Counter-Currents
Eating Watermelon Is Hardly the Worst Thing Black People Do
Jim Goad
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
1,583 words / 12:19
As we all commemorate National Watermelon Month and finalize plans to celebrate National Watermelon Day on August 3, it has come to my attention that many black people are terrified of eating watermelon in front of whites.
What a strange thing to fear. I’d think it’s better than being tied to a post and whipped for getting uppity with your slave master, but I’ve never been a black slave, so I wouldn’t know. Then again, neither have any of the modern black writers who write agonized treatises about trembling in horror of confirming “stereotype threat” by nibbling on watermelon under the cruel white gaze.
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On Monday in The Baltimore Banner, John-John Williams IV — apparently three John-John Williamses weren’t enough — wrote about a black woman he knows who refuses to eat watermelon in places where she might risk being seen by a white person:
Chrissy Thornton has a list of rules when it comes to foods she’ll eat in front of white people: no watermelon, no fried chicken, no ribs. She doesn’t like the optics.
“It’s not about watermelon. People say it’s healthy. Of course it is. But that’s not what they see when they see us eating it. They see a stereotype that was created decades ago,” said the 48-year-old Reisterstown resident, who is Black [sic]. “I probably eat more watermelon than anyone I know. But I do it in the privacy of my own people. It’s one more way we can’t allow our counterparts to see us that way.”
A “counterpart” such as myself would assume that black people in Baltimore have more pressing problems than having me accidentally espy them eating watermelon — chief among them living around other black people in Baltimore.
In 2022, balding and bespectacled black lady Renee Graham wrote in the Boston Globe:
On my first trip to Italy years ago, my friends and I did something we’d never dared before — we ate watermelon in public, purchased from a street vendor in Rome.
In 2019, Cynthia Greenlee — a purple-lipped recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in Literature and winner of the James Beard Foundation Award — wrote about her dread of eating watermelon in front of white people:
My hand hovered over the fruit tray, about to spear a chunk of watermelon, when a white person walked up. I paused.
Does she ever pause while walking the streets alone at night and sees an unfamiliar black man approaching her? And if so, has she ever written about that?
In November 2014, while accepting a National Book Award for her “adolescent verse memoir” Brown Girl Dreaming, Flavor Flav lookalike Jacqueline Woodson suffered the indignity of being reminded by Daniel Handler, the white man who introduced her, that she was allergic to watermelon. The previous summer, Handler had graciously hosted Woodson at his Cape Cod home and tried to serve watermelon soup, whereupon Woodson informed him that she was allergic to it. But Woodson rewarded his generosity by writing an essay in The New York Times she titled “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke.” She accused Handler of operating from “a place of ignorance.”
In 2015, gay black TV broadcaster Vester Flanagan shot two white co-workers live and on camera, then blew off his own head during a police chase. He’d previously claimed that workers had taunted him by intermittently placing a watermelon “in a strategic location where it would be visible to newsroom employees entering and exiting the building.”
In the grand scheme of things, I’d reckon it’s worse to commit a double homicide than allegedly being forced to view the occasional strategically-placed watermelon, but I’m clearly operating from a place of ignorance.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Bomb Inside My Brain here.
In 2018, the President of New York University said it had been “inexcusably insensitive” that in the course of honoring Black History Month, a dining hall at his school offered what The New York Times called “two beverages with racist connotations: Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water.”
In 2019, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts offered a formal apology after a black teacher named Marvelyne Lamy claimed that a staff member had told her group of black students, “No food, no drink, and no watermelon.” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said that the purported remark was “incredibly disturbing.” The story made international news, with the Daily Mail dubbing it “shocking racist behavior.” The shockingly racist staff member claims they were misheard, however, and that they’d merely said, “No food, no drink, and no water bottles.”
In 2022, officials at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis had dared to offer “Juneteenth Watermelon Salad” but backpedaled when it had been deemed “offensive after a photo of the salad circulated on social media.” A museum rep added, “We deeply regret the hurt and the pain that the food offering in our food court has caused, and we apologize.”
I’d bet my house that I experienced more pain reading that comment than any black children did at the prospect of eating free watermelon salad.
In 2023, the principal of a middle school in Nyack, New York sent a groveling apology letter to parents:
The offering of chicken and waffles as an entree with watermelon as a dessert on the first day of Black History Month was inexcusably insensitive and reflected a lack of understanding of our district’s vision to address racial bias.
Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute — what’s so bad about eating watermelon? Alongside the similarly hateful banana, it’s my favorite fruit. One summer about nine or ten years ago, back when Jacqueline Woodson was grieving about painful watermelon jokes and Vester Flanagan was killing white people because he’d felt taunted by their watermelon placement, I polished off three watermelons in five days.
