Disclaimer: I am not trolling, I am an autistic person who doesn’t understand so many social nuances. Also I am from New Hampshire (97% white), so I just don’t have any close African-American friends that I am willing to risk asking such a loaded question.
That’s not the comparison you need to use here. The comparison should be Irish car bombs. And the answer is there’s not a difference that’s super, will not racist but jingoist maybe, too.
Or Black and Tans aka half and halfs
Others have given you solid answers on why the chicken and watermelon thing was really stupid so I’ll try to answer from the Irish perspective on the second part of your question:
You can serve me corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day as long as you’re not being a dick about it. I’d probably consider it a nice effort actually if I happened to be abroad on the day.
My dad used to love corned beef, cabbage and potatoes with parsley sauce. It’s a grand meal but not my thing.
If you were a unionist who served it to me in a leprechaun outfit I’d be inclined to tell you where to go though.
Edit: I hope this answers your question. It’s a good question and the answer is nuanced so if I can offer you more perspective let me know, I’d be happy to help.
Note: Unionist is not refering to labor unions.
Years and years ago at a house party, some woman from Cork and a friend of mine from Belfast were joking and they said, “Because Ulster says”, and I had no idea what they were talking about.
All these years later I can still hear his voice saying it.
This seems interesting. What’s the context here?
The lad in the picture is Ian Paisley. He was a prominent unionist back in the day. (Unionist being someone in favour of maintaining the six counties in Northern Ireland being part of the UK)
From the wiki page:
Ulster Says No was the name and slogan of a unionist mass protest campaign against the provisions of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement which gave the government of the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the governance of Northern Ireland.
Page here if you want some more reading.
As I recall (and I was young at the time so this may be wrong) it got rolled out for various other stuff.
Catchy slogan in fairness.
😂
Thank you, this helped a lot!
Fried chicken has historically been used to mock black culture, not celebrate it
Why?
wikipedia has fairly fleshed out histories:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_stereotype https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_chicken_stereotype
I don’t understand that, though…
Fried chicken is fuckin delicious.
That’s part of the cruelty. Almost everybody loves fried chicken. But growing up in the deep south, they were mocked for it in nasty ways I witnessed (but don’t feel comfortable describing).
I think part of the disconnect is that you don’t see that same mockery in the north.
Yes absolutely. I went to high school in the north from 02-06 and took an elective class that was African American history for the first half of the school year and Vietnam War history the second half. My teacher for both was a black woman and the first day of class she asked the class what some stereotypes they have heard of black people were, and of course people mentioned all of them. Whe fried chicken was mentioned she said, and I quote, “No we actually don’t like fried chicken, WE LOVE IT!”. So yeah I mean in the north there’s a lot less hate behind it and it’s more seen as just a “funny observation”. And not to take away from any true hate or racism but the idea of liking fried chicken being a bad thing is so ridiculous to me because fried chicke is fucking amazing.
This really does nail it. In the north, we do have the stereotype that black people like fried chicken. However, that is seen as neutral or positive. Fried chicken is delicious and black people tend to make great fried chicken. What’s not to like?
Yeah I don’t think anyone I’m friends with or close to that is white views it as a negative stereotype at all up here in NY. However if you drive out to small towns in NY there still uneducated racists flying confederate flags on their front porch, unfortunately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_Chicken_Inn Black people and chicken was like leprechauns and breakfast cereal for a while.
Everyone ate it too. The mockery was because
- they were messy to eat
- they were staples commonly eaten
- they were made and sold by black people early in their steps of economic independence following slavery.
- racism doesn’t have to make sense.
If you hate someone, anything they do can be something you use to express your hate, even if you do it to.
If you hate someone, anything they do can be something you use to express your hate, even if you do it to.
Yeah I think this is the big kicker right here.
Might be more life to serving just potatoes on St Pats from that perspective.
Irish people are white.
They didn’t start out that way in America, because race is a social construct used by the state to achieve its ends and when a shit ton of Irish people were coming over to the United States to escape the manmade potato famine the terms of their acceptance into American society was that they’d be doing the shittiest work.
