How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope

[MachineGhost]

Fascinating.

[quote=http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... pe/383529/]But the stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

Not that the raw material for the racist watermelon trope didn’t exist before emancipation. In the early modern European imagination, the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant. The watermelon, noted a British officer stationed in Egypt in 1801, was “a poor Arab’s feast,” a meager substitute for a proper meal. In the port city of Rosetta he saw the locals eating watermelons “ravenously ... as if afraid the passer-by was going to snatch them away,” and watermelon rinds littered the streets. There, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so easy, and it’s hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it’s a fruit you have to sit down and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it’s hard to eat a watermelon by yourself.  These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves.

This may be surprising given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans’ lives. Slave owners often let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. The slave Israel Campbell would slip a watermelon into the bottom of his cotton basket when he fell short of his daily quota, and then retrieve the melon at the end of the day and eat it. Campbell taught the trick to another slave who was often whipped for not reaching his quota, and soon the trick was widespread. When the year’s cotton fell a few bales short of what the master had figured, it simply remained “a mystery.”

But Southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. Slaves were usually careful to enjoy watermelon according to the code of behavior established by whites. When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

Emancipation, of course, destroyed that relationship. Black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons during slavery, but now when they did so it was a threat to the racial order. To whites, it seemed now as if blacks were flaunting their newfound freedom, living off their own land, selling watermelons in the market, and—worst of all—enjoying watermelon together in the public square. One white family in Houston was devastated when their nanny Clara left their household shortly after her emancipation in 1865. Henry Evans, a young white boy to whom Clara had likely been a second mother, cried for days after she left. But when he bumped into her on the street one day, he rejected her attempt to make peace. When Clara offered him some watermelon, Henry told her that “he would not eat what free negroes ate.”

Newspapers amplified this association between the watermelon and the free black person. In 1869, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published perhaps the first caricature of blacks reveling in watermelon. The adjoining article 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.”

Two years later, a Georgia newspaper reported that a black man had been arrested for poisoning a watermelon with the intent of killing a neighbor. The story was headlined “Negro Kuklux” and equated black-on-black violence with the Ku Klux Klan, asking facetiously whether the Radical Republican congressional subcommittee investigating the Klan would investigate this freedman’s actions. The article began with a scornful depiction of the man on his way to the courthouse: “On Sabbath afternoon we encountered a strapping 15th Amendment bearing an enormous watermelon in his arms en route for the Court-house.” It was as if the freedman’s worst crime was not attempted murder but walking around in public with that ridiculous fruit.

The primary message of the watermelon stereotype was that black people were not ready for freedom. During the 1880 election season, Democrats accused the South Carolina state legislature, which had been majority-black during Reconstruction, of having wasted taxpayers’ money on watermelons for their own refreshment; this fiction even found its way into history textbooks. D. W. Griffith’s white-supremacist epic film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, included a watermelon feast in its depiction of emancipation, as corrupt northern whites encouraged the former slaves to stop working and enjoy some watermelon instead. In these racist fictions, blacks were no more deserving of freedom than were children.

By the early twentieth century, the watermelon stereotype was everywhere—potholders, paperweights, sheet music, salt-and-pepper shakers. A popular postcard portrayed an elderly black man carrying a watermelon in each arm only to happen upon a stray chicken. The man laments, “Dis am de wust perdickermunt ob mah life.” As a black man, the postcard implied, he had few responsibilities and little interest in anything beyond his own stomach. Edwin S. Porter, famous for directing The Great Train Robbery in 1903, co-directed The Watermelon Patch two years later, which featured “darkies” sneaking into a watermelon patch, men dressed as skeletons chasing away the watermelon thieves (à la the Ku Klux Klan, who dressed as ghosts to frighten blacks), a watermelon-eating contest, and a band of white vigilantes ultimately smoking the watermelon thieves out of a cabin. The long history of white violence to maintain the racial order was played for laughs.[/quote]

[Mountaineer]

Humans suck.

We are indeed born sinners.  Nothing much has changed since watermelon became a symbol.  It is like the movie, American Beauty ... we look good on the outside, but we are pretty disgusting behind the closed doors of our facades - literally and figuratively.  We just point fingers and say thank God I'm not like those other sinners.  Oh what lies we like to tell ourselves.

... M

Q. I’ve heard it said, “We’re not sinners because we sin. We sin because we’re sinners.” Would you be kind enough to elaborate on this statement in a little more depth.

A. It means we don’t start off pure and acquire the habit of sinning by doing it repeatedly over time. We are born sinners and our sinful behavior is a manifestation of our nature. We have no choice about it.

In Psalm 51:5 David said, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” He wasn’t just talking about himself there. From the moment of conception we all had a sin nature and sinful behavior would become one of the defining characteristics of our life. The phrase “sin nature” means it’s in our nature to sin, and that will be the case until we die or are raptured.

That means even after we’ve been saved and have the seal of the Holy Spirit we can’t completely stop sinning because being saved does not remove our sin nature. Christians who think they no longer sin don’t understand how pervasive our sin nature really is. They believe sin is just a type of behavior, when actually it’s a built in flaw in the system that controls way we think and feel. Therefore, it’s not what we do that makes us sinners, it’s who we are that makes us sinners.

Cleaning up our behavior is a good thing to do. But thinking that means we’ve stopped sinning makes us like the white washed tombs Jesus spoke of in Matt. 23:27, beautiful on the outside but still full of everything unclean on the inside.

This is why we so desperately need a Savior. Had Jesus not been willing to die in our place to pay the penalty for our sins we would have been unable to save ourselves from the consequences of our sinful lives.

Paul said, “What a wretched man I am. Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24-25)

[Libertarian666]

So this is racist? Who knew?

http://cottagelife.com/entertaining/how ... on-explode

[curlew]

That means even after we’ve been saved and have the seal of the Holy Spirit we can’t completely stop sinning because being saved does not remove our sin nature. Christians who think they no longer sin don’t understand how pervasive our sin nature really is. They believe sin is just a type of behavior, when actually it’s a built in flaw in the system that controls way we think and feel. Therefore, it’s not what we do that makes us sinners, it’s who we are that makes us sinners.

So basically you are saying that if I'm using watermelons in a derogatory way as a racial stereotype to demean black people and I ask Jesus into my heart and get saved I will probably still keep on doing this?

Or did you just see a way to inject your religion into a thread with an otherwise meaningless post?

[Mountaineer]

That means even after we’ve been saved and have the seal of the Holy Spirit we can’t completely stop sinning because being saved does not remove our sin nature. Christians who think they no longer sin don’t understand how pervasive our sin nature really is. They believe sin is just a type of behavior, when actually it’s a built in flaw in the system that controls way we think and feel. Therefore, it’s not what we do that makes us sinners, it’s who we are that makes us sinners.

So basically you are saying that if I'm using watermelons in a derogatory way as a racial stereotype to demean black people and I ask Jesus into my heart and get saved I will probably still keep on doing this?

Or did you just see a way to inject your religion into a thread with an otherwise meaningless post?

I was merely building on Desert's comment "humans suck".  I guess you are also reinforcing that comment by injecting your religion of 'lack of tolerance of views that differ from mine'.    If you do not think "humans suck" or, as the quote I posted said, humans are all sinners, I'd love to know how you explain world events, historical and current. 

... M