Disclaimer: I am not trolling, I am an autistic person who doesn’t understand so many social nuances. Also I am from New Hampshire (97% white), so I just don’t have any close African-American friends that I am willing to risk asking such a loaded question.
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.
Irish isn’t a race
Well, not any more, anyways.
Fried chicken has historically been used to mock black culture, not celebrate it
Might be more life to serving just potatoes on St Pats from that perspective.
I don’t understand that, though…
Fried chicken is fuckin delicious.
That’s part of the cruelty. Almost everybody loves fried chicken. But growing up in the deep south, they were mocked for it in nasty ways I witnessed (but don’t feel comfortable describing).
I think part of the disconnect is that you don’t see that same mockery in the north.
Yes absolutely. I went to high school in the north from 02-06 and took an elective class that was African American history for the first half of the school year and Vietnam War history the second half. My teacher for both was a black woman and the first day of class she asked the class what some stereotypes they have heard of black people were, and of course people mentioned all of them. Whe fried chicken was mentioned she said, and I quote, “No we actually don’t like fried chicken, WE LOVE IT!”. So yeah I mean in the north there’s a lot less hate behind it and it’s more seen as just a “funny observation”. And not to take away from any true hate or racism but the idea of liking fried chicken being a bad thing is so ridiculous to me because fried chicke is fucking amazing.
This really does nail it. In the north, we do have the stereotype that black people like fried chicken. However, that is seen as neutral or positive. Fried chicken is delicious and black people tend to make great fried chicken. What’s not to like?
Yeah I don’t think anyone I’m friends with or close to that is white views it as a negative stereotype at all up here in NY. However if you drive out to small towns in NY there still uneducated racists flying confederate flags on their front porch, unfortunately.
Everyone ate it too. The mockery was because
- they were messy to eat
- they were staples commonly eaten
- they were made and sold by black people early in their steps of economic independence following slavery.
- racism doesn’t have to make sense.
If you hate someone, anything they do can be something you use to express your hate, even if you do it to.
If you hate someone, anything they do can be something you use to express your hate, even if you do it to.
Yeah I think this is the big kicker right here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_Chicken_Inn Black people and chicken was like leprechauns and breakfast cereal for a while.
Why?
wikipedia has fairly fleshed out histories:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_stereotype https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_chicken_stereotype
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?
Yes you can, in fact many people just say they are autistic.
Ultimate life hack UNLOCKED
Fried chicken should be served EVERY day.
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?
Irish-Americans found an affinity for corned beef as they finally had access to meat and especially beef. They initially lived in and near Jewish neighborhoods, so, it became popular to boil up corned beef, cabbage, and root vegetables.
I believe Americans serve it on Paddy’s day and / or is seen as a stereotypically Irish meal over there. I do recall being asked over there if I ate it regularly.
As I said in another comment there my oul boy did actually really like it as a meal but I think it’s more a misunderstanding though it does have some weird historical roots.
Thats wild I didn’t know that was a mainly Irish-American dish. My mother always makes it every St Patrick’s day I think it’s delicious. Don’t tell me that soda bread isn’t traditionally Irish either??
Fear not…Brown soda bread is big here. Definitely my most consumed bread.
“How is eating fried chicken and watermelon wrong? Man, if you don’t like fried chicken and watermelon, something is wrong with you!”
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.
It isn’t racist to eat chicken and waffles on Juneteenth. It would be like eating ham on Thanksgiving. You can do it and you can do it with friends if everyone is on board for that.
Is it not common just to make something when you want it?
Maybe I’m too Canadian to understand but do you usually go out for meals?
Millennial Americans will cook, if it isnt too complicated.
GenZ Americans won’t cook unless it is putting something in the microwave.
Who asked you?
The same person that asked you to respond with this nonsense.
Cooking is not so much of a generational thing and more of a time/convenience thing. Some people just don’t have time to cook. They could be working double jobs, working late hours, etc. And some people just don’t want to cook or like the convenience of take out food. Nothing wrong with that
Fried chicken is difficult to make at home due to the cookware and temperatures involved. It’s also a LOT of cooking oil, so it doesn’t really make sense unless you’re frying a LOT of chicken.
I mean its not the exact same crisp but a small layer of oil in a standard pan’ll still beat waiting months I’d argue
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Because of a thread that is linked to the question.
they said because of the tradition of corned beef and cabbage on st patricks day, it’s a fair question
It would provide an excuse for someone to raise hell and make others happy.
I’d argue it depends on who is serving it and what their intentions are. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. I went to a local Juneteenth celebration and the food stands were serving some fried chicken, collard greens, jollof rice, etc.
