Black Guy With Watermelon On His Head

It seems as if every few weeks there's another watermelon controversy. The Boston Herald got in trouble for publishing a cartoon of the White Firm fence jumper, having made his fashion into Barack Obama's bathroom, recommending watermelon-flavored toothpaste to the president. A high-school football coach in Charleston, S Carolina, was briefly fired for a bizarre postal service-game celebration ritual in which his team smashed a watermelon while making apelike noises. While hosting the National Book Awards, the author Daniel Handler (a.grand.a. Lemony Snicket) joked almost how his friend Jacqueline Woodson, who had won the young people's literature accolade for her memoir Chocolate-brown Daughter Dreaming, was allergic to watermelon. And most recently, activists protesting the killing of Michael Brownish were greeted with an ugly brandish while marching through Rosebud, Missouri, on their way from Ferguson to Jefferson City: malt liquor, fried craven, a Confederate flag, and, of grade, a watermelon.

While mainstream-media figures deride these instances of racism, or at least racial insensitivity, another conversation takes place on Twitter feeds and comment boards: What, many ask, does a watermelon have to do with race? What's and then offensive about liking watermelon? Don't white people like watermelon too? Because these conversations tend to focus on the individual intent of the cartoonist, double-decker, or emcee, information technology's all too like shooting fish in a barrel to exculpate them from blame, because the racial pregnant of the watermelon is and so ambiguous.

But the stereotype that African Americans are excessively addicted of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came in full strength when slaves won their emancipation during the Ceremonious War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing and so fabricated the fruit a symbol of their liberty. Southern whites, threatened by blacks' newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of blackness people'due south perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope and 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 one-half a century quondam.

Not that the raw material for the racist watermelon trope didn't exist before emancipation. In the early on 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 repast. In the port urban center of Rosetta he saw the locals eating watermelons "ravenously … as if agape the passer-by was going to snatch them away," and watermelon rinds littered the streets. At that place, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in postal service-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is and then messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so like shooting fish in a barrel, and because it's hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it'southward a fruit you have to sit downwards and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it'south difficult to eat a watermelon by yourself. These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not however take a racial meaning. Americans were but as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels every bit with black Southward Carolina slaves.

Soon after winning their emancipation, many African Americans sold watermelons in club to make a living exterior the plantation system. (Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper)

This may be surprising, given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans' lives. Many slave owners let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a mean solar day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. The slave Israel Campbell would sideslip a watermelon into the bottom of his cotton wool basket when he fell brusque of his daily quota, and then recall the melon at the end of the day and eat it. Campbell taught the trick to some other slave who was often whipped for non reaching his quota, and soon information technology was widespread. When the year'southward cotton fell a few bales short of what the main 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 relish 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 male child, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did go 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 and so stubborn." The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous human relationship between chief and slave.

Emancipation, of course, destroyed that human relationship. Black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons during slavery, but now when they did so information technology was a threat to the racial order. To whites, it seemed now equally 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 soon after her emancipation in 1865. Henry Evans, a immature white boy to whom Clara had likely been a 2d mother, cried for days afterward she left. Merely when he bumped into her on the street one 24-hour interval, he rejected her attempt to make peace. When Clara offered him some watermelon, Henry told her that "he would not consume what free negroes ate."

Newspapers amplified this clan betwixt the watermelon and the complimentary black person. In 1869, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Paper published perhaps the first caricature of blacks reveling in eating watermelon. The adjoining commodity 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."

Perhaps the get-go printed illustration of the racist watermelon trope, c. 1869 (Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper)

2 years after, a Georgia paper 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 blackness-on-black violence with the Ku Klux Klan, request 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 homo on his style 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'due south worst crime was not attempted murder but walking around in public with that ridiculous fruit.

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

As mass-produced pianos and canvas music became pop in the late 19th century, so did "coon songs," popular tunes that mocked African Americans for their lazy, shiftless, kittenish ways. (Courtesy Brown University Library)

Past the early on 20th century, the watermelon stereotype was everywhere—potholders, paperweights, sheet music, common salt-and-pepper shakers. A popular postcard portrayed an elderly blackness man conveying a watermelon in each arm, only to happen upon a stray craven. The homo laments, "Dis am de wust perdickermunt ob mah life." Equally 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 Slap-up Railroad train Robbery in 1903, co-directed The Watermelon Patch ii years afterward, which featured "darkies" sneaking into a watermelon patch; men dressed equally skeletons chasing away the watermelon thieves (à la the Ku Klux Klan, who dressed equally ghosts to affright blacks); a watermelon-eating contest; and a band of white vigilantes ultimately smoking the watermelon thieves out of a motel. The long history of white violence to maintain the racial order was played for laughs.

Information technology may seem giddy to aspect so much meaning to a fruit. And the truth is that there is zip inherently racist about watermelons. Just cultural symbols have the power to shape how we see our world and the people in information technology, such as when the constabulary officeholder Darren Wilson saw Michael Brownish every bit a superhuman "demon." These symbols have roots in existent historical struggles—specifically, in the instance of the watermelon, white people's fear of the emancipated black body. Whites used the stereotype to denigrate black people—to accept something they were using to further their own freedom and arrive an object of ridicule. It ultimately does non matter if someone ways to offend when they tap into the racist watermelon stereotype, because the stereotype has a life of its own.