American society dealt with this contradiction by adopting the racial pseudoscience that put Irish people below “real whites”.
Whiteness isn’t something innate that can be measured objectively (although pseudoscientific methods claim to be able to do so!), it’s a basic subjective measure of where one stands in the white supremacist power structure.
The white supremacist power structure informs all sorts of stuff like can you get a loan, can you get insurance, do you need to be more afraid of dying to the cops than usual, how loud can you play your music, pretty much every aspect of life in America.
After Catholicism became more widely accepted in the us, and a shit ton of Irish people became cops (so that the white supremacist state could surveil their communities) Irish people were eventually considered white.
Black people in America aren’t white. That might seem like an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to be clear that the process of integration that the Irish immigrant wave went through was never really offered to black Americans.
A person could argue that we are living through that process right now and I think there is a process of integration going on but it’s not making black Americans part of the broader white American group but instead giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital. That’s a significantly different deal.
Anyway, there’s this thing called racism, which is where a society uses the completely made up category of race to discriminate against groups of people to achieve its ends.
Some examples of American racism are slavery, segregation, redlining, the treatment of agricultural workers, the treatment of rail workers, etc.
What’s important is that racism is when a society (or its members) discriminate against some group. There is power in the discrimination and it’s being used against a group.
If a bank decides not to lend to white people it doesn’t hurt white people because there’s literally all the other banks that they can go to and get loans. There is discrimination being used against a group in that example, but it has no power over them because they’ll just go to all the banks that (and I’m quoting directly from a Bank of America sign here) don’t “serve coloreds”.
Okay, so why am I saying this? We’re talking about food!
There’s an old stereotype that black people eat watermelon and fried chicken. There’s a long and storied history to the food stereotypes of black Americans but I’ll spare you the tangent and just say it’s visible in all sorts of Jim crow and segregation era media and arts and crafts stuff.
If you got one of those “antique mall” type places you can probably see some of it there.
During and before Jim Crow and segregation, those stereotypes were deployed to depict black Americans as at best ignorant country bumpkins and at worst subhuman apes.
So to serve the stereotypical food of a racist caricature on a day that is intended to remember the freeing of the last slaves is at best thoughtless reproduction of a racist stereotype and at worst malicious intentional reification of a racist stereotype!
But why isn’t it racist to serve corned beef on saint patricks day? Well for one thing, saint Patrick’s day isn’t seriously celebrated as a remembrance of Irish American culture or the experience of immigrants almost anywhere in the us. It’s one of the big four, a drinking holiday with a dress code.
It’s also not perpetuating harmful stereotype to run a homemade Reuben special on saint Patrick’s day. No one bites into a Rachel and thinks “lol, those dumb micks are only good for driving spikes, drinking and swearing allegiance to Rome” or “if only they could multiply the way they multiply, maybe they wouldn’t be so poor, sad!”
Now that’s not to say it’s racist to prepare or eat fried chicken or watermelon. As a southerner I got strong feelings about both.
But pretty much it boils down to Irish people are white.
E: I fucking made a stupid ass mistake and substituted greenwood for the freeing of the last slaves when describing the context of Juneteenth. My dumbass brain was going “tell em about how greenwood and Parrish street were about giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital, instead of equality under white supremacy” over and over again the whole time I was writing this stream of consciousness ass post and when I couldn’t find a place to shoehorn it in the ol’ brain took over and did it anyway. Thanks to fryhyde for pointing it out!
Hey , I totally read all the stuff you just wrote and I totally agree. Can I borrow fifty cents?
So not to nitpick here, but Juneteenth isn’t intended to remember the destruction of any neighborhood. Black Wall Steet, Central Park, etc. were all significant things that happened, but not related to Juneteenth. It’s the day that the last slaves in Texas were actually declared free by the Union army on June 19th in Galveston.
Thanks for catching that. I kept trying to figure out how to frame greenwood and Parrish street as similar early attempts to bring black Americans into the fold of capital, one of which saw a violent attack by the white hegemon that was opposed to expansion of capital to black Americans but it just kept not fitting.
I guess my brain just subbed it in cause I was turning it over in my head. Edited.
