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Stereotypes of food for African American

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Stereotypes of food for African American

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Stereotypes of food for African American

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Stereotypes of food for African American

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stereotypes of food for African American

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stereotypes of food for African American

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A few weeks ago I attempted to research where the notion that black people should take over the fried-chicken-commercial world came from. By "research" I mean I searched Google, of course.

Even though I couldn't find any information, I was given alternative search ideas, such as "black people love watermelon," "black people love popeyes" and "black people eat chicken." Needless to say, there wasn't any Wikipedia article referencing when the love of fried chicken landed solely in the clogged arteries of black folks in commercials. But with today being #NationalFriedChickenDay (not even sure who came up with that one), let's talk about fried chicken and advertising.

About five years ago, Mary J. Blige came under fire for her modern-day shucking-and-jiving Crispy Chicken Wrap commercial for Burger King. It was reported that MJB was paid $2 million for the spot. Unfortunately, less than 48 hours after the commercial aired, it was pulled because people deemed it "racist" and inappropriate. Sure, it was a little over the top, with MJB screaming singing about chicken strips, but blame the advertising executives who thought it was a good idea.

Blige's Crispy Chicken-gate made me wonder when advertisers blatantly started marketing fried chicken to black people. Growing up, I remember several KFC commercials, like the ones below:

In the '80s, advertising executives apparently thought that white people were giddy over fried chicken, because you were hard-pressed to find a commercial with black people in it. White people loved the finger-licking goodness, just like the next person. I'll be the first to say, I love a piece of fried chicken as much as the next person, but what I don't love is the stereotypical advertising that is now prevalent in most fast-food fried-chicken commercials.

The first time I saw a full black cast in a fried-chicken commercial was with Ella Fitzgerald and a then-10-year-old Shanice-and of course I was able to find it on YouTube. Could this possibly be the first "singing for chicken" commercial?

Fitzgerald hocked fried chicken, so maybe MJB was trying to follow in her footsteps? Also, let's not forget Fats Domino. How apropos for a fat man in a shiny suit to peddle chicken:

Those commercials can now be considered subdued compared with what we presently have in the form of chicken commercials.

We had stepping for chicken, because everyone knows black people love stepping:

Even former football star Jerry Rice decided that nothing could stop him from getting a piece of that delicious Louisiana Popeyes fried chicken. But that commercial didn't last too long after the backlash.

So Jerry Rice clearly didn't think about what he was doing here.
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And with fried chicken comes the stereotypes from other countries. Yes, I love Korean fried chicken as much as the next person, but apparently Koreans think that fried chicken soothes the savage beast:

I'd like to know what goes through the minds of the people behind these commercials. Do they try hard to be stereotypical in depicting black people and their love of fried chicken? What's next-a commercial with black people playing basketball, eating fried chicken during halftime and washing it down with some Kool-Aid, followed by a dessert that consists of watermelon?

You'd be hard-pressed nowadays to find a fried-chicken ad with a nonblack person in it. I wonder if white people feel left out. Colonel Sanders is probably rolling over in his grave because he proved that white people loved fried chicken just as much as the next person.

So on this #NationalFriedChickenDay, go out and enjoy your favorite piece of fried chicken, whether it's KFC and their soggy fried chicken, Popeyes and their abnormally sized chicken breasts, or even some chicken strips from Bojangles. And maybe one day we won't have to watch black people sing or be sassy in chicken commercials anymore.

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Black People and Fried Chicken: A Stereotype-Filled Love Affair in Advertising

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A few weeks ago I attempted to research where the notion that black people should take over the fried-chicken-commercial world came from. By "research" I mean I searched Google, of course. Even though I couldn't find any information, I was given alternative search ideas, such as "black people love watermelon," "black people love popeyes" and "black people eat chicken."

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Stereotypes of African Americans - Wikipedia

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Stereotypes of African Americans are misleading beliefs about the culture of people with partial or total ancestry from any black racial groups of Africa whose ancestors resided in the United States since before 1865. These stereotypes are largely connected to the racism and the discrimination faced by African Americans. These beliefs date back to the slavery of black people during the colonial era and they have evolved within American society over time.

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A 1909 postcard, with the caption "I'se so happy!"

The watermelon stereotype is an anti-black racist trope originating in the Southern United States. It first arose as a backlash against African-American emancipation and economic sufficiency in the late 1860s.

