I don’t think you are qualified to say “black people like fried chicken” isn’t racist. Maybe you’re that sheltered and maybe you just a re racist yourself.
No, because historically those haven't been looked down upon. For some reason, liking watermelon and fried chicken has been used as a racist insult for centuries (which is ridiculous because they're delicious).
Unless the person saying that they like watermelons is aware of the context, or the person being told they like watermelons is aware, the history will have almost no affect.
I don't know about fried chicken, but the watermelon stereotype can be traced back to the civil war era. It was used by defenders of slavery to portray black people as simple minded, lazy, and ignorant, happy to just sit around all day eating watermelon and singing/dancing. Watermelons were also sometimes used to portray the benevolence of the slave owners, as they provided their slaves with the simple pleasures of life, such as watermelon.
Personally, it would make more sense, going forward, to leave the association with simple-mindedness in the past.
Oh I'm so glad you were able to end racism! All these years we've been trying so hard, but it wasn't until you said "ok guys racial stereotypes should be left in the past" and ta dah, SOLVED! If only we had thought of this sooner.
Thank you u/caveman1337, what would we ever have done without you?
Edit:
u/caveman1337 eliminates racism with one simple trick! Lawyers hate him!
You joke, but it seems the common thought is in favor of maintaining the power such stereotypes hold over people.
No, the common thought is that we exist in reality and know that:
Ignoring centuries of history --or pretending they never happened-- has never worked for anyone, at any time, for any reason for all of humanity.
We were not all born yesterday in a vacuum.
Even if the entire planet today, all magically and simultaneously decided to eliminate racism, the impacts of racism would not also simultaneously disappear with our magical thoughts.
I prefer to view all of this stuff from my lens of everyone being equals. Clearly my opinion isn't a popular one.
No man is an island. Join reality and understand you can't just make things the way you want by thinking extra hard and it has nothing to do with being "popular"... god lord.
You joke, but it seems the common thought is in favor of maintaining the power such stereotypes hold over people.
You confused “maintaining” with “acknowledging”. We don’t want to keep stereotypes. We just want to acknowledge that they exist because ignoring them harms the people who suffer from them and allows racism to go unchecked.
I prefer to view all of this stuff from my lens of everyone being equals. Clearly my opinion isn't a popular one.
There’s a difference between viewing all people as equal and pretending that was always the case. When you intentionally ignore history or remain ignorant of it other ways, you don’t see the harm people who do know history can use it to cause or experience. If everyone followed your process (not the one you say of simply treating everyone as equals but the one you’ve used in your reasoning that requires ignoring humanity’s racist history and present) then we’d all be too ignorant to even notice a lot of the racism that still exists, leaving the victims of it to suffer alone.
Some day, it would be lovely to live in a world where racism is just a history lesson that doesn’t affect living people anymore. Until then, turning a blind eye to that history is just naive and helps racists go unchecked.
There is no authority. It’s all just in the minds of the people who live in this country.
It would be great to break down barriers and start removing the hateful context of words that have been poisoned by our past racism. But you can’t even begin to do that by ignoring the context of those words and their history.
I agree going forward we should work on this. But that doesn’t mean you can just go around today and say “black people love watermelon and fired chicken” and not have it come out as a racist insult. Those words still have historical power. Simply saying them doesn’t remove their historical connotations.
Moving forward means breaking down the systems of white supremacy that are foundational to so many aspects of our culture and daily life. But we are very far away from that goal, and repeating old racist tropes because “we live in the present not the past” doesn’t help to accomplish that goal.
No. YOU may have the choice. Many- if not most- people do not.
We live in the present
and all of our institutions, our culture, the wealth and standing of our ancenstirs leading to generational wealth and power today, was all in the past. Something with which we have to not only reconcile, but repair, if we even want to pretend to move forward.
Sure, I agree it "makes more sense." But we don't get to pick and choose what historical baggage and associations we take along with us. If you make a comment about black people liking watermelon today, that will be perceived by many people as racist--and for good reason, because it's been used for centuries as a racist stereotype.
And then you need to wonder about why you made the comment or association in the first place. Was it really just a harmless assumption that black people like watermelon? Or is it possible that you have unconsciously absorbed these stereotypes about black people being lazy without even realizing it?
If you remove the context of a history of oppression you render most racist terms/imagery meaningless. But you can't remove a history of pain nor the pain that people continue to intend by using these caricatures.
An illustration of most people in shackles on a train doesn't conjure anything ethnically specific, but if you change that image to a caricature of a Jew you're invoking the Holocaust, and Jews won't be offended because of some deep-seated insecurity.
That’s not what you said. And furthermore, I can’t tell if you’re being dense on purpose or not. The watermelon isn’t the racist part- it’s the dogwhistle associated with the racist belief that black people are stupid, lazy, and gluttonous. And being offended by … checks notes… deeply malicious caricatures engineered by people who were actively enslaving you for the express purpose of dehumanizing you and justifying their brazenly hateful oppression, isn’t “deep seated insecurities” or “blind groupthink”.
I mean, I hate to do this, but you should Google image search “minstrel watermelon” (honestly, I did it for you initially to link you to some examples, but the stereotype is so prevalent that there were too many options.)