Where tl;dr?
It is a nuanced topic that requires explanation of certain history. There is no TL;DR
Irish people are white and therefore cannot experience racism.
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i’m not.
if you want to understand why the history of racism against irish americans after the wave of immigration in response to the manmade famine doesn’t factor into racism irish americans experience today (none, zero, irish americans do not experience racism today), read my top level comment.
the defining factors are that irish americans were integrated into white supremacist power structures and black americans weren’t, that st. patricks day isn’t treated with any reverence in the united states and is instead one of the big four drinking holidays and the negative stereotypes of irish americans from the 1800s don’t survive today in word or in deed.
i chose not to touch on the lingering economic impact of racism against irish americans as opposed to racism against black americans because they’re in two different universes. one was largely dismantled before any of us were born and the other is still systemic and pervasive to this day.
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The ops question is about America. I explicitly made a top level comment about America.
When someone asked for a tldr I did not specify Irish Americans, but that should be clear from the thread, my post and the op.
You’re replying to a comment where I explicitly specified America.
America is not the world but we’re talking about America here.
It’s true they were born with immunity. I heard one of those potato eating bastards has a pot o’ gold.
I feel like this all hinges on the assumption that black people do not proportionally like watermelon and fried chicken more than other groups of people. I’d be interested in some stats on that. A quick search brought up this study which shows that they do https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9884589/
However, now I have to wonder if they eat more chicken than other ethnic groups due to generational poverty and the fact that chicken has been historically the most affordable meat. I didn’t have any success finding the answer to that question.
Regardless, those foods are delicious and I’d be happy if a tradition of eating watermelon and fried chicken for Juneteenth became more popular. What really matters is if any significant amount of people actually feel discriminated against for it or if the social justice warriors are picking this fight on behalf of people that don’t actually care.
No.
Serving a dish which is part of the post slavery white supremacist negative stereotype of black Americans used to reify the Jim Crow and segregationist regimes on the day set aside to mark the freeing of the last slaves would not be more or less racist weather black Americans enjoyed eating it or not.
Are people getting upset over nothing? I don’t know. Are some people not allowed to get upset? I don’t know.
I gotta say, I genuinely love this issue.
Like I’m a left leaning generic progressive white guy with a degree that includes a Sociology minor. This shit is so fascinating to me.
I don’t know many black people, personally. Maybe 10 humans I know (like… Might send a social media message to because we are casual acquaintances) are black. I live in a rural area. Two are vegan, but the rest do indeed love fried chicken. We joke, I’veasked. I mean fuck, So do I. What meat eater doesn’t? It’s such a bizarre stereotype from the start. I believe I’ve heard it has to do with slaves being given the wings and appendages of chicken? But I don’t know the veracity of that. Seems plausible?
Anyways, this.
Dated a lovely black woman back in my late 20s, she took me to meet her family like a month in, they were all super sweet. Dinner was fried chicken, hominy, mustard and collard greens, slaw and Mac n cheese, her grandmas fried chicken made me forget I ever cared about my grandmas fried chicken. Who the fuck doesn’t love fried chicken? Okay sure, vegans, but other than that?
And seriously I get the whole stereotype being a deep seated bunch of white people fuckery, but like, fuck that, let’s eat.
My guess is that if they had got a local Soul Food place to cater a whole spread, and the fried chicken and watermelon was part of the rest of the stuff you just mentioned, it would have gone over better. (I bet Charlotte has a bunch of places that would have done that for them). Maybe they could even have done some research and provided the context I am just learning now, in this thread.
But I think this was planned by committee, and that committee planned it all in a half hour so they could break for lunch earlier. So they got a bunch of buckets of chicken (I hope they weren’t from KFC), and someone went to Publix and bought a bunch of watermelon to cut up, and they called it all good. And that committee had nobody on it that pointed out how bad this would look without better planning. (In other words, no black folks…)
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well, no, the reason is commercial, chicken is one of the cheapest and easiest proteins to raise in the smallest amount of space, which works out better for those of lesser means. everybody loves fried chicken, sure, but it’s not the reason it’s always been a stereotypical hallmark of the American Black population
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The issue isn’t eating what you want.