After the American Civil War, in several areas of the south, former-slaves grew watermelon on their own land as a cash-crop to sell. Thus, for African-Americans, watermelons were a symbol of liberation and self-reliance, while for many in the majority white culture they embodied a loss, and threatened loss, of dominance. Southern-white resentment against African Americans led to a politically potent cultural caricature, using the watermelon to disparage African Americans as sloppy, childish, lazy, and publicly embarrassing.

The first known image associating black people with watermelons.[2]

The first published caricature of Black people reveling in watermelon is believed to have appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1869. The stereotype emerged shortly after enslaved people were emancipated after the Civil War. Defenders of slavery used it to portray African Americans as a simple-minded people who were happy when provided with watermelon and a little rest. The slaves' enjoyment of watermelon was also seen by the Southern people as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. The stereotype was perpetuated in minstrel shows often depicting African Americans as ignorant and lazy, given to song and dance and inordinately fond of watermelon.

The link between African-Americans and watermelons may have been promoted in part by African-American minstrels who sang popular songs such as "The Watermelon Song" and "Oh, Dat Watermelon" in their shows, and which were set down in print in the 1870s. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago planned to include a "Colored People's Day" featuring African American entertainers and free watermelons for the African-American visitors whom the exposition's organizers hoped to attract. It was a flop, as the city's African-American community boycotted the exposition, along with many of the performers booked to attend on Colored People's Day.

Pickaninny caricature from the early 1900s. The postcard shows a picture of a black boy eating a watermelon, with a stereotypical poem underneath.

Early-1900s postcards often depicted African-Americans as animalistic creatures "happy to do nothing but eat watermelon" - a bid to dehumanize them. Other such "Coon cards", as they were popularly known, depicted African-Americans stealing, fighting over, and becoming watermelons. One poem from the early 1900s (pictured right) reads:

George Washington Watermelon Columbus Brown
I'se black as any little coon in town
At eating melon I can put a pig to shame
For Watermelon am my middle name

For several decades in the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, the stereotype was promoted through caricatures in print, film, sculpture and music, and was a common decorative theme on household goods.

At the end of the 19th century, there was a brief genre of "watermelon pictures" - cinematic caricatures of African-American life showing such supposedly typical pursuits as eating watermelons, cakewalking and stealing chickens, with titles such as The Watermelon Contest (1896), Dancing Darkies (1896), Watermelon Feast (1896), and Who Said Watermelon? (1900, 1902). The African-American characters in such features were initially played by Black performers, but from about 1903 onwards, they were replaced by white actors performing in blackface.

Several of the films depicted African-Americans as having a virtually uncontrollable appetite for watermelons; for instance, The Watermelon Contest and Watermelon Feast include scenes of African-American men consuming the fruits at such a speed that they spew out mush and seeds. The author Novotny Lawrence suggests that such scenes had a subtext of representing Black male sexuality, in which Black men "love and desire the fruit in the same manner that they love sex ... In short, black males have a watermelon 'appetite' and are always trying to see 'who can eat the most' with the strength of this 'appetite' depicted by black males uncontrollably devouring watermelon."

African-American minstrels sang popular songs such as "The Watermelon Song" and "Oh, Dat Watermelon" in their shows, recorded in print in the 1870s.

In March 1916, Harry C. Browne recorded a song titled "Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha!, Ha! Ha!", set to the tune of the popular folk song " Turkey in the Straw". Such songs were popular during that period and many made use of the watermelon stereotype. The script for Gone with the Wind (1939) contained a scene in which Scarlett O'Hara's slave Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen, eats watermelon, which the actress refused to perform. Use of this stereotype started to die down around the 1950s, and had mostly vanished by 1970, although its continued power as a stereotype could still be recognized in films such as Watermelon Man (1970), The Watermelon Woman (1996), and Bamboozled (2001). Watermelons also provided a theme for many racial jokes in the 2000s.

In 2002, British journalist (and later prime minister) Boris Johnson alluded to "piccaninies" with "watermelon smiles" in a Telegraph article about then-prime minister Tony Blair visiting West Africa, a description widely criticised as racist and out of touch.

