In response, IKEA erred on the side of caution and modified the image, causing the catalogue to be delayed. Primary Menu. Search for: Search. Stock Photo. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? 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?
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 in 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. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. In the early modern European imagination, the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant.
There, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. 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. Many slave owners 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. But those moments, I realized, were cloistered events within my family home, reunions, or the circle of our middle-class black neighborhood in North Carolina, where white families had fled the nice brick ranches when people like us arrived.
Yet between childhood and work meetings, something had changed. Banana-eating GIFs. Monkey memes. The first lady depicted as a monster. The commander in chief photoshopped into a historic Black Panther photo.
At the same time that some people were busy building post-racial castles in the air — few black people among them — the pushback against a black president underlined the dangerous endurance of racism.
It is a sobering thing to face your interior white supremacist nag. I had mild indigestion all day, but it had nothing to do with the fruit. It was a profound unease that I, as a black historian who fancies myself informed and evolved, would be so complicit with a stereotype.
I was angry with myself for letting racist rhetoric take over my taste buds. But how did this stereotype come to be? No fruit — with the exception of that troublesome apple Eve got blamed for — has been infused with such negative significance.
It could be that the watermelon came to this country with a bit of a reputation as an Other; the fruit probably originated in arid African climates ancient Egyptians even painted them or left them in pharaonic tombs, probably as water sources for the dead as they traveled thirsty between worlds.
At some point, watermelons emigrated to the Mediterranean, and pink-fleshed, green-skinned melons — the ones we know so well today — began showing up in 17th-century still-life paintings. Perverse racial logic then attached the watermelon to newly freed people, who built a nation in bondage but were slandered as indolent loafers after the Civil War.
As freed people entered the market economy — as wage earners, fruit stand vendors, and emancipated hustlers — they sold watermelons in public squares and pocketed the money for themselves. White supremacist haters took the most exception to black pleasure and enjoyment. American media of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also thrived on the idea that black Americans had a pathological weakness for watermelon.
Post-Civil War newspapers were filled with predictable anecdotes about black fruit thieves often met by armed plantation owners who argued that their melons were an irresistible draw.
Medical journals wrote in scientific earnestness of the black patients — always black patients — whose intestines were clogged by watermelon seeds.
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