The issue is that there is a cultural celebration involving food. Rather than try to serve food that fits within that cultural celebration, food was served based on a racial stereotype.
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It doesn’t make my point incorrect.
Historically fried chicken and watermelon are stereotypical foods associated with black Americans as part of minstrel shows, which were usually performed in blackface, and other racist portrayals of black people. Watermelon in particular was turned into a negative racial stereotype because growing watermelon was one way that emancipated slaves could be financially independent.
Fried chicken has been associated with enslaved black people since before the Civil War, because chickens were the only livestock they were allowed to keep. Well into the 20th century there were also white-owned restaurants and brands that drew on these stereotypical images over the protests of black people.
At best it is very ignorant of the history of racism in the US to have a fried chicken and watermelon special on Juneteenth, because the thought process is just black people holiday = fried chicken and watermelon. At worst it’s just signaling to other racists, which is definitely not an unviable business strategy in some parts of the US.
stereotypical foods associated with black Americans
It was a money thing. Poor people ate chicken, rich people ate beef or pork. It didn’t just start with slaves, the frying method is literally Scottish in origin, which is why hillbillies were doing it too.
The insulting part was in ministrel shows, it was portrayed as “a taste of the highlife”.
That they were excited for something hillbillies considered normal food. And most people looked down on hillbillies.
There’s nothing wrong with fried chicken and watermelon. It’s that for a serious event, they’re having fried chicken and watermelon.
Like, imagine you have a big event, and that’s what there is. Regardless of how much you like it, there’s gonna be a pause.
That being said, I’m white, and fried chicken was literally the main course at every family event including weddings growing up. But that’s because my family is all hillbillies. That’s just what we do. We sure as shit didn’t have someone cook it for us that didn’t know how, it’s one thing when the recipe is 200 years old and the same that your family has always been eating.
Not to mention the most important part of a chicken fry is everyone getting together. My family bitched and fought all the time. But if chicken was being fried it was like an elite military operation.
So getting a plate of bland fried chicken and unsalted watermelon just strips every good part of the tradition away, while reminding you that you could be celebrating.
And leaves the racist connotation.
THANK YOU for your input! My dad was born and raised in Missouri, and I was taught at an early age how to make “real” fried chicken, which is amazing. I couldn’t understand why it would be denigrated, but your reply explains it so well. And TIL watermelon should be salted!
Watermelon and chicken were two of the ways that black people started supporting themselves after being freed from slavery. They were agricultural products they could raise with very little investment and start building wealth from essentially nothing. Racists, not wanting them to prosper, mocked them for their preference for these things, but it’s important to note that the mockery didn’t stop them from supporting themselves with the foods they were able to produce. To this day black people enjoy these foods, and there’s nothing wrong with them enjoying the foods. If you’re with your black family, and you want to celebrate your own heritage, this isn’t actually a bad way to do it.
However.
When a corporation, particularly a corporation run and staffed by white people, makes a choice to celebrate a significant black cultural date by presenting people with foods that white people used to mock black people, it reads as mockery. (This is especially true in North Carolina, a place where racism is rampant and open.) At best, this is tone deaf; someone along the way should have said “hey, do you think any black people will feel like you’re doing this as a racist attack?” And if any one of them had answered “yes” to that question, they wouldn’t have done it. It made it through the pipeline to being something they actually did because nobody in the decision chain cares about the racist overtones of what they were doing.
If you’re going to do anything to celebrate black history or black culture, failing to ask any black people what they think about it is racism. Cultural sensitivity would have meant getting some input from a few black folks about how they think it should be celebrated–and, had they done that, they would have avoided this mess.
And, just in case anyone was wondering, the VP in charge of this situation is white.
Thank you! TIL Black people were mocked for liking those foods. They are the best, racists are only hurting themselves if they don’t eat it!
I heard white racists make fun of black people for that a lot when I was younger. But we ate it when I was a kid because we were poor and that was cheap and delicious.
looks at username
Well…yeah. You’re going to run into racists in TEXAS!!! Jesus! That’s the same place that seceded from Mexico to defend their ability to have slaves. Then seceded from the usa to defend their ability to have slaves. Then they complain about building a wall to keep Mexicans out.
