Except when you’re doing it about Brits and their food. That shit’s comedy gold.
Goulash, I should have been more specific with the quality of the meat. 
Is that a habanero in your pocket…?
mmm
Here it is. It’s like someone telling me as an Indian that I “must eat a lot of curry” or “I’m surprised you eat American food at home! I figured you ate curry all the time” both of which I have heard.
I’m American and it’s just a way to make me other. And so can you imagine what black people must feel, being even more a part of this country’s heritage and still made to feel “other”?
Monty I never feel that there just because people are white they can’t handle spicy food. Another name for vindaloo we use is “spicy stuff so hot only white people will eat it”. 
Tiger Woods won the Masters, the most prestigious tournament in golf. He had won several Amateur championships as well. By tradition, the previous winner of the Masters, Fuzzy Zoeller, got to choose the menu for the award banquet. Tiger’s mother was from Thailand, he was raised in suburban Southern California, and he attended Stanford. What did Fuzzy choose to serve? Fried chicken. The fact that Tiger’s father was black trumped everything else about him. All Fuzzy could see was the color of Tiger’s skin. What did Tiger serve the next year when he hosted? Cheeseburgers and milkshakes: his actual favorites.
Nitpick.
Zoeller didn’t choose the menu nor had he won the Masters the year before.
He was asked about Tiger Woods and he said, “He’s doing quite well, pretty impressive. That little boy is driving well and he’s putting well. He’s doing everything it takes to win. So, you know what you guys do when he gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year. Got it. Or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve.”
In short, Zoeller’s behavior was even more offensive than you suggest.
Also, in addition to his comments about Woods eating fried chicken and collard greens he referred to Woods as a “boy” which has all sorts of historical connotations.
Ugh, that *is *worse than I mis-remembered.
You just answered your own question. The fried-chicken-and-watermelon stereotype is offensive because it’s meant to be offensive, in the same way that a nonsensical word like “kike” is offensive. It was part of an entire culture that had an elaborate and powerful institutional mechanism for demeaning black people. Picking out one thing in isolation and saying “but it’s harmless!” is meaningless. It’s also exactly what the people using these cultural stereotypes as weapons would say. Objectively speaking, what’s wrong with the word “nigger”? Nothing. It’s just a variation of “negro,” a latinate word for the color “black.” What’s wrong with that? The problem is that in order to make this argument, you have to ignore the entire history of institutionalized and cultural racism in this society. Fried chicken and watermelon is part of it, and you’ll never “get” what’s going on if you ignore the context.
And fried chicken and watermelon is part of the same dynamic in which people make fun of African-American names and clothing fashions.
“That’s such a pretty name! Does it mean something? I hope you will forgive me if I don’t try to pronounce it; it don’t want to get it wrong! Where are you from?” == You don’t belong here.
Don’t you think that it has a little bit to do with the ability for Democrats to accuse their political enemies of bad things?
Just a little… c’mon???
Seriously? Man. I was having curry the other day, and I went ‘hey, this is actually spicy this time, what did you put in it’, and my mother answered ‘habaneros fresh from the farm.’ I didn’t think they were actually that spicy.
Huh. Probably explains why I don’t think picante sauce is all that interesting either.
Anyhow, something y’all are neglecting is that both chickens and watermelon have a somewhat older meaning than just ‘soul food’. As the JBs said, “Why do we like soul food? Cause it tastes soooo goood. Pass the peas.” But chicken and watermelon, specifically, weren’t just the sort of thing you had every day as a sharecropper. Nope. They were special treats. Cause you could sneak out like a fox, grab some of each, and run like hell.
They’re specifically aligned with being stolen food. Like apples from a neighbor’s tree for a northeasterner. That’s a big part of the insulting part.
http://marksrichardson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/racist-pickaninny.jpg
http://www2.metrotimes.com/sb/39154/film1Bamboozled.gif
That’s why it’s offensive.
Servants and indentured workers in colonial New England were forced to eat lobster, after a near insurrection laws were enacted in Massachusetts limiting the frequency an employer could serve it to them.
Ribs were considered junk meat and fit only for slaves.
Monstro, I enjoy your posts about black culture/background/stereotypes/etc because it gives me an adult insight I don’t generally get. Not in this depth. So believe me when I say I’m struggling with understanding what you’re saying. I don’t want to discredit your experiences or anyone’s feelings, but I am having a hard time trying to figure out why the black/fried chicken/watermelon stereotype is still a bad thing. I think the OP was saying there seems to be a correlation between blacks and loving fried chicken, not “Black people would do ANYTHING for fried chicken.”
