Micheal wrote:
An artist once discussed with me a thought or a theory she had about it, seeing it from an artistic perspective. The watermelon is a disproportionately large fruit, vividly colored and grown in hotter climates more than the cooler northern ones (remember, her theory). The northerner would be less aware of it, the southern resident very aware of it. The large round aspect of the watermelon would go well with the dumb fat poor person depiction in most of the illustrations used in the racist literatiure. The concept of the watermelon being used as an artistic subtext seemed interesting, but I am not an artist. What do the more artistically inclined types here think?
She is black by the way, the artist. Does that change anyhong for you?
Not in the least. Just because an artist can draw an absurd comparison between a large fruit and racist literature about black people does not mean there actually is one. What is a "disproportionately large fruit" anyhow? Disproportionate to what? Other fruits? One of them has to be the biggest. A watermelon is what it is. Her comment reveals just how little reasoning and how much intuition, artistic thinking, and general emotionalism went into this idea; she makes an absurd claim about "disproportionately large fruit" as if there's something inherent in the structure of a watermelon that makes it representative of racism against blacks, when in fact it is what it is because it evolved that way.
It doesn't really matter what the "artistic subtexts" are. "Artistic subtexts" are worthless as hypotheses; any artist can see almost any subtext they want in anything, making it undisproveable and therefor worthless.
Furthermore, being black is really part of the problem.
Black people do not get to declare by fiat what is and isn't racist, acceptable, or unacceptable. The longer we allow this sort of nonsense, the longer there will be a racial divide.
Even looking at Midgen's link establishes this; it shows racist images of blacks eating watermelon.. except that those images would be just as bad with any other food, or no food at all. The article says "inordinately fond of watermelon". Really? What's "inordinately" fond of watermelon? Why is it more racist to be "inordinately" fond of it as opposed to any other food?
Watermelons are entirely incidental to the racist imagery.