If Florida didn’t exist, Texas would be the king of racism in America.
Texas is racist, Florida is racist, but ain’t neither of them got shit on Alabama and Mississippi. Texas and Florida are just louder.
It’s kinda sweet you didn’t know this actually.
Fried chicken and watermelon is still used to mock black people as well. There were racist memes about Obama eating fried chicken and watermelon.
I was a child of the 90s when I feel this humor was more prevalent. Until now, I always thought of it as a common stereotype, like white guys in khakis, old white women and wine, or country folk and cheap beer. Something that does poke fun of a group, but generally in a light way. Now I know there’s a more significant back story. I figured it was just culturally something that developed in black communities.
Ah, but here’s the real hypocrisy: they absolutely do eat those foods. Southerners of any color love fried chicken and watermelon. That doesn’t stop them from being racist about it. Racism doesn’t have to make sense.
I dont know a single person who has said they hated fried chicken or watermelon. Watermelon isn’t my favorite because it’s never as sweet as I think it is going to be but I will never turn a cold slice down.
I hate watermelon. Even the best, most ripe watermelon sucks. But usually they’re mealy and watery in flavor. They also remind me of the taste of cucumbers, which I hate more, unless they’re pickled.
Every time this comes up I gotta say, who the fuck doesn’t like fried chicken and watermelon?! It’s like making fun of someone for liking sunshine and the ability to breathe. Not that I needed another reason to point at racists and call them a bunch of fucked up morons, but goddamn they are bunch of fucked up morons.
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That’s me! The life giving sun can fuck off behind the clouds!
The sun is actively trying to kill me, you’re the weirdo in this situation! I have freckles in places that have never seen sunshine by just EXISTING for a few days in Oklahoma!!
I’m too pale AF to have a loving relationship with the sun. I’ve been burned too many times. I always use protection, but last weekend the sunscreen failed me :(
I mean, climate change being what it is, I’m literally brainstorming ways to inject artificial rain clouds into the sky.
My current idea is giant poles all over the city. They have blades at the top. They start rotating like a helicopter, but not designed to takeoff. Instead, it sprays cool mist above the blades so the cool mist gets swirled around in the hot air, that makes the whole city artificially humid. Eventually this should all rise up, and create rain clouds! Which then cool down the entire city.
Edit: Also, I have zero idea if this conceptually is even feasible.
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Well, shit! Pass that technology over here! We could test it in Nevada, on a daily basis for 10 years. Maybe raining over a section of desert that has literally zero life can turn it into a livable habitat. It could be a test. With the added benefit of cooling a portion of the earth as they do it.
I really tried to pick two things that couldn’t be argued with so now I’m just waiting for someone to tell me they don’t like breathing either.
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C’mon guy/gal, don’t kinkshame (/s)
PNW weirdo here. I like things to be green and alive, I like my skin unburned, and I like being able to poke around tide pools on a lonely beach. Clouds and rain help all of that.
It’s currently sunny and about 77°F, which is about as warm as I want it unless I’m going swimming. Late summer when it approaches 100° is miserable, but for now the bright weather is fine and good for the plants.
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Bullies don’t make sense.
Actively working against your own species is fucking brain dead. Especially a species you share the fucking planet with.
The nice part about tolerance is it’s a contract. If you don’t agree to it, nobody who does agree to it has to be tolerant with you. It’s simple
Not that I needed another reason to point at racists and call them a bunch of fucked up morons, but goddamn they are bunch of fucked up morons.
People are literally killing people who’s ancestors adapted to more exposure to direct sunlight than theirs did. I can’t not see it in just that simple way and think “what the actual fuck is wrong with people?” You can’t even say it’s a culture thing they don’t like, because they don’t actually know the people they cast hate at other than the color of their skin. It’s absolute insanity.
I like watermelon for the first 1.2 seconds where it actually has flavor. Though I did see a picture floating around Lemmy here that made me think the watermelons I’ve had that gave me that opinion were probably a quantity vs quality issue.