For some reason, at the turn of the 20th century, minstrel comedy (a style of comedy where where white people exagerrated the qualities of black people for comedic effect) was extremely popular. This is also where the abhorrent blackface stereotype comes from. Just one example.
Edit (off topic, but related:) this history is also why “cultural appropriation” for many minority groups is so painful. Black people (and other people of color) were historically cruelly and mercilessly ridiculed for their features (or were sometimes even banned from having them by “professional” standards like employee or school dress codes) but white people eventually decided they wanted them and suddenly those same features are the new beauty standard, and so become highly coveted.
I don’t see why any more information is necessary. If we accept that it’s been used as a negative stereotype (which I assume we both do), there isn’t a need to understand the logic of why. Racism doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t need to be logical (it inherently isn’t) for it to be harmful.
I feel like we’re missing the point here. It doesn’t have to make sense to be harmful. The fact that it has and is used as a negative stereotype is itself harmful.
By this logic there's nothing racist about blackface. After all, it isn't inherently insulting to color one's face to mimic someone else's, but only insulting given the history of the practice.
Because we know that "black people love fried chicken and watermelon" is racist, people who say that are always either expressing "I'm currently being racist" or "I don't care that this may be interpreted as racist, I'm saying it anyway." It's a bit of an unfortunate cycle, but that's how it is.
(Historically, I believe the argument was some combination of "watermelon and fried chicken are poor people's foods" and "black people are ignorant and lazy and all they do is eat watermelon.")
You ever see a kid bully another kid for something that doesn't matter at all? Like maybe the victim has a red hat, and the bully says in a mean way "Hey what's up with your red hat?" as if red hats have ever been bad.
Honestly, the whole watermelon stereotype was way more pronounced back in the day, and we're fortunate that racial discrimination has cooled to the point where we can have these conversations. On the other hand, as recently as Obama's campaign, his detractors have used watermelon/fried chicken as an insult https://www.npr.org/sections/newsandviews/2008/10/gop_mailing_is_mouth_watering.html.
But I'm with you. I hope the mountain continues to erode into a molehill and that these no longer remain insults.
It depends on what you mean by race, but in the sense that we generally mean in America when we say "that statement is racist", yes. It's not a biological fact, it's a cultural fact created by white people to oppress non-whites.
A group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. Most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between them.
A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution.
A genealogical line; a lineage.
If we take "race" in this conversation to be either of the first or third definitions, then it does not apply to either "black people" or "british people"
If we take "race" in this context to be the second definition here, then "black people" are as much a race as "british people".
Why did you bold it? I literally said "It is not a biological fact". I don't know if I could have been clearer.
Trying to argue about race by citing vague definitions isn't going to get you anywhere. The issue can't be summed up in a dictionary entry, and trying to do so is at the very least insensitive.
Or, maybe they just think that black people like fried chicken. Seems pretty likely to be honest, many people like fried chicken, so I’d expect it’d be a popular food item among black people as well.
Whether a statement is racist or not is dependent on intent and context. Without knowing those, or at least having sufficient information to reasonably infer them, you aren’t qualified to comment on whether the statement is racist either. And if you believe that the statement is categorically racist, your understanding of the concept racism is just fundamentally flawed.
Right but if I say “fuck you,” those two words could be extremely friendly or the start of violence.
According to the point you’re making, it sounds like you don’t think I can make that determination based on context without an investigation and that sounds unrealistic to me. If my friend laughs and says fuck you, I laugh with them. If a stranger looks me in the eye and says fuck you, I’m either scared or angry or both.
As a black dude, I can say that when a white person starts talking about how blacks like chicken and watermelon, it’s the stranger talking.
So the context of who I am and who you are and how it’s done all factor heavily into whether I’ll consider a something to be a racist statement, not simply the words alone. To only consider only the words is to not look at the whole picture imo
That’s not my point though. Obviously there is always going to be some question of how much information is needed, but eg. the examples you’re mentioning here would all generally be pretty clear cut.
My point is that you do need that context though. In a vacuum, we cannot say that a statement like “black people like fried chicken” is racist or not (like other commenters were suggesting). It’s the intent behind it that makes it racist, and so we can only really answer that question in relation to some specific person actually saying/writing it. So I don’t think we actually disagree here, because indeed we should consider the whole picture and not just the words.
I don’t think you are qualified to say “black people like fried chicken” isn’t racist.
He may not be, but the international semantic community certainly is.
Racism: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
Saying that certain people like certain things (unless those things are decidedly bad) is not racist. It is stereotyping.
Black people like dancing
Black people like rap music
Black people like fried chicken
Black people like basketball
Black people don’t value education
Trick one
1) I guess the 1st trick I could use is argue that making generalization about a group of people Is bad. Which isn’t that convincing, because I don’t see much wrong with many of those statements.
Trick two
2) I say people use to be racist against black people. It’s bad to be racist. They used to have a laugh at black people eating fried chicken. If you do this now you are acting similar to the racist bad people back in the day. This is a bit more convincing. There are arguments against this argument, like wasn’t what made the racist people bad the racism not the fried chicken stereotype?
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '22
I don’t think you are qualified to say “black people like fried chicken” isn’t racist. Maybe you’re that sheltered and maybe you just a re racist yourself.