Counter-Currents
Including Audio Version by Jim Goad!
The Banana as a Hate Symbol
Jim Goad
1,291 words / 10:10
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
“A Monkey-Themed Banana Holder Is Tearing a Texas City Apart” reads a Daily Beast headline that attributes so much magical voodoo power to a banana holder, one suspects it may have been written by a black person.
A more accurate headline would have been “Black People in a Small Texas Town Chimp Out Over a Freakin’ Banana Holder.”
Hutto, Texas is a suburb of Austin with a population of only around 27,500, so referring to it as a “city” is as generous as calling black people a race of geniuses. As of 2020 its population was 43.65% white, 35.62% Hispanic, and a mere 12.54% black, yet its Anglo-Latino majority can’t seem to muster the cojones to tell its black minority to pipe down and eat their bananas.
The offending banana holder appears to be this little gem, the International Joie Monkey Banana Tree Holder Hanger, which can be yours from Amazon for only $15.99 minus the bananas, which you have to supply yourself.
The banana holder became a political bone of contention on August 31, when Nicole Calderone, a failed mayoral candidate who appears to be white and perhaps a wee bit insane, used it as a rhetorical prop while addressing the Hutto City Council. After pulling the miniature fruit stand out of a bag, she announced:
It’s a symbol. I’m one of the many monkeys who keep trying to climb the ladder for bananas regardless of how many times other monkeys try to pull me down and beat me up. . . . To me, the bananas represent what I expect and what I’m willing to fight for: low taxes, keeping a roof over our head and food on the table.
If I’m following the trail of illogic correctly, it’s a white woman calling herself a monkey and using a banana stand to make some sort of inscrutable political point about low taxes, affordable food, and physical abuse. Calderone then presented the banana stand, which she’d generously supplied with fresh and wholesome bananas, to Mayor Mike Snyder, a white man who left it standing on the dais for the meeting’s duration.
Although no one objected to the monkey-themed banana holder at the time, Hutto’s Official Blacks expressed tremendous dismay and lingering psychic wounds a week later at the following meeting. Black council member Brian Thompson ululated:
This act demonstrated prejudice and raised questions about the mayor’s commitment to foster an inclusive and equitable community. . . . Accepting a gift of bananas, a historically racist symbol used to demean and dehumanize black Americans, is not only disrespecting myself and Council Member (Dana) Wilcott but undermining the trust and inclusivity needed for effective government.
Onnesha Williams, co-founder of Black Families of Hutto, demanded the mayor’s resignation and likened the banana stand to a hate symbol on par with a Klan hood, a Rebel flag, or a swastika:
It’s the same as going to work and having a noose hanging at your desk.
A couple of weeks later, Hutto school board member Terrance Owens publicly relived the trauma of being forced to stare at bananas:
Those bananas sat there for two hours. We could not even see the mayor’s face. When he spoke, we saw bananas.
Nelson Linder, the portly head of Austin’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter, said:
From a historical standpoint, black people have always been compared to monkeys, and monkeys eat bananas. The banana is a global symbol of white supremacy and hatred of black people.
The global press alleges that at soccer games, bananas are thrown from the stands at black players to intimidate, infuriate, and subjugate them. A 2014 headline lamented that “The ugly, racist trend of tossing bananas at black soccer players continues.”
According to Jamaica-born black soccer player John Barnes, whose heyday came while playing for British clubs in the 1980s and ‘90s:
I always say there are invisible banana skins and unspoken words of racism thrown at black people every day of their lives.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
But is it possible that soccer fans, aware of pervasive African malnutrition, are merely tossing their favorite black players a healthy and invigorating fruit mid-game?
In 2014, a black soccer player for Barcelona named Dani Alves did the sane and prudent thing when someone in the crowd tossed a banana his way on the pitch: He picked it up, peeled it, and ate it.
Alves’ heroically spunky act of defiance led to social media hashtags such as #weareallmonkeys and its Spanish equivalent, #somostodosmacaos, as the Web became flooded with monkey-positive “bananagrams.”
In 2013, Italy’s first black minister, a rotund mudball named Cecile Kyenge, was reportedly called a “Congolese monkey” and had bananas thrown at her while speaking at a rally. Her only complaint about the banana-tossing was that it was a shame to waste good food when there was so much world hunger. Just like the soccer player Dani Alves, she wisely interpreted the free bananas as a nutritious gift rather than a symbol of hatred.
In a 2010 workplace discrimination suit where a plaintiff argued that antagonists had left “racist bananas and banana peels” on his truck, a US Circuit Court of appeals found that “there is nothing inherently racist about a banana, absent direct supporting evidence.”
