I’m a white 58 year old woman from the south side of Chicago and I have never heard of Kool-Aid being a black stereotype drink. I still drink Hawaiian Punch…
White guy here who grew up drinking a lot of Kool Aid. I don’t recall ever hearing it was a black thing. My only association with blacks and Kool Aid is the old “Yo Mama” joke:
“Yo mama so fat, when she wears her red dress all the neighbor kids yell Hey Kool Aid!”
I know of it as a stereotype now, but it’s not one I knew growing up (Chicago, SW side). The one I was familiar with was the orange soda and grape soda one (and, from my struggling memory, it seems that orange soda was more the stereotype that I remember than the grape one.) Of course, though, we all kind of liked orange soda. It’s like the joke: “You know who likes fried chicken?” “Black people.” “You know who else likes fried chicken?” “Everybody.”
This is all amazing to me. I grew up in western NY, family from Philadelphia, all Italian by heritage or immigrant. My parents pro-civil rights, dad went to a big march in Philly as a young man; grandparents…not so much. I wouldn’t say I got much black culture or history at home though.
As a kid, there was always grape and orange soda around–probably more at my grandparents’, because I hated both so my folks wouldn’t have bought it much. Kool-Aid was available at home though. And watermelon was a special summer treat–I remember loving it, sweet and juicy, spitting the seeds out and such. My grandparents would buy it in Philadelphia from what they called “hucksters”–guys who drove a truck into the city to sell fresh produce.
I had no idea watermelon was a “black” thing until college, when the mother of a friend (also Italian heritage FWIW) asked what we had for dessert on the 4th of July, and when I said watermelon, she made some sneering racist reply. Nor did I know fried chicken was “black” until I ran into the stereotype from people I met at university.
Funny old world. By which I mean, depressing.
The stereotype is not "white people dont drink Kool Aid, so I don’t know why this confuses you.
In any case, the point of racial stereotypes of not that they are intended to be 100 percent true.
Now?! For centuries black Americans lived in a society in which everything was racial. It’s just in the past few decades that we have begun chipping away at this by pointing out crap like this, and your reaction is that everything is racial now?