Protesters against African-Americans frequently hold up watermelons, among other things; imagery of Barack Obama consuming watermelon was subject of viral emails circulated by political opponents during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. After his election to the US presidency, watermelon-themed imagery of Obama continued to be created and endorsed. In February 2009, Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose resigned (albeit temporarily) after forwarding to the White House an email displaying a picture of the White House lawn planted with watermelons. Grose said that he was not aware of the watermelon stereotype. Other controversies included a statue of Obama holding a watermelon in Kentucky in 2012 and a 2014 editorial cartoon in the Boston Herald asking if Obama has tried watermelon-flavored toothpaste.

At the National Book Awards ceremony in November 2014, author Daniel Handler made a controversial remark after author Jacqueline Woodson was presented with an award for young people's literature. Woodson, who is Black, won the award for Brown Girl Dreaming. During the ceremony, Handler noted that Woodson is allergic to watermelon, a reference to the racist stereotype. His comments were immediately criticized; Handler apologized via Twitter and donated $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books, and promised to match donations up to $100,000. In a New York Times op-ed published shortly thereafter, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke", Jacqueline Woodson explained that "in making light of that deep and troubled history" with his joke, Daniel Handler had come from a place of ignorance, but underscored the need for her mission to "give people a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past".

On January 7, 2016, Australian cartoonist Chris Roy Taylor published a cartoon of Jamaican cricketer Chris Gayle with a whole watermelon in his mouth. Gayle had been in the news for making controversial suggestive comments towards a female interviewer during a live broadcast. The cartoon depicted a Cricket Australia official asking a boy if he could "borrow" the watermelon, so Gayle would be unable to speak. A couple of days earlier, a video of a boy eating a whole watermelon - rind and all - in the stands of a cricket match had gone viral. Taylor said he was unaware of the stereotype, and the cartoon was removed.

In " Safety Training", an episode of the American television series Michael Scott ( Steve Carell) throws a watermelon off the roof of the office onto a trampoline. After it bounces and hits a car, Michael fears that the car belongs to Stanley Hudson ( Leslie David Baker), who is African-American, and that Stanley will think he is racist; Michael tells Dwight Schrute ( Rainn Wilson), "Deactivate the car alarm, clean up the mess, find out whose car that is. If it's Stanley's, call the offices of James P. Albini. See if he handles hate crimes."

On October 22, 2017, the Fox & Friends morning show on the Fox News Channel dressed a Hispanic boy,[failed verification ] who was mistaken by many as an African-American, in a watermelon Halloween costume, drawing ire on social media.

In 2019, the video game Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled featured an alternative skin for the character of Tawna, named "Watermelon Tawna". The skin has darker fur and darker hair and wears a watermelon-themed T-shirt. Shortly after the skin was introduced, and after some social media discussion of the issue, a patch was issued that renamed the skin "Summertime Tawna".

In 2021, the television comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm season 11 episode "The Watermelon" features Larry David ( Larry David) helping his friend Leon Black ( J. B. Smoove) to overcome his embarrassment of eating watermelon. Larry takes Leon shopping to purchase a watermelon. At the checkout Larry announces to the store: "It's not a crime for a black man to like watermelon".

Pilgrim, David. Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum. PM Press. Oct 9, 2017.

Black, William R. How Watermelons Became Black. Journal of the Civil War Era Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 64-86 (23 pages). University of North Carolina Press. March 2018.

Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans. . Oct. 23, 2018.

How Watermelon's Reputation Got Tangled In Racism. University of Maryland. Aug 2, 2019

Greenlee, Cynthia. On eating watermelon in front of white people: "I'm not as free as I thought". VOX. Aug 29, 2019.

Sousa, Emily and Manish Raizada. Contributions of African Crops to American Culture and Beyond: The Slave Trade and Other Journeys of Resilient Peoples and Crops. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. July 23, 2020.

Maynard, David and Donald. The Cambridge World History of Food - Cucumbers, Melons, and Watermelons. Cambridge University Press. 2000.

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The watermelon stereotype is an anti-black racist trope originating in the Southern United States. It first arose as a backlash against African-American emancipation and economic sufficiency in the late 1860s. After the American Civil War, in several areas of the south, former-slaves grew watermelon on their own land as a cash-crop to sell.

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List of soul foods and dishes - Wikipedia

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This is a list of soul foods and dishes. Soul food is an African-American cuisine that primarily originated in the Southern United States and has been adapted to the cuisine of the Southern United States.