In a 2013 essay titled “Why Black People Can’t Eat Bananas in Public,” an unnamed black woman wrote about how she was actually able to eat a banana in public, but saw fit to torture herself about it while blaming the white people who passively sat around and allowed her to munch on her banana:
Last week, I was sitting in a room full of white people, and I pulled out my banana and ate it. . . . The weird thing is that I was consciously aware that I was eating a banana in the presence of white people. . . . But I couldn’t help but think about the whole white people still think black people are apes scenario. . . . So, I was sitting there thinking, “Am I feeding a stereotype by eating this banana?”
No, you daffy, dark-skinned dame, you were only feeding yourself by eating that banana.
As in every case where black people are compared to monkeys, the monkeys shoulder most of the blame. But yet again, the monkeys are not the culpable party.
According to Katharine Milton, who for some weird reason decided to spend her professional life studying primates’ dietary habits:
The entire wild monkey-banana connection in fact is total fabrication. . . . The edible banana is a cultivated domesticated plant and fruit. Wild monkeys never encounter bananas at all ever unless they are around human habitation where bananas are or have been planted.
When they find themselves in the vicinity of humans and their domesticated fruits, monkeys are known to enjoy the occasional banana, although a 1936 study found that they prefer grapes.
So if it’s not the monkeys who are wantonly gobbling bananas in their natural element, who is? You guessed it: black people.
The noble Negroes of Uganda are said to be the Worldwide Banana-Eating Champs, eating about four times their weight in “tree-borne fruit” every year.
According to “Banana facts and figures” by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization:
. . . in many African countries such as Uganda, Rwanda and Cameroon, per capita consumption exceeds 200 kg of banana (all types including non-Cavendish and plantains). Especially in rural areas in these countries, banana can provide up to 25 percent of the daily calorie intake. . . .
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” is a saying often attributed to Sigmund Freud. In the same spirit, sometimes a banana is just a banana, but try telling that to a group of sub-Saharans who’ve been trained since birth to take everything personally.
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26 comments
“Nobody is resigning or apologizing. You are being overly sensitive and I won’t pander to you. If the bananas go today, you’ll find something new to complain about tomorrow, because you’re not really offended–this is all just a flex because 1. you don’t like white people, and 2. you can, at the moment, get away with it, since everyone is afraid you’ll burn down their house or beat them to death. I’m personally tired of it, and many others are, too.”
Eventually, every white person who would cast off the anti-white black bullshit is going to have to explicitly deal with the matter, even if that sentiment is only expressed to other whites, in hopes of their “seeing the light.” That stance, however, vis-a-vis blacks is what matters most, is what must be maintained without compromise, whether one decides to cast his pearls before the proverbial swine by saying something to them directly, or not.
I used to wonder why a group of people who take so much pride in themselves and exude such an amazing level of confidence and strength could be so thin skinned. But then I realized it is just a big flex to keep wypipo on defense all of the time. At one time I would recoil in horror or lash out in righteous anger if someone accused me of being a racist. Now I respond with a smile and by saying “Thanks! Ain’t it neat?”
They are a race without honor or authentic self-respect.
However, that defect proves to be a strength when dealing with Whites, than whom no other group on Earth is more saturated with groundless self-defeating moralism.
I always feel bad for the noble monkey, or ape, when he’s compared to a race of rapists, murderers, muggers and layabouts It’s not right.
I gotta get me one of those banana stands. It’ll be the perfect complement to my lawn jockey.
A famous equity experiment when monkeys were rewarded with grapes vs. cucumbers….
https://youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
cucumbers >>>> grapes
Once again, monkeys proving they are stupid animals of low taste. I won’t even entertain to comment on what the “scientist” uttered.
“We could not even see the mayor’s face. When he spoke, we saw bananas.”
I know the feeling, brother. Many of us, in many other jurisdictions, have had that experience.
“I always say there are invisible banana skins and unspoken words of racism thrown at black people every day of their lives.”
Pulled from invisible backpacks of privilege, no doubt.
Demands rise for banning Arrested Development from local cable channels.
https://youtu.be/Yh3mwibfPkI?si=qD9anXDvQal86lW2
To a Negro, a cigar is never just a cigar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZyjXqdKG6Y
I can attest that in the early 1970s at the Arsenal football club, Highbury, north London, that when an opposing player was black, the Arsenal fans in the North Bank stand would shout monkey noises and indeed some would throw bananas onto the pitch. This occurred at other English football grounds too at the time. This is long before Kick Out Racism in football.