My mom eats it with salt. It’s actually not bad, I enjoy it either way. The salt does give it an interesting flavor, so maybe try that if it might enable you to like it more.
Melon with something savory is a widely popular choice. See: honeydew with prosciutto/parma ham and cantaloupe/honeydew with tajin (Mexican mix of savory spices.)
I never knew about the prosciutto/ham, but tajin makes everything better!
Thats why you just gotta keep eating more. More flavor! Also yes some definitely have more flavor than others, I’m no good at picking them but if you cut it open and it’s deep red you’re probably in for a good tome.
Dave Chapelle had a whole bit about this before he decided to double (and triple, and quadruple) down on transphobia. He makes the very salient point that these things are delicious.
Came here to say that. Barring a few contrarians, EVERYONE likes both watermelon and fried chicken. I know vegetarians who will admit that fried chicken tastes fantastic, even if they no longer eat it.
I also wanted to link to some info about the “Coon Chicken Inn” chain – founded by a white guy, of course.
- http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/coon_chicken.htm
- https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/links/essays/chicken.htm
Holy fuckin shit
He has blue eyes, confirming a depiction of a white man in black face, as opposed to a racist caricature of black people. 😠
It’s a real tell that they had no black person high enough in management to raise this concern.
In this day and age, either diversify or sign a contract with a “cultural awareness” agency to run your ideas by first.
Ok, everything you just said is true, and a great answer if the question is “Why is chicken and watermellon a bad food to be assosiated with February/Juneteenth?”.
However, the question is “Why is it different from corned beef on St. Patricks day?” And everything you just said is ALSO true about how Americans treated the Irish upon their mass immigration to America during the 1800s. They were mocked for corned beef, potatoes, and alcohol. The Irish were assosiated with those items in Ireland for the same reasons black people were assosiated with chicken, and watermellons. It was cheap, and it fed a poor mans family. The non-poor (whites) mocked them for being poor.
So…you gave a great answer, but not for this exact question. And yes, I know the original question didn’t mention potatoes or alcohol, but it also applies for the same reasons.
I’m not saying what the company did was right, I’m saying those same racist stigmas for the holiday it was compared to is equally wrong.
I think a better answer is “It’s not so different. Both are wrong.”
I mean, OP replied to my answer and apparently liked it, so I think I got him squared. But here’s a real response:
When the concept of whiteness was invented (yes, invented) it didn’t originally include Irish people, and they did endure abuse and marginalization comparable to what black people have endured and continued to endure. Irish people were worked as near slaves, so they even have a lot of that in common. As you say, I think that if you were Irish in America in the early 19th century, people who already belonged to the White club would have mocked you for your corned beef. We still make fun of Irish people for these things.
But there is a difference. Irish people in modern times got access to whiteness. They were accepted as part of the in-group and no longer marginalized. When this happened, and it took decades to gradually go this direction, the mockery didn’t disappear but, if you were Irish (and, in fact, I am) it would have started to feel less like someone who means you harm, and more as friendly teasing, precisely because you have access to the same power as the Germans and the British and so on who already belonged to the club.
Black people don’t have that. Black people are still very much marginalized, still the victims of racism and violence and institutional exclusion. So piling the food-based racism on top of that, is going to feel a lot more painful.
It’s one thing to be mocked; but to be mocked by someone else who is punching down is much worse.
An interesting aside that you probably know: corned beef and cabbage is a distinctly Irish-American tradition. The Irish were economically forced to raise cattle for corned beef for British folks. Despite raising and curing the beef, they could not afford it and subsisted on potatoes. Britain’s wealth and insatiable appetite for corned beef was so immense that those who made it could not afford the price. On the other hand, the reliance on potatoes for subsistence during this period as well as its outcome is well known.
You just made me so happy to be on Lemmy and not Reddit. Great answer!
Who’s the company involved in this? I’m not in the US so I’ve probably missed a lot of context here.
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Spectrum. I think they’re mainly an ISP, cable TV, stuff like that. We don’t have them around here but I understand them to be a fairly big company.
