A few years back a saw a movie where a African American woman was highly offended that someone was serving watermelons at a barbecue. It has bothered me ever since. I live in Sweden and I really don’t have anyone to ask about these sort of things so please help. What is up with that?
An American negative stereotype of blacks is that all they eat are fried chicken, watermelon, and chit’lins (chicken innards, not sure how they are prepared). I’m not quite sure how this is offensive - I’m sure someone here will know the symbolism - but it definitely is.
As for the movie, if the black woman was offended by the mere presence of watermelon, she was nuts. If the host said, “look we bought some watermelon just for you!”, then the women’s offense was justified.
V.
Just a note - chitlins (or chitterlings) are pig innards, not chicken. Specifically intestines. This site will tell you how to prepare them:
These foods are a racial stereotype because they were originally cheap / easily grown food which might be fed to slaves or produced by them with minimal resources for their own use. Chitlins seem to be more of an ethnic marker than a stereotype like fried chicken and watermelon. Haven’t had them, but I would not be adverse to trying them.
This is definitely an Americanism. Not something that is easily described if you haven’t grown up with it.
The sterotype is that American blacks really love watermelon. It’s not that there’s any specific symbolism to it, but any time you act on a stereotype it brings up certain feelings.
The mere presence of watermelon around blacks should not be offensive. However, if you take special pains to offer watermelon to a black person, you are, at best, admitting that you’re basing your expectations of their taste in food on their race. It says that you place the sterotype over individual differences. While this sterotype may seem benign, there are many other ones that aren’t.
Furthermore, there are many mean-spirited types that, over the years, have used this “benign” sterotype in a taunting way. They offer watermelon to a black person much the same way that they might tease a dog by holding out a bone. They communicate the attitude that blacks are somehow closer to animals than humans, in that they are controlled by this racial “instict” to love watermelon.
Doesn’t take too much of this to get pretty sensitive to a food that otherwise seems to offer no offense.
I, for one, have never understood how “Southern” foods became “Black” foods.
The Blacks I know do eat fried chicken, watermelon, kawn bread, ham hocks, black-eyed peas, collard greens, etc.
But so do po’ white folks, so I don’t see how they came to be associated mainly with Blacks.
Chitlins–well, that’s a little different. That’s not something that is for everyone. They do have a very strong taste (much as liver has a very strong taste, although they don’t taste at all the same). I haven’t known many people, Black or Crack(er, that is), who particularly cared for them.
But here’s one. 
BTW, I would invite people to take a look at “Counting to the Beach,” a children’s book by Faith Ringgold, who I believe is Black.
What are the first two items they take to the beach: watermelon and fried chicken.
Mjollnir: Yeah, this has always bugged me, as well.
As yabob pointed out, a lot of food items became pegged as “soul food” because they were the things that the masters passed on to the slaves…poor blacks ate necks and backs of chicken, for example, and learned how to make the best use of them, because Scarlett and the Colonel were eating the chicken breasts up at the big house.
But anyone who’s spent time in the South, moving among the social classes, knows that poor whites eat necks and backs (and feet) too. So does anyone who’s read a good U.S. food history, or even Ernest Mickler’s WHITE TRASH COOKING.
My WAG is that, when blacks moved up North to take factory jobs in the mid-20th century, they brought their foodways with them. (Natuarally. As did the poor whites who came up at the same time.) But when the Black Pride movement took off in the 1960s, southern cheapo cooking was promoted as “soul food,” something to be proud of and have written up by the PR men. Meanwhile, the poor whites were still just eating it.
Eventually, it became a shorthand…When I talk about southern cooking with someone who’s not knowledgable about food, I sometimes call it “soul food.” It’s easily recognizable, and even food tyros know you mean fried chicken, ribs, cornbread, stewed greens, etc.
It stirs up bad, bad feelings.
There were many stereotypes attributed to blacks in America. The types evolved over the centuries to fit the circumstances of the times.
At first there was the sub-human savage. This worked well while first enslaving a race,
Then there was the indolent, shiftless idiot. Perfect excuse for keeping a race enslaved and for any rough treatment given them.
When abolitionist sentiment was growing in this country a new stereotype was born. The happy, tap dancing, fried chicken and watermelon eating slave. This black person ate well and was so happy in his circumstances he danced and told jokes all the time.