Good times, good times…
Great, now ‘classic’, book on this period and subject in the UK: Buford, Among the Thugs. I read it when it came out in the early 90s. Highly entertaining, as I recall. An Italian soccer-fanatic friend of mine at the time verified the truth of this phenomenon (saying it was very common at all European soccer games – not only among the English – for the fans to start making chimp noises whenever a black player took possession of the ball).
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
Thomas Jefferson
Autobiography (1821)
True then, true now, true forever.
It really is tailor-made for WN propaganda: “Where’s the rest of the sentence?”
Sometimes something subtly said, or coyly asked, has more power. Imagine how powerful it could be to ask, at your local political meetup or online equivalent, “Where’s the rest of the sentence? They built an entire monument to this guy, then edited his message? Seems strange. If he’s worth a monument, maybe he’s worth listening to, too.”
Then have a link to, say, Racial Divorce at the ready.
Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the basics: this is a Founding Friggin’ Father we’re talking about! who is making our case for us in the most unambiguous terms. Or, more humbly, we’re all making his.
Jefferson messed up. He know all the things we know but still let the phrase ‘[A]ll men are created equal’ slip from his pen and, thereby, created the conditions for our dispossession. He knew better but he wrote it anyway.
https://counter-currents.com/2018/07/thomas-jefferson-and-the-declaration-of-independence/
In politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
He did mess up, that’s true. I’m just not sure that he “knew better.” I have a hard time blaming him for not being prescient enough to anticipate just how absurd things would and/or could become.
Some are quick to talk about original intent (i.e. context) when it comes to 2A, for example, but then forget (or refuse) to use that standard when interpreting things like the phrase in question; in other words, Jefferson would not have even considered a sub-Saharan a “man,” as the term is used in the “all men are created equal” phrase, in addition to the phrase being uttered in the context of hereditary monarchy, as has often been pointed out here.
Additionally, I believe that he could have said something as brazen as, “Now, to be clear, I’m only talking about white people here. This does not, I repeat, NOT, apply to anyone besides whites, especially Negroes. And by ‘whites,’ I mean . . .” and by the usual suspects today that explicit safeguard would be just as summarily dismissed as the part after the semicolon has been summarily omitted from the Jefferson Memorial’s wall.
How insensitive. All I saw was a transgender orange.
Imagine the earful we’d-a got if it was a watermelon?
“Now looky heah…”
Fried chicken wings as the main course perhaps?
Jim’s funny and thoughtful essay reminds me when I was stationed in Germany in 1976. I took the unit bus into Frankfurt for sick call, and five black GIs from my unit were with me to be dropped off at the PX, all gabbling and MF all over the place. When we came to a stop light, a truck pulled by us, a fruit truck full of bananas. The blacks immediately rolled down the windows and started hooting and shouting as they stuck their heads out “hey, gimme banana, gimme banana MF, C’mon, gimme!”
The German man driving the truck looked and smiled. “Ja,” he said, Moechten Sie banana?”
“Gimme banana, Man. C’mon, MF. Wan’ MF banana!” Their arms went out, fingers grabbing inches from the fruit; like at the monkey house, and I don’t exaggerate, nor imply racism. They were grabbing and shouting, bodies halfway out of the passenger windows.
The driver happily gave out five bananas (being white, I was ignored, but I wasn’t MF for fruit), and the light changed. Everyone drove on, the blacks all now stuffing their faces with their bananas, I even heard them go “umm’umm” as they ate. Not “Ook”, but it sounded close, bananas sticking out of their mouths. I noted how, with these blacks, as with them all, how quickly they become a pack.
And the driver? Was he the usual kind-hearted European giving blacks a break, or was he secretly laughing at them? Don’t know.
So, when I read the above, when I hear of blacks being mortally offended of any banana reference, or the strength and lost glory of their race, the spiritual greatnesss of Martin Luther King, etc., I think about that day. It never leaves my mind.
&, there I was- doodling all sorts of Evolian, Guenonian, esoteric symbols for my next tattoo…
Hail BANANA!
Oh, & I’ve just ordered the cute little monkey banana holder too 😉
I’m a little late to comment but this article reminds me of the time I was at some group dinner for young adults. There was also another group of African blacks sitting at another table. Out of nowhere someone in our group started making monkey noises. At first I thought what the hell is going? This is funny as hell… OH MY GOD! The optics of my young adult group of white people making monkey noises next to black people. Lucky for us these were African blacks who didn’t think twice of what may have been construed as racial overtones of monkey noises. The people making the noises were just screwing around and were your classic privileged white liberals from upper class families who would rather be dead than be called racist. Rest assured though, if these were American blacks, then we all would have been sent to the hospital and also jailed for assaulting the blacks’ fists with our heads.
Love the Andy Warhol — Velvet Underground banana, JG.
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