I went to a historically black college. . . when I first arrived I went to the cafeteria on a Wednesday and it was packed, there was a DJ and lots of people there in suits and dressed up. I thought it must be some kind of special day, maybe some historical event day, or festival or something. Anyway, when I went to my next class I asked a girl ,“What’s so special about today? There’s this big crowd and a DJ and VIPs in the cafeteria?”. . . her reply. . . “Chicken Day. . . It’s fried chicken day.”
So, because many African American love fried chicken, it’s therefore racist to suggest that many African American’s love fried chicken.
Actually it’s not Racist, but it is prejudiced to ascribe general group characteristics to every individual in that group.
Or the email purportedly showing the walk-in fridge in the White House main kitchen, only to show a cold-storage warehouse filled to the brim with watermelons. Got that from dear old Dad this morning.
My father used to work in a pub in New Zealand, he used to the local POM call him when he (the POM) was leaving home (a 30 minute drive away) and ask for a beer to poured so that it would be suitably warm when he arrived.
Next thing you know someone will complain abut watermelons.
Food is not racist. Fried chicken and watermelon are part of Southern culture and tradition. Everyone I know eats that kind of food here. White, Black, Asian it doesn’t matter. The majority of people love these flavors. We have fried chicken and watermelon at our church dinners all the time in the summer. We also have pork chops and roast beef.
Are there racist attitudes and jokes made about certain foods? Yes. But, don’t slam an entire regions culture and food because of a few knuckle dragging neanderthals.
Please go and read the other thread, dun need the whole new debate here. Projecting your own biases onto an ad that was produced for and by another country and then telling them they’re “wrong” is equally as racist as anything you are accusing them of.
To carry on…
The thing about sterotypes is that they only tend to become sterotypes and be perpetuated in the first place because they contain at least an element of truth.
For my own experiences, a few I get that bug me all the time
People doing a double take when they see me using chopsticks and gush over “how good I am” I mean, WTF? I may be ang mo but my wife is Chinese, I have been living in Singapore for 10years, and even before meeting my wife I could use chopsticks - you mean to say the dumb white fellah can’t be talented enough to learn how to use the oh so complex chopsticks? (nah, I don’t get upset, I just roll eyes and say thanks, they mean well)
The very first question people ask me daughter is “do you speak chinese” - well of course she bloody does you fool, she is attending school in Singapore, where again we have a bi-lingual school system (every student studies english plus mother tongue), her mum is ethnic chinese, she looks chinese and she has spent all her life in Singapore
The one that bugged me the most though is the stupid bitch who, when I was cooking (rice) porridge in the microwave for my lunch asked me why I would eat oatmeal for lunch. I felt like fucking her upside down for her ignorance (but instead I just made a joke - what you mean us poor stupid ang mo dun like porridge is it?)
Do note, the lady was chinese, and was familiar with Singapore. If you say porridge here, EVERYONE knows you mean rice porridge and not oatmeal, infact if I said I had porridge and brown sugar with bananas for breakfast people would still look at me funny and ask why the hell I was eating rice with bananas.
I don’t think anyone is slamming the food. Just the attitude of, “Hey, you’re black, do you like fried chicken?” If you went up to a black guy and said that, don’t be surprised if he thinks you’re a racists ass.
Hmmm…(putting aside that New Zealander is an ethnicity and not a race) is it racist to ask a New Zealander if he knows the best way to cook lamb chops or make a pavlova from scratch? Or if a japanese likes sushi and / or sashimi? Or how about asking a scotsman if he has eaten haggis?
Sometimes particular ethnicities (or more correctly cultural groups) CAN be identified with particular likes … SO WHAT?
Not the same at all. There’s a really unpleasant history of associating blacks with fried chicken–see Odesio’s post or the Coon Chicken Inn images for why it’s different. Side note–I had no idea there really was a Coon Chicken Inn/Cook’s Chicken franchise. I only know of it from the film Ghost World.
Long ago, chicken was an expensive food. The birds were rarely slaughtered because the real cost of a chicken dinner included the loss of future egg production. So it isn’t just that chicken is cheap food today. The underlying issue is that racist stereotypes in the past painted black people as incorrigible petty thieves, and watermelons and chickens were equally stereotyped as the main things stolen, especially in the rural South. This comes up even in recent literature–I came across an example of this in a Charles Bukowski novel, in which he uses the stereotype to indicate that a character has racist tendencies.
