Actually, it reminds me of an article (I want to say it was in Reader’s Digest, but I can’t swear to that) I read years ago when the description “Politically Correct” first started cropping up all over the damn place. It had a list of words/phrases to avoid if you wanted to be PC..including any reference to ‘fried chicken’ because the writers of the article claimed those words were defamatory to black people. :smack: Is that why Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC? Because it was un-PC?
Paraphrased:
A chicken has to walk past me wearing a disguise -D.L. Hughley
I was always under the impression that they changed their name to KFC to de-emphasize that much of their food was deep fried, and therefore unhealthy.
Now, I’m a 51 year old white guy from New York. Am I aware that there are racial connotations to watermelon? Yes, but just barely. And I didn’t learn about that directly- rather, I learned about it through left-wing satirists!
That is, while I’ve known many genuine racists, many people who threw around the "N-word casually (I did grow up in Archie Bunker’s neighborhood, after all), I never heard any actual racists making watermelon jokes. That was a liberal’s shorthand- if a character said something about watermelon, you knew instantly he was a stupid racist… even if REAL-LIFE stupid racists had long since moved on to different stereotypes).
On the contrary, it was liberal comedians, liberal cartoonists and TV shows with liberal writers who were always making watermelon jokes and placing them in the mouths of stuid bigots. If Mad magazine wanted to demonstrate that a character in a cartton was racist, they’d show him making a watermelon or fried chicken joke. On All in the Family, when Norman Lear wanted to make Archie Bunker look like a Neanderthal, he’d have Archie make a watermelon crack to Lionel Jefferson.
But white genuine racism certainly hasn’t disappeared, most white people my age and younger have no direct exerience with THOSE particular stereotypes. It’s actually quite EASY for me to believe that a 35 year old white woman in a marketing department would have no idea there’s anything racist about watermelon. Oh, she might well be aware of all kinds of stereotypes to be avoided, but the fact is, an ordinary white kid in a modern American suburb has probably NEVER been exposed to old-fashioned Amos & Andy-esque stereotypes.
I always find the “black people like watermelon” stereotype to be funny. I grew up in a small town of mostly white people and the next small town over of mostly white people had a watermelon festival every year. We would go and they’d have ponies for the kids to ride and a bbq cook-off and people would bring their watermelon based recipes, one year someone brought watermelon ice cream to sell, and other family type stuff to do. One year they even had a helicopter and my brother, grandpa and I went on a ride.
So I grew up associating watermelon with white people. It wasn’t until we moved out here to California when I was 12 that I learned of the black people and watermelon thing.
I’m hoping we’re thinking the same thing. We have to be thinking the same thing, because it took me a while to associate anything with this post.
read it in grade 10 english class, i was so edgy
LOL!!!