Man, you gotta love Percy Miller.
The man who gave us No Limit Records in the mid-late ’90s, kept us entertained with club-bangers and hood-flicks through the early 2000s and has never stopped being a shining example of relentless hustle and God-tier Black entrepreneurship, is now promoting a new food brand to replace recently ditched brands like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben that use caricatures of our likeness but are not Black-owned.
“When you look at Aunt Jemima, and you look at Uncle Ben, we don’t own those products, we never did,” Master P said in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. “We need to understand that we’re not going to be able to put money back in our [Black] community because we don’t own those brands. Our grandparents [have] been having us buy those products because they think it’s people that look like us.”
P owns a variety of businesses such as shoe company MoneYatti, and he isn’t a stranger to selling food products as he’s already seen much success through his Rap Snacks brand.
This week Master P introduced his own rice brand, Uncle P’s rice—which of course is a play on Uncle Ben’s rice—and he hopes to have it distributed by major retailers in the near future.
“If you have Aunt Jemima pancakes or Uncle Ben rice, you know, those are not real people, P told Yahoo. “[There are] other guys out there and girls that have products, bringing it to life.”
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P also spoke about the Black Lives Matter explosion that has resulted in a national conversation about systemic racism (and the thing that has inspired all of these companies to rethink their racist branding) and he advocates making a push for Black ownership part of the fight.
“What we fighting for right now, we got to do it on a financial level, and start fighting for those rights on the financial side and start showing people that we have people that are thinking outside the box, coming up with great ideas,” he said. “I tell people all the time, start your own business. I think this is a great time, what we’re going into right now because not only us protesting, it’s whites, blacks, the unity that you’re seeing out there. I think other races are starting to recognize that we are being victimized as African Americans.”
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