There have been others. After the happy slave there was the noble savage (this was from a segment of society that thought they were on the black folks side).
The sexual predator, the violent race, the can’t-help-themselves-they’re-stupid-genetically stereotypes came after and are still with us.
They all still hurt but just because a black person eats watermelon in a movie doesn’t mean the movie was portraying any stereotypes. That would be the worst of all of stereotyping’s sins: denying black people the right to eat fried chicken and watermelon!
FWIW
Chris Rock (a black comedian on HBO) did a skit last year that went “how to be a modern sucessful black person and still eat your watermelon.” You were supposed to dress it up like a baby, stuff it in your bra, etc… very funny stuff.
When I was at camp one year in WASP country, our couselor, Carl, was black. He was a great guy, and his ethnicity was never an issue, even though most of us kids had probably never met a black person.
The last night of camp, us kids raided the kitchen during the dance and stashed the goodies in our attic crawlspace of our cabin. We went back to the dance, then campfire. Finally, we got back to the cabin to enjoy our loot. I’m on a bunk bed pulling stuff down: 1/2-melted ice cream, cake, pie. Then as Carl comes in (we figured he’d be with his wife at her cabin [she was white, another curveball to our WASP experiences]), I pull down a watermelon. Carl reviews the scene, sees me with the watermelon, and says, “I thought that was my job to get that!”
Mjollnir:
I’ve been told and have read that a lot of Southern dishes were adaptations of African ones, namely the stewed vegetables, yams (I think) and the like. Can anyone back this up or counter it?
Anecdotally related to the OP:
A few years back, the US Department of Agriculture made June 19th National Watermelon Day. This wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that June 19th is celebrated as Juneteenth in Texas and commemorates June 19th, 1965, the day that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston with the news of the Emancipation Proclamation. The USDA swore that it was purely a coincidence, but you can’t help but wonder.
Oh man… don’t tell my Grandmother that the “Southern” foods she cooks is "Black food. That’d tick her off something fierce.
Having only found out what “soul food” is when I was about 23, I was rather surprised to realize that I had been eating it my entire life at family gatherings.
I think that the whole black connotation likely came from northern whites who primarily saw those as things black people ate, while in the South, it was very common across ethnic groups.
1965? I knew the Government was inefficient, but damn, that’s a little long. GD&R
V.
Mjollnir:
quote:
“I, for one, have never understood how “Southern” foods became “Black” foods.”
I think you guys have it confused to some extent. I think poor blacks and poor whites had a lot more in common than is usually recognized. I believe that each learned from the other in a symbiotic relationship. As for food origins, I believe that okra (I love that stuff, stewed or fried) originated in Africa but that is the only one I am reasonably sure of.
As a kid in Texas, 1940s and early 1950s, my mother’s table included white bread and corn bread, sweet milk and buttermilk, collard greens, butterbeans with ham hock, sweet and white potatoes, fried and baked chicken and so forth—exactly the foods I would expect to see on a black persons table. I will admit that some blacks I knew augmented their fare with possums and racoons, neither of which I have ever tasted. However, my family augmented their fare with fresh caught fish, usually supplied by me. Rabbit and squirel showed up with some regularity, as well. Vegetables and fruit were grown by us and “put up” by my mother and grandmother. We raised and snuffed our own chickens but bought pork and beef. With a few exceptions, my diet and my black acquaintances diet did not significantly differ. So when you speak of “Black Food” and “Southern Food” they are identical, in my mind.
SuaSponte,
Good one. Of course, the Union may not have sped things up, but I don’t think that they were the ones who slowed things down.
Quoth cornflakes:
Yams are, indeed, African, but they’re seldom eaten in the US. What we eat are sweet potatoes, a completely unrelated vegetable which is not native to Africa: So far as I know, the only point they have in common is that both are orange tubers; I’m not even sure if the taste is similar. I suppose that it’s possible that newly-arrived blacks tried to re-create their own style of cooking, but not finding yams over here, that they used the closest equivalent instead.
Stewed vegetables may be African, but I doubt the concept is exclusively African-- You could probably find some places in Europe where they’re popular, too.