I can accept that someone may have never heard of the racial connotations of watermelons and blacks; thankfully, this is something on its way out and if you’re under, say, 40, I’d venture it’s as likely as not that you’ve never heard it.
But Stoid puts her finger on the point quite well – if you’ve never heard of it, the entire e-mail becomes a bizarre non-sequiter. Why would there be a field of watermelons on the White House lawn? What makes that likely, or funny?
I guess it’s some measure of overall progress that assholes like this guy recognize that it’s more acceptable to be thought an idiot and a liar than it is to be thought a racist.
Baby steps, folks.
I had never heard of Los Alamitos, but i didn’t exactly collapse with shock when i learned it was in Orange County.
I agree with Stoid and Bricker (:eek:). I figured it was worth the hike down here to the pit to post my agreement in a demonstration of reaching across the hamster cage aisle.
I was also born in Los Alamitos, but my family relocated to the opposite end of the state when I was 3.
There is definitely racism all over California, and a default level of what may be called circumstantial segregation, especially in rural areas. I went to high school in Humboldt County with only one black student in attendance during any of my 4 years, and the only reason she was there was because her family lived in the Navy housing nearby. Yes, it was and is a very small town with a very small school, but I can also count on only 1 or 2 hands the amount of times we played against any teams with non-caucasian athletes (which is the only insight I had into attendance at other schools, I’m not trying to make any sweeping generalizations about race and atheletics). We did regularly play a largely Native American school, and I’m not trying to somehow exclude them as somehow non-non-caucasian. They are the exception that proves the rule as there was a lot of revolting behavior by my schoolmates and the adults at games when we would play the school from the Hoopa/Hupa Reservation.
I think a lot of people that I grew up knowing liked to think of themselves as “not being at all racist” because they had no interaction with any folks that might challenge that belief. They never had to really confront any possibility of racism within themselves. After college I lived in Atlanta for nearly 10 years, and coming back to the rural areas of California where I spent most of my early life it is very obvious to me that there is a lot of out-of-sight-out-of-mind denial back home. Since they’ve never been inclined to roll down the window and yell hate while driving, they feel they are somehow bastions of color-blind love. But put the same person in an environment where there are actually black or asian people living and driving among them, and they’ll be slinging epithets left and right.
Which brings me to California’s problems with classism/racism and migrant farm workers from Mexico. There were plenty of Mexican families living nearby when I was in high school who worked in the Dairy industry. I don’t know where their kids went to school, maybe at home or one of the larger towns nearby, but they certainly didn’t come to our school. At the same time, there was long-established Portuguese population in our town, going back to when it was first founded. So the descendants of those pioneering dairy families enjoyed a level of acceptance that simply did not translate to more recent arrivals from elsewhere.
This is so reminiscent of the Obama Bucks that Don’t Call Me Shirley posted about some months back.
This kind of thing happens with local Republicans or Republican groups with frightening regularity, and every time the denials come that “it’s not racist. It’s only racist if you think it’s racist. I’m not a racist, and I don’t think it’s racist.”
Maybe thing will change a bit with Michael Steele at the head of the RNC. I don’t have any real hope for him to be a moderating influence on most of the right wing agenda, but perhaps he can get the party to come down harder on Republicans who hurt the whole party distributing shit like this.
I read that the California GOP somehow disciplined 6 elected reps for voying for the state buget in the past week or so. Maybe they can get off their asses and do something next time one of their own practices what approaches hate speech.
I dunno about that. I just conducted an impromptu survey of several people 19-25, and they had all heard of it. Born in different places in Virginia, in case that makes any difference.
Yep, seeing that “excuse” today made me wonder WTF? Anyone with half a brain would see that excuse as being full of shit. It’s profoundly sad when someone thinks that a denial, “Huh, I didn’t know…” plays better than just owning up to outdated humor and apologizing for it outright. Really insulting, on many levels.
I’ve Dave Chappelle did it, it would be heralded as genius.
…but of course, if Dave Chappelle did it, it would be as a meta-parody OF racist stereotypes, rather than humor based off of simply replaying them with a “wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more squire!” attitude.
I was curious myself about why it became a racial insult ( “You eat watermelons !” just strikes me as such a sad excuse for an insult ), and found this old thread, and this one too. Apparently the prevailing theory is that the connotation of watermelon and fried chicken as “Southern poor people food” was a major part of it.
