How can it be racist to say that black people like fried chicken? Is there something bad about eating fried chicken that I don’t know about? Does it make you mean or stupid? Is it against someone’s religion?
The fat-lipped, bug-eyed depictions that used to be shown alongside fried chicken were racist, although on a racism scale where 10 is the KKK, they are about a 2 or a 3. That’s why you don’t see them, at least in public, anymore.
It’s the difference between “Many black people enjoy fried chicken” and “you’re black; I’ll bet you love fried chicken, don’t you?”
It doesn’t help that fried chicken is a messy, greasy food with icky bones and such that you eat with your fingers.
The stereotype originally stems from these things being food items that were really cheap and easy to produce, hence suitable to feed slaves, or let them raise on very small plots of their own. You also had things like chitlins, which were a by product of butchering out the pig to obtain the more desirable parts, and could be fed to the slaves. So it has an association as “slave food”. Chickens are still raised in many parts of the world where resources are severely limited.
My father made a similar mistake when I first invited a black friend over with a couple white guys to jam (musically) in the basement. I introduced my father to Marcus and my father, trying to make conversation, by the second or third sentence said something like “Do you know any good barbecue places?” Now, my father was born in Poland and, while aware of the stereotype that blacks are linked to barbecue and other soul food, did not realize that this can be construed as racist in an American context. He meant that completely innocently. If I invited a local Italian or German friend, he’d be just as likely to ask “know any good Italian/German restaurants,” since he’s interested in that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, my friend sort of got a deer-in-headlights look that said, “I cannot BELIEVE I’ve just been asked that question” and sort of shrugged it off, later telling me how fucked up it was that my father asked the question. But it sincerely was an innocent question on my father’s part (and one that Marcus did actually know the answer to.)
It’s racist to start just about any sentence with “Black people like…” People are all different, no matter what color their skin is. You’d never say “White people like kielbasa,” or “White people like sushi.” A lot of them do, but a lot of them don’t as well.
I don’t buy into the stereotypes = racism argument, because one is a disdain for another race while the other is an observation usually based (at some point) on facts. Saying black people like fried chicken isn’t racist, it’s a stereotype. Sure, it’s in poor taste for any company to exploit stereotypes (although I’m not sure even THAT was done in the KFC ad), but it’s not automatically racist.
Related anecdote: my friend used to work at a movie theater concession stand and he would say whenever they saw a black person approaching they would automatically get a Hi-C ready, and almost every time it was needed. To say that certain ethnicities having certain food and drink preferences is automatically racist is pretty ignorant.
Hey, I love that place!
Of course, now it’s duck time, being an Asian grocery store…
Everyone knows white people like Wonderbread and mayonnaise!
To say that certain ethnicities have certain food preferences is pretty ignorant as well. Let’s pick, for example, a black male. With no other data, tell me his food preferences. You can’t, without making some rather large assumptions, because you don’t know if he is a Masai, or Jamaican, or from Seattle, or Paris, that he is from a millionaire family or from the sticks of Mississippi. So any assumption as to food preferences is either borderline racist, or made on a strictly localized level based on experience with a particular community at a particular period in history.
Rigamarole - Well…yeah, ok. You got me on that one! 
This is weird… growing up in NC (and certainly seeing my fair share of racism) I was under the impression that all right-thinking people, white, black, yellow, blue, or whatever, loved fried chicken, watermelon, and BBQ. (However, by BBQ I mean real NC pig-pickin’ BBQ with vinegar-based sauce, not that rib tomato-based-sauce stuff you get in weird places like Texas.)
(I actually don’t like watermelon, and boy, everyone thought that was weird!)
Sambo’s was a fairly well-known chain; I had never heard of the other place. In any case, the stereotyping went way way way beyond a particular restaurant featuring fried chicken.
The business about fried chicken and watermelon picked up a racist connotation in part from the messiness and lack of sophistication associated with the foods, and partly from some people believing that blacks hardly ate anything else. It’s just dumb to propagate the idea that someone will automatically delight in eating a particular food because of their ethnicity.
By the way, despite being an official White Person, I like fried chicken and watermelon, but you can’t expect to get me to do something just by giving them to me. I require barbecue as well.
You’ve made the mistake of confusing race and ethinicity. Latinos can be black, white, or asian, or anything else. But people of latino ethnicity generally like the sorts of foods they have traditionally eaten. This is not some sort of crass generalization; it’s a obvious and important result of the entire concept of ethnicity – traditions and attitudes or even an entire culture handed down through the generations.
Black isn’t an ethnicity, though in the United States it is much closer to being an ethnicity, because of shared culture through the media and historically. And one does not have to be of the black race to identify with the “black” ethnicity.
So you are right that a Parisian and a Watusi probably don’t share a ton of food preferences (and are actually two different ethnicities), but I rarely run into Zulu tribesmen in the mall. Your idea of “without other data” is correct, but it’s academic, given that we always have quite a bit of data, especially geographical and cultural data, and it’s not ignorant to understand the general preferences of an ethnicity/culture and its members.
The OP doesn’t ask whether the stereotype exists, but why the stereotype exists.
I think the stereotype was historically more prevalent in the Northern and Western US. (Because hell, in the South everybody loves fried chicken and watermelon.)
It probably dates from The Great Migration (1910 to 1930), a period during which large numbers of African Americans were migrating from the South to the North and West. They brought with them their Southern eating habits (like fried chicken and watermelon) which in the North came to be associated with black people. In the same way, what Southerners consider a “country cooking” or “meat-and-three” restaurant gets called “soul food” in the North and West because it is associated there with black people.
I doubt that the U.S. is unique in having some tensions around stereotyping the foods commonly eaten by marginalized groups.
i think that is pretty likely also, as if it were much earlier, chicken would probably have been a rare luxury for most black families. Chicken was rare enough even in white familes that “A chicken in every pot” was a campaign slogan of Herbert Hoover in 1928.
I don’t understand. Wouldn’t it have existed beforehand, transmitted via white southerners?
Oh, and FTR, I’m white and love melon and watermelon. Not so hot on fried chicken - but then I try and avoid chicken anyway.
BTW I once had fried frog’s leg and it tasted exactly like fried chicken.
No, because white Southerners were eating fried chicken and watermelon too. So black people eating fried chicken and watermelon wouldn’t have set them apart in the South, and wouldn’t have been a basis for a stereotype here in that era. (Or maybe I don’t understand your question.)
Yes, you’ve misunderstood me. Presumably northern whites had plenty of exposure to southern whites in the Civil War and WW1. And presumably southern whites travelled to the north and west anyway, taking their culinary proclivities with them. So I’m failing to see why fried chicken and watermelon is seen as a ‘black thing’ rather than a ‘southern thing’.