few years say otherwise. Aside from the eternal debate regarding Budweiser’s watery taste, everyone can agree that they’ve put out some highly memorable ad campaigns over the years. Too memorable, one could say, given that their mascots keep becoming popular with underage drinkers. 

The first notable occasion wherein this happened was during the 1987 Super Bowl, according to Business Insider, with the introduction of their new doggie mascot Spuds MacKenzie, the partying Bull Terrier. Spuds soon appeared everywhere, spiking Bud Light’s sales up 20 percent. Soon enough, Spuds got the attention of Senator Strom Thurmond, who raised arguments that promotional materials like a Spuds MacKenzie doll seemed an awful lot like Budweiser was marketing to kids. Mothers Against Drunk Driving followed suit. So did schools, which started banning Spuds merchandise … though really, who sends their first grader to school in a beer T-shirt? Anyway, by 1989, Spuds retired, though his ethereal ghost would later appear in a 2019 commercial.

This same cycle repeated in the ’90s, SF Gate says, with the Budweiser frogs. You remember those guys, the ones that ribbited “Bud” and “Weis” and “Er,” yeah? So does every other ’90s kid, and a 1996 study found that children recognized the Budweiser frogs just as much as Bugs Bunny and Smokey the Bear. Budweiser disputed this, but as Business Insider points out, they still phased out the frogs.

If you’re familiar with the racial slur “Sambo,” sometimes used to refer to black men and/or men of mixed ancestry, you might be shocked (or not) to learn that in the recent past, people in the United States flocked to a restaurant named Sambo’s, which used a mascot — a cartoon image of a young boy, named Little Black Sambo, a la the infamous Helen Bannerman book — that played up the name’s associations. According to The Daily Beast, Sambo’s could be found in 47 states, at 1,117 locations, and this unnamed mascot was at every one of them.

Weirdly enough, the concept behind the name wasn’t originally connected to the racist epithet. First opened by Sam Battistone Sr. and Newell Bohnett in Santa Barbara, California, in 1947 as a place for cheap pancakes and cheaper coffee, Sambo’s was a portmanteau of the founders’ names: “Sam” from Battistone and “Bo” from Bohnett. Once established, though, Sambo’s swiftly adopted the offensive connotations, and the restaurant’s walls were decorated with painted wall murals of their mascot going on adventures. During the Civil Rights Movement, marginalized communities began to speak up against the restaurant’s imagery, and by the ’70s, Sambo’s expansion attempts wound up in lawsuits from states like Connecticut and Michigan, garnering the involvement of the Human Rights Commission and the NAACP. Eventually, the controversy grew so hot that Sambo’s started downplaying their past, trying out different names, and finally, filed for bankruptcy in 1982.

You don’t need to have spent any time in Mexico to figure out that Taco Bell is about as far removed from actual Mexican cuisine as Pizza Hut is from Italian. Despite this, the company has regularly appropriated Mexican imagery or used weird Spanglish slogans to market itself. One advertising campaign that particularly set people off, though, was also Taco Bell’s most successful — the so-called Taco Bell Chihuahua, a Mexican-accented pup who would often proclaim, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” The League of United Latin American Citizens took issue with the fast food canine, according to the Los Angeles Times, by pointing out that the imagery exacerbated existing racial stereotypes. The argument, in the words of LULAC president Gabriel Cazares, was that, “Mexican Americans are treated like dogs, they have to work like dogs, and now they’re being portrayed as dogs.”

In the end, oddly, it wasn’t racial controversy that cost Taco Bell their dog but a breach of contract. In 2009, The Seattle Times reported that a decade-long rights dispute between the fast food company and the mascot’s creators, Thomas Rinks and Joseph Shields, had ended with Taco Bell being ordered to award $42 million in damages to the two men.

The dog herself, Gidget, died that same year, at the age of 15. According to CNN, she also appeared in films like Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Legally Blonde.