It’s not the chicken itself that’s the bad thing. And you don’t think stuff like this is all that unpleasant? I’m not saying fried chicken is evil by any means–but let’s not pretend these stereotypes weren’t so bad.
Fine, but unfunny and racist are two diferent things.
I’m going to assume that Fuzzy Zoehler is a) not a racist, and b) a friend of Tiger Woods. In that case, it’s ironic that he would reference an old stereotype. Having just won the Masters ought to have put Woods in the mood to put up with a silly little black joke from one of his friends.
If Zoehler had made a fried-chicken joke to a black janitor, it would have been considerably more inappropriate. The latter is still arguably somewhat in victim-mode as opposed to King-of the-World mode.
You might say that fried-chicken is a “meta-stereotype”. Nobody really believes that black people are particularly voracious eaters of fried chicken, but “everyone knows it’s a stereotype that blacks eat a lot of fried chicken”. So a joke of this kind satirizes the omnipresent awareness of the stereotype rather than the stereotypical behavior itself.
Ah, but do you do that when you have white guests? Or just when you feel you need to blur out the possiblilty that a particular meat dish might invoke a racial sterotype?
(It just occured to me that there’s a very thin line: If you had Muslim guests over, they might expect you to “stereotype” them as people who do not eat pork.)
I remember years ago being at a local fishing pier. A black family was camped out on their spot fishing away. Having a good day, eating fried chicken among other things, and enjoying some shade under a giant beach umbrella with little graphics of watermelon slices all over it. Apparently, for them they decided to either ignore the possible negative conotations of the stereotype or just run with it and have a little fun.
An OLDER generation of black people undoubtedly had good reason to be offended by fried chicken and watermelon jokes. Those were stereotypes that once seemed ubiquitous.
Thing is, it’s been so long now since such media images were common that people sometimes have to be reminded what they’re offended about.
To use a few examples:
Every now and then, I’ll hear a black person point out angrily that the phrase"cotton picking" (as in “get your cotton picking hands off me”) is offensive, because it suggests that black people who worked in cotton fields were dirty and subhuman. And I’m sure that WAS a crude, racist insult at one time. Thing is, anyone my age (48) or younger has probably never heard a real, live person use that phrase. Heck, I only know it because I heard Yosemite Sam and Foghorn Leghorn say it in old cartoons.
Growing up where I did, in New York City, I only knew that images of fried chicken and watermelon were offensive to blacks because liberal satirists kept using those images! Listen, I’ve known plenty of white racists, but none of them ever made watermelon or fried chicken jokes. On the other hand, “All in the Family” and MAD Magazine constantly showed me white racists who revelled in such stereotypes.
Radio and TV shows like “Amos and Andy” popularized certain racist stereotypes. A black man probably SHOULD be offended if he sees an “Amos and Andy” rerun broadcast on TV. Thing is… that show, and shows like it, HAVEN"T been rebroadcast in 30 years or more.
A young black person in America today has probably NEVER heard a white person use the phrase"cotton picking" as an insult, has never heard a white radio actor putting putting on an exaggerated “black” voice, and has probably never heard anyone (except maybe Fuzzy Zoeller) make fried chicken/watermelon jokes unironically. A young black man may actually have to have someone explain the joke or the insult, and only THEN get offended.
The very existence of this thread illustrates a point. It’s been so long since the aforementioned racist jokes and sterotypes were swidely seen that, in 2010, some people have to ask, “What’s the joke, and what’s racist about it?”
Heh, apropos of nothing, I once knew a guy who made a living as a seller of Black-themed memorabilia - Sambo dolls, glasses in the shape of Black women eating watermellons and the like.
He was Black and so were most of his clientele. Apparently this stuff goes for big bucks these days, because much of it was thrown out when social attitudes changed. Now, people will pay a lot (and the more egregious they are, the better) for these things as conversation pieces.
Woods never had a problem with the joke. It was an outcry by others that caused Zoehler problems.
I remember this being used on the 70s comedy “Carter Country”. There was a joke where the black deputy insisted that he didn’t like fried chicken or watermelon.