I don’t know why, but my students are insanely curious about racial stereotypes and race relations. Maybe their age and environment just makes them more open to talking about it, I donno. Because of my name and my son’s name, they’ve picked up on “Miss CP is Jewish”. I have to be really careful about what I say because they have a lot of questions, even this late into the semester. I don’t want to get written up for ‘spreading religion’ when I’m an athiest and who knows what. (My boss actually thought a local rabbi from a teen interventions program was ‘Arab’.) And with Christmas coming up, it’s “So how come Jews don’t believe in Jesus/have Christmas?” head/smack. But I’m OK with dispelling some of their preconceived notions about Jews. And white people.
Sometimes my boss (black), the kids (black and Latino) and myself (white, but only to some of them, since they think Jewish = not white) will get into discussions about this - food, hair, names, clothes, music, whatever. I think it’s healthy, but we break the unspoken rule that says Thou Shalt Not Talk About Race in the classroom.
Food is a pretty personal thing, right? It’s how we love each other and bond with each other. It comes up a lot. This is what I’ve heard in the last couple of weeks alone: Oatmeal is eaten with butter (yuck!), only white people eat cottage cheese, only white people buy fancy cheese, Latinos love beans, only Latinos know how to make a proper empanada, and black people love fried chicken everywhere and only their moms and grandmas know how to cook it. A loose quote:* It don’t matter where you’re at. Black people love fried chicken. It’s so damned good. Popeye’s, mama’s house, whatever.*
I personally don’t like fried chicken or watermelon, so I don’t know how to respond to the charge that ‘everyone’ loves fried chicken. I know not all blacks love fried chicken (duh), but I have somehow been ingraned with the idea that blacks will have fried chicken as a staple more often than whites do. It’s just what I see/hear, I guess. I know that it used to be a racial insult, but is it really now?
Look at this newscast when Popeye’s ran out of chicken. That -cringe- perpetuates the stereotype, but I don’t know if that was intentional or not.
(1) Racial stereotyping of American blacks ran deeper and stronger and was more pervasive than any other kind of stereotyping in the history of this country and possibly any other country ever. Blacks were the subject of a centuries-long, pervasive, thorough, embedded campaign on political, professional, social, commercial, educational, cultural, literary, and every other level of society to demean them, restrict their options, and to prevent them from enjoying many of the freedoms of living in our world that other people enjoyed.
(2) Perhaps very relevant to what you’re asking … It’s not history. It’s the present. It’s not as bad as it was a few decades ago, it’s not as pervasive, and it’s not as popularly accepted. Racial stereotyping of blacks has gotten a bad name, at least in open society. But that doesn’t mean it’s over, not by a long shot. In fact, trying to pretend that it’s over and we should all act like everything is equal again helps to perpetuate it by giving cover to those who still use stereotyping covertly, in code-word fashion, rather than overtly. What has happened is that we have gone from “racism is bad” to “racists are bad” to “it’s bad to accuse someone of racism,” while completely skipping over the reality that racism still exists and it still harms people.
So, yes, stereotyping blacks as loving fried chicken and watermelon is still culturally powerful. The important thing to remember is that it has absolutely nothing to do with individual people’s eating preferences. So ruminating on the fact that “some white people like fried chicken and watermelon” and “some black people don’t like fried chicken and watermelon” is completely missing the point. It’s not actually about people eating or what people like to eat. It’s about using coded words to send a message to the public, some members of which understand the coded meaning of what’s being said about black people, and it has nothing to do with lunch.
Okay. I see what you are saying. I am a) trying to figure out how it is still offensive (remember, most of the American world isn’t as well versed in history and such like the rest of Dopers) and b) why is it terrible if blacks have acknowledged, if not outright owned it?
I mean, I’m not about to call someone the n-word (and I don’t allow it in my class, even when it’s ‘friendly fire’) so I can’t make that comparison, but. BUT I can’t help but to wonder why is it a big deal if black people themselves say so? How is it in any way dishonest, unfair, or degrading?
Denver Public Schools had a fried chicken dinner in honor of MLK day and that went over very terribly, except, to be fair, it was his favorite meal.
UC Irvine made the same mistake.
No one offered up Kool-Aid as a side. 
RE:The Slate article:
I’m not sure whether there’s anything more I can add to my paragraph (2) in Post No. 54 above, which was intended to respond to this exact question. I’m not sure whether I’ve failed to address the question or if I haven’t explained it well.
What have they acknowledged? They’ve acknowledged that some of them like fried chicken. Perhaps they’ve acknowledged that most of them like fried chicken. Perhaps they’ve even acknowledged that the vast majority of them like fried chicken. That doesn’t change anything that I said in the last paragraph of Post No. 54 above.
