The Banana as a Hate Symbol

^[1]1,291 words / 10:10

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here ^[2]. To download the mp3, right-click here ^[2] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

“A Monkey-Themed Banana Holder Is Tearing a Texas City Apart ^[3]” 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.

https://counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Goad-The-Banana-as-a-Hate-Symbol.m4a ^[2]

A more accurate headline would have been “Black People in a Small Texas Town Chimp Out Over a Freakin’ Banana Holder.”

Hutto, Texas ^[4] is a suburb of Austin with a population of only around 27,500, so referring to it as a “city ^[5]” 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 ^[6], 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 ^[7], a failed mayoral candidate ^[8] 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 ^[9], 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 ^[10] 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 ^[11], 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 ^[12] 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 ^[13], 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 ^[14].”

According to Jamaica-born black soccer player John Barnes ^[15], 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.

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 ^[18].

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 ^[19].”

In 2013, Italy’s first black minister, a rotund mudball named Cecile Kyenge ^[20],  was reportedly called a “Congolese monkey” and had bananas thrown at her ^[21] 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 ^[22] 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 ^[23],” 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 ^[24], 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 ^[25] 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 ^[26] 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 ^[27]” 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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