This one doesn’t fall on the whole company, mainly just this one call center, but still, Spectrum corporate should get interested in how this happened.
Ah okay. Thank you!
If I recall correctly, some states even had laws against black people raising animals like cows (and maybe pigs too?), so chickens were their only option.
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“How is eating fried chicken and watermelon wrong? Man, if you don’t like fried chicken and watermelon, something is wrong with you!”
Probably a lot of black families actually do have fried chicken, barbeque and cookouts are apparently a big part of the festivities traditionally.
If you find yourself becoming such good friends with a black person that they actually invite you to one of these cookouts, don’t bring fried chicken, or watermelons, or most of the stereotypical “black” foods, they’re considered black people food because the post civil war south fostered an environment of chronic black poverty on purpose that led to black families tending towards raising cheaper animals and growing cheaper crops for their own consumption.
So a white guy cracking watermelon or fried chicken jokes or bringing that kind of stuff to a black celebration comes across less as trying to share in the culture and more as rubbing salt in a, in many ways still open, wound.
As for what you should bring, bro just ask. Just making it known ya want to bring something for folks to enjoy will be good and appreciated, and if they decide they’d like to take you up on that, they’ll either give you a recipe off their list of stuff they’ve decided they want or ask what you think you can handle making and take your word on that if anything you feel confident making sounds good. Who knows, maybe that year will go down as the year that corned beef ya mentioned becomes a staple of the annual cookout!
What if they ask him to bring watermelon and chicken to the cookout? ;-)
Make sure you can go wide eyed enough that they start laughing if they were just razzing you
Because one is actual ethnic cuisine, and the other is a stereotype.
Serious question: how do I tell the difference?
It’s the same way neurotypicals learn the preferences of a neurodivergent person.
Many times we make mistakes. And many times we have to be told flat out or pick up cues.
You build up knowledge over time by paying attention to how the culture that it is tied to responds, since most racist stuff doesn’t make logical sense.
For an example of it being complicated, the Florida Seminoles college football team is fine because the school has coordinated with the tribe. I don’t know of any other professional or college sports team that does so, and any that don’t are exploiting Native American culture and most likely using racist stereotypes as part of their team ‘spirit’.
I’m a white Christian man in Texas. I know I’m privileged and that that privilege often comes with ignorance, so I used to be really nervous about offending people inadvertently.
But I eventually learned to just ask if I wasn’t sure.
It did help that one of my best friends in college was a black lesbian who transitioned Jr year. I joked with him that he was my token “X” friend.
ask :)
seeing as how ethnicity and geographic origin of the american slaves were purposefully destroyed and lost, to cut them off from their history by design, their created culture will need to suffice
Fried chicken is an ethnic food though.
Scottish/Irish brought the method over, and when slaves made it, they used African flavoring techniques. Which also caught on with hillbillies.
That led to hillbillies and slaves being the ones that popularized it.
And they were the two most looked down on ethnic groups in America for a long time. Especially because they were eating it because it was cheap. The lard and frying was to increase the calorie count, because there wasn’t much to go around. Same with the heat, it made you eat the (relatively cheap, but still expensive) part slowly.
The big difference is authentic fried chicken, and instead being handed a watered down version of it.
Like, if for Cinco de Mayo they got Taco Bell…
Good point!
I love that you recognize the original hillbilly usage :)
I’m a white man from Ukraine migrated to America in 1989.
I love fried chicken, I live in the south of America the deep South and man oh man do we have good fried chicken!
Fried chicken is a universally loved dish and is only stereotyped by the most ignorant of people!
Not only should fried chicken be served for Juneteenth it should be served on every holiday as well!
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Um, but actual Irish-Americans love eating corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day. It’s racist to celebrate your heritage? Or just to try things from other people’s cultures?
I bet you go to Taco Bell for Cinco de mayo too.
In my experience, when you get an over-the-top response from someone from a sh.itjust.works user, the best response it to just block them.
Found the bigot.
Nah, go bugger lol. One side of my family is mostly from potato famine Irish, and we all love some corned beef. It’s definitely on the menu for holidays
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Fried chicken should be served EVERY day.