This shouldn’t be any surprise to a teacher — words have different meanings depending on their context. When a black person uses the word “nigger” with another black person, there is a shared understanding and context of what that word means. When it is used by a white person, that context is different and the understanding of the coded meaning kicks in.
In the same way, when a group of black people gather and eat fried chicken because someone in that group likes fried chicken, they understand the context and each other’s motives and intentions. When someone from outside makes a comment about black people and fried chicken, a different context — assumptions, intentions, motives — is in play.
CitizenPained, your students are young, so of course “black people eat fried chicken!” is no big deal to them. I imagine they would look at you with a blank face if you mentioned minstrel shows or asked them if they knew what a “Sambo” is.
And to be honest, it’s not really that big of a deal to me. Or most black people I know, though I do know some who will not eat fried chicken in public, and sadly I’m starting to see their plight. In the right context it’s perfectly fine to point out the observation (even though I have never observed black people liking fried chicken more than anyone else, but hey, that’s just me) and it’s fine to mock the stereotype all together. Like I’ve done plenty of times on this board or in real life. Like most black comedians do all the time. Self-deprecating humor is one thing black Americans–like Jewish Americans–do quite well. That’s why the whole “Black people will riot!” thing bugs the absolute hell out of me. Black people invented laughing in the face of offensiveness. Hell, sometimes we laugh when we SHOULD be rioting.
But as you get older and you learn more about history and how black people’s humanity has tried to be stripped away from them in more ways than one, then stereotypes–even harmless ones–start to be not quite so funny any more. A guy once joked around with me about black people and their love of grape soda. I laughed, being the good-natured person I am. But eventually he exposed far more sinister beliefs and I couldn’t laugh with him anymore. So I’ve learned to be weary of anyone who believes in stereotypes too much. Even if those stereotypes seem relatively harmless.
I was relating a story about an annoying woman to a white person once. I don’t know how she guessed that the person I was kvetching about was black, but she did. She said, “You should tell her, ‘Well, at least I don’t look like Aunt Jemima.’” I laughed because it was so unexpected. Later it bothered me. Did this person not know where “Aunt Jemima” comes from? It’s not a harmless stereotype. It’s a racist caricature, and for her to instantly “go there” made me question her righteousness (especially since she claims to always forget that I am black). But I did not make a big deal about it. As I said before, a person can be annoyed by something and not be angry or “outraged”. But it seems like people don’t even want black people to be annoyed. Well, mere annoyance is not going away anytime soon. We aren’t that “post-racial”, whatever the hell that means.
I’m curious why this topic keeps coming back. We just talked about it a couple of months ago. The same exact topic. I don’t watch news as much as I probably should, but is there something happening in current events that would make this a topical discussion? Some black people getting irate about fried chicken jokes? It’s not even Black History Month, so it’s not like there are any school cafeterias catching flack for serving soul food in celebration. So while “black people love them some fried chicken” doesn’t bug me in isolation, the constant talking about it does. It seems like yet another way of “othering” black people that does not to happen to other racial/ethnic groups.
Sure. Please offend me with lox and bagels with shmeer (or is it shmear?).
Ironically, chicken was historically not cheap; it was a treat reserved for special occasions. There are recipes for “country chicken” where you make veal taste like chicken. Modern methods of production have dramatically lowered the price.
Okay, monstro. I will try to change my thinking - I think. I mean, I’m not sure how to. It’s an association I make (kind of like beans and Mexicans and lox and Jews). I don’t say those things aloud and you’d never catch me telling my son that ‘black people love chicken!’
There are things in Jewish culture that used to be derrogatory that we now just ‘own’. I assumed blacks were the same way with chicken. I sincerely thought that, especially when that Slate article said that those surveyed thought that fried chicken was associated with black culture.
But if you tell me that xyz is offensive, I’ll try to rethink my words/actions. I don’t want to tell someone with a ‘different background’ that their opinions or feelings about something like that isn’t valid. I do appreciate the responses.
I have been doing all of these mini-units on food. I wonder if there’s a lesson in here to do with my students and if so, the proper way to go about it.
I remember for ‘word of the day’ a kid had used AAVE on the board for his ‘use it in a sentence’ example. About an hour later, he said, “Miss, can I have a marker to change that? That makes me look ignorant.” I was kind of sad at his remark, but I handed him a Dry Erase. I wonder if they make the same connections with other ‘black’ things. Last week they were joking about black names…“Sha nay nay ne qua!” (“If you pull the lever on the slot machine, a bunch of sounds come together and you gotta new name!”) Where they live, race can be everything, so I’m glad they feel comfortable enough to talk about it. I can’t always see things through their eyes, so I’m glad to have the Dope for adult opinions.
It does hurt, though, when someone wants to erase his language from the board so he doesn’t ‘look ignorant’.