You have to feel a bit sorry for the administrators at Carondelet High School for Girls in Concord, CA. I mean, how were they to know people would be offended and upset? Who’d ever imagine it?
It stands to reason that if it’s Black History Month, the school would seek to honor it. So why not offer a special menu to mark the occasion? Who’d ever think anyone could be upset by a special menu to honor Black History Month — a lunch of fried chicken, cornbread and watermelon.
How could anyone be upset by that? This is how:
Administrators at a Northern California private school are facing tough questions and offering a big apology after a menu controversy.
Students at Carondelet High School for Girls in Concord wanted to come up with ways to celebrate Black History Month in a lunchtime celebration. But when the Christian school announced a lunch of fried chicken, cornbread and watermelon, students and parents were outraged and offended.
The principal and dean of the school refused to talk to NBC Bay Area on Wednesday, but school officials held an assembly on campus to discuss the issue and sent an apology letter to parents.
“I’d like to apologize for the announcement and any hurt this caused students, parents or community members,” Principal Nancy Libby said in the letter. “Please know that at no time at Carondelet do we wish to perpetrate racial stereotypes.”
And while the menu seemed by most standards an insulting culinary creation reflecting a caricature view of African-Americans a professor notes that in all fairness the issue is a bit more complex than that:
University of San Francisco professor James Taylor said he can see why some students and teachers would be offended, even though the lunch may have been well intentioned.
“Chicken, water melon, collard greens, these stereotypes of black Southern culture that come from the same place where the N-word comes from,” he said.
Ruth Wilson, chair of the African-American Studies Dept. at San Jose State University, said the food isn’t offensive perse – in fact fried chicken is an American mainstay, in large part to Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders.
The