The Wikipedia page “Watermelon stereotype” attempts to explain the roots of this deeply painful meme:
The watermelon stereotype is an anti-Black [sic] racist trope originating in the Southern United States. It first arose as a backlash against African American emancipation and economic self-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. But for many in the majority white culture watermelons embodied, and threatened, a loss of dominance. Southern White [sic] resentment against African Americans led to a politically potent cultural caricature, using the watermelon to disparage African Americans as childish and unclean, among other negative attributes.
While researching this article, I saw this narrative unquestioningly pushed over and over and over and over and over and over and over: Whites felt threatened by black entrepreneurial savvy as demonstrated through watermelon sales, so in order to demoralize them and thwart the possibility that blacks would, oh, master math and physics and economic theory and suddenly start inventing things, they created a cruel stereotype that blacks enjoy eating watermelon.
It would have been nice if any of these people peddling this storyline had cited evidence from any white person saying something in the spirit of, “We felt economically threatened by these coons selling watermelons, so we had to shut ’em down with gross stereotypes of coons eating watermelons.” Is it too much of me to ask for even one citation?
The Wikipedia page on “watermelon stereotype” says the “first known image associating Black [sic] Americans with watermelons” was a benign 1866 illustration adjoining a newspaper article in Charleston, South Carolina that explained:
The Southern negro in no particular more palpably exhibits his epicurean tastes than in his excessive fondness for watermelons. The juvenile freedman is especially intense in his partiality for that refreshing fruit.
But the same Wikipedia page suggests that around the same time, black minstrels were propagating their own watermelon stereotypes:
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.
Sample lyrics from “Oh, Dat Watermelon”:
Den Oh, dat watermelon,
Lamb of goodness, you must die.
I’m gwine to join de contraband children,
Gwine to git a home bye and bye.
Excuse me for suspecting that these black minstrels unwittingly presented far grosser caricatures of black behavior than that anemic newspaper article did.
Film shorts from the late 1890s such as Watermelon Contest depicted black men sloppily gobbling on the oversized and deeply-hydrating fruit — but, as with the minstrels of the 1870s singing watermelon songs, these were black people depicting themselves.
I could be wrong, but it seems as if most of the egregiously cartoonish depictions of blacks and watermelons that were produced by whites — things such as the “coon cards” of the early 1900s, songs such as 1916’s “Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha!, Ha!, Ha!” and 1941’s Universal Pictures animated cartoon Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat — came after the watermelon songs by black minstrels in the 1870s. It doesn’t seem as if whites created this stereotype as much as they observed it and then appropriated it.
Rather than modern white people being “inexcusably insensitive,” I think it’s more accurate to describe contemporary blacks as being pathetically thin-skinned.
I can think of a lot of worse things that black people do than eating watermelon. I doubt it’s even in the Top 100. And yet, unlike eating watermelon, they aren’t afraid to do most of these things in public.
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34 comments
Negro Fatigue: a rapidly progressive disease which metastasizes indefinitely and exponentially but, despite the sufferers’ pleas for it, does not grant them the release of death.
I actually had a black coworker tell me about this years ago. Like Goad, my immediate thought was “All the unbecoming things blacks do in the public eye and this is where you draw the line?”
I’ve seen a flatbed truck driving around the ghetto selling watermelon at least a dozen times in my life, but my friends always think I’m making it up.
There is a scene in the 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz that depicts a black man sitting in the middle of a watermelon patch during the big storm that whisks Dorothy away to Oz. Every time he gets struck by lightning he just scratches his head and looks around. I can’t seem to find it anywhere. A little help please?
It’s on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Yy19hafoc
Here’s a version that’s been cleaned up and looks a little crisper. He’s not in a watermelon patch though. He comes out of a shed and takes a few bolts to the head without seeming to notice, then does a flip when one strikes his feet. The scene starts at 35:12.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz2rnKDv1OI
Thank you so much for that. I could have sworn he was in a watermelon patch but it was still funny nonetheless.
I object to the piggesh manner in which they doubtlessly consume watermelon, and not the consumption of watermelon itself. Eating with an open mouth, smacking lips, and so on.
I was always somewhat apathetic about watermelon-I never disliked it but was never all that enthusiastic about it either. This year though my lady has been buying it and it is really delicious. Needless to say we cut the watermelon in squares and partake as civilized white people do. I don’t think I could stomach being watching a video of most blacks eating anything for more than a few seconds, least of all watermelon.
“Eating with an open mouth, smacking lips, and so on.”
Hey, if you had lips like that you’d smack ’em too! 🙂
And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride!
If I were black I would not be who I am, same if I were Japanese. That stated had I been born black, and thus be something utterly and irretrievably different than what I am, I would hope I would be an exception to the rule. There are genteel, decent blacks, although an exception and far too much of an exception to override the general principles at hand of them collectively as a group.
“Eating with an open mouth, smacking lips, and so on.”
This African doesn’t mind the watermelon stereotype:
— [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wyhhxOZazI ]
Hmm… no, I don’t think I want to click on that youtube link.
“Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute — what’s so bad about eating watermelon?”
Nice to see the adjective “cotton-pickin’,” while endangered, isn’t extinct.
That and “God damn it to hell!” were favorite expletives of grandpa, who was functionally more like a dad. Fond memories.
You may enjoy that great 1967 movie, Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers, restored in all its glory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0DkeTvdEoo
Of course, set in the south, but IIRC, no blacks or watermelon are to be seen. It has Sonny Tufts and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom so it can’t be bad.
I just don’t see anything wrong with liking watermelon. Ethnic cuisine styles certainly exist. It’s just very strange that Blacks seem so very touchy about all that.
What are Blacks not touchy about?
If biting into an uncooked fruit is cuisine, I’d like to take a tour of their space station.
The funniest thing I have seen regarding black eating habits is how many of them will literally wash chicken with dish soap before cooking it. I even saw a video of a lady using bleach along with the soap. Apparently they don’t know or trust that properly cooking it to the right temp will take care of any germs.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_eQCzw08CZQ
“You gotta use name brand Clorox or else it not gonna taste right.”
Thanks for the video. I had to crack a smile upon viewing this zinger in the comment section:
Poor Clorox is gonna have to come out with a statement saying that their products are not food safe smh
Yes, they certainly will. Better safe than sorry. You wouldn’t think it would occur to anyone to wash chicken with soap, let alone bleach; but then again, you also wouldn’t think that a woman would intentionally spray a powerful adhesive on her hair.
Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to wash raw chicken as the water droplets will spread germs – salmonella for instance. Washing raw chicken with washing up liquid and bleach in order to prepare it for food consumption seems to betray an almost Cargo Cult mindset.
Excellent humor today, Jim.
I don’t eat watermelon, and not because negroids love it, as I really dislike the taste. Cantaloupe is my melon of choice.
I generally dislike Negroes, but it would never cross my mind to malign them for eating two of the best foods known to man: fried chicken and watermelon. And it’s a shame they’d deprive themselves the pleasure for fear I’d do that.
Dave Chappelle once said something along the lines of “Show me one white person that doesn’t like fried chicken and watermelon!”
Here’s another interesting factoid. Fried chicken and watermelon are both extremely popular foods in China, of all places.
I can think of a lot of worse things that black people do than eating watermelon. I doubt it’s even in the Top 100. And yet, unlike eating watermelon, they aren’t afraid to do most of these things in public.
As soon as I read the opening few paragraphs, I thought to myself “Damn, I wish blacks would take some of that self-consciousness and paranoia and apply it to their movie theater behavior. Or, you know, their tendency to rob, rape, and steal.” I guess whites might benefit too much from that for them to seriously consider it, though.
If they are self conscious about eating watermelon in public, imagine their shock when they find out how we feel about them twerking on top of cop cars.
“I probably eat more watermelon than anyone I know. But I do it in the privacy of my own people… we can’t allow our counterparts to see us that way.”
I gather that the reason they don’t want to “confirm the stereotype” is not that the stereotype is false, but because it’s true, and that seems to go for almost all the stereotypes.
But it was kind of her to refer to us as their “counterparts”. Usually they’ve got different words for us…
Is watermelon salad racist? It’s got feta.
https://reciperunner.com/watermelon-salad-cucumber-feta/
The watermelons here in Costa Rica are superb, but obviously I will have to go into the streets and inform the townfolk that they are a problematic fruit. Now, then. What’s the Spanish for “cultural appropriation”?
They are so painfully insecure. Why do the studies always come back saying blacks have incredible self-esteem?
Wifewaffen: July 19, 2024 Why do the studies always come back saying blacks have incredible self-esteem?
—
They are portrayed over and over on the electronic Jew in shitcoms and commercials as being esteemed. Didn’t that Negro serial rapist of White women, Cosby — “America’s dad” — play a doctor on TV?
Dr. Pierce ridiculed that phony depiction of esteem as “niggers in lab coats.”
Aptly put by Dr. Pierce!
One of my fondest memories is being at the old gorilla pit at the Bronx Zoo and watching an overweight colored gentleman eat a banana as all the tourists, and gorillas, watched him. If we’d had cellphones back then, it would’ve been everywhere.
Brilliant!
According to Cormac McCarthy, poor whites’ behavior with watermelons was much more shameful!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6Mpg1HQCw
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