Totally agree about intention. Food is not inherently racist it’s all about intent.
Both tburkhol and I posted about Coon Chicken Inn – a place for white people BY white people with a denigrating caricature of a black man as their logo (on their delivery vehicles, menu, and even entrances).
spujb links to the chicken stereotype.
It is one thing for a group of people to choose what food to serve themselves, and something else when an oppressed group is mocked, denied rights, and then illustrated as liking foods that EVERYONE likes as if those foods are somehow a hilarious thing for them to eat. Side note: Sooo many places serve fried chicken that the only reason it is racist is associations like Coon Chicken Inn (and the racism leading to its creation). Lots of BBQ places in particular serve collards as well as Caribbean spots. Jollof is specifically African (not American). If I see Jollof or Fufu on the menu, I’m hoping for cassava leaves instead of collards, but I understand it isn’t as available in the U.S.
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!
Hey , I totally read all the stuff you just wrote and I totally agree. Can I borrow fifty cents?
So not to nitpick here, but Juneteenth isn’t intended to remember the destruction of any neighborhood. Black Wall Steet, Central Park, etc. were all significant things that happened, but not related to Juneteenth. It’s the day that the last slaves in Texas were actually declared free by the Union army on June 19th in Galveston.
Thanks for catching that. I kept trying to figure out how to frame greenwood and Parrish street as similar early attempts to bring black Americans into the fold of capital, one of which saw a violent attack by the white hegemon that was opposed to expansion of capital to black Americans but it just kept not fitting.
I guess my brain just subbed it in cause I was turning it over in my head. Edited.
Where tl;dr?
It is a nuanced topic that requires explanation of certain history. There is no TL;DR
Irish people are white and therefore cannot experience racism.
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i’m not.
if you want to understand why the history of racism against irish americans after the wave of immigration in response to the manmade famine doesn’t factor into racism irish americans experience today (none, zero, irish americans do not experience racism today), read my top level comment.
the defining factors are that irish americans were integrated into white supremacist power structures and black americans weren’t, that st. patricks day isn’t treated with any reverence in the united states and is instead one of the big four drinking holidays and the negative stereotypes of irish americans from the 1800s don’t survive today in word or in deed.
i chose not to touch on the lingering economic impact of racism against irish americans as opposed to racism against black americans because they’re in two different universes. one was largely dismantled before any of us were born and the other is still systemic and pervasive to this day.
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The ops question is about America. I explicitly made a top level comment about America.
When someone asked for a tldr I did not specify Irish Americans, but that should be clear from the thread, my post and the op.
You’re replying to a comment where I explicitly specified America.
America is not the world but we’re talking about America here.
It’s true they were born with immunity. I heard one of those potato eating bastards has a pot o’ gold.
I feel like this all hinges on the assumption that black people do not proportionally like watermelon and fried chicken more than other groups of people. I’d be interested in some stats on that. A quick search brought up this study which shows that they do https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9884589/
However, now I have to wonder if they eat more chicken than other ethnic groups due to generational poverty and the fact that chicken has been historically the most affordable meat. I didn’t have any success finding the answer to that question.
Regardless, those foods are delicious and I’d be happy if a tradition of eating watermelon and fried chicken for Juneteenth became more popular. What really matters is if any significant amount of people actually feel discriminated against for it or if the social justice warriors are picking this fight on behalf of people that don’t actually care.
No.
Serving a dish which is part of the post slavery white supremacist negative stereotype of black Americans used to reify the Jim Crow and segregationist regimes on the day set aside to mark the freeing of the last slaves would not be more or less racist weather black Americans enjoyed eating it or not.
Are people getting upset over nothing? I don’t know. Are some people not allowed to get upset? I don’t know.
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The issue isn’t eating what you want.
The issue is that there is a cultural celebration involving food. Rather than try to serve food that fits within that cultural celebration, food was served based on a racial stereotype.
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It doesn’t make my point incorrect.
The way I see it isn’t that stereotypes are inherently awful, it’s that they have various levels of impact. Racism against African Americans is considered more heavily because they have such a long history of oppression that not many other groups have had. Most other groups didn’t meet fierce resistance to obtaining basic rights for as long as they did
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Um, but actual Irish-Americans love eating corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day. It’s racist to celebrate your heritage? Or just to try things from other people’s cultures?
In my experience, when you get an over-the-top response from someone from a sh.itjust.works user, the best response it to just block them.
Found the bigot.
I bet you go to Taco Bell for Cinco de mayo too.
Nah, go bugger lol. One side of my family is mostly from potato famine Irish, and we all love some corned beef. It’s definitely on the menu for holidays
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