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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.

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!

You’re asking the difference between culture and race. Irish isn’t a race. Therefore it’s not racist to say Irish people eat corned beef.

Fried chicken however is not culturally eaten by black people and that doesn’t even begin to touch on the nuances of slavery that are involved in the origins of soul food.

Long story short you can’t apply stereotypes to races. That is by definition racist.

If I tell people I’m autistic can I just say whatever comes into my head without consequences and then turn it against them if they do?

Wait, What’s this about corned beef? I am Irish (as in actually from Ireland) and I have no idea what that has to do with St Patrick’s day?

It would provide an excuse for someone to raise hell and make others happy.

Fried chicken has historically been used to mock black culture, not celebrate it

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.

Tbh. I’ve been craving chicken and waffles for months. I was like hell yeah hopefully there’s a event or some shit that might have some for sale…

Well no… only one place had it on the menu and it was a gentrified restraunt that was charging 25 bucks for chicken strips and a waffle for 28 bucks.

I was disappointed to say yhe least.

Fried chicken should be served EVERY day.