With the Presidential election over, I thought I'd revisit one of the more onerous political tactics of the campaign. This direct mail piece, now known as the Obama Bucks mailer, was created and deseminated by a California Republican group in the waning months of the campaign. It soon gained national media attention, to the embarassment of the GOP and African American Republicans. There are conflicting reports as to the originator of the design and its intent, but the propagators of the mailer (who were white), unapologetically defended their actions. Their most interesting assertion was that the imagery was in no way racially insensitive because they ate those foods themselves, and no malice was intended.
So is the depiction of an African American eating watermelon, ribs and fried chicken a racist sterotype? What about an Irishman eating potatoes? An Asian eating rice? A Latino eating a taco?
Examining the the foods separately, we know that fried chicken originated in the South during the Colonial era and a certain Kentucky Colonel packaged, mass-marketed, and popularized it starting in the 1800s. Watermelon is a fruit indigenous to warmer climates, with possible origins from southern Africa. Spare ribs, according to my research, has no ties geographically. Kool Aid was invented in the midwest during the 1920s and is a product brand owned and nationally distributed by the General Foods corporation. Fried chicken and watermelon are not exclusively enjoyed in the South, but certainly has its roots threre. To date, I've seen no data to support that one race significantly consumes more of these foods than another. Kool Aid's demographic is driven more by economic status than ethnicity. So do these symbols, individually or collectively, used in tandem with a black person, constitute racial imagery? Or is it a straightforward cultural depiction of a particular race?
The answer lies in American historical imagery. Since the early 1800s, advertising, packaging and editorials portrayed African Americans as naive, childish, superstitious, simple minded, and in many cases, alien and sub-human. In many of these depictions, blacks were consuming fried chicken, spare ribs, and watermelons. While the renditions of African Americans were exaggerated with the full intent of denigration, the foods themselves added no additional negative symbolism. But the fact that these symbols were used so pervasively as accompaniments to racial stereostypes is what gives them their potency. Their usage, with the full knowledge of their historical intent of subjugating an entire race, is the core of the issue. Using this same standard, a Jewish person eating a bagel would not solicit outrage, but propogating the historical image of a Jew sprouting horns and a tail certainly would.
The California Republicans' claim of ignorance of the Obama Bucks' negative effects is disingenuous at best. It seems incredulous that those symbols would just be randomly chosen and would coincidentally happen to be an unintentional racial insult. In a post-election televised roundable, Newsweek editor Eleanor Clift warned that the Republican Party could be turning into the party of the Confederacy, doomed to serve a shrinking constituency. Controversies like these will only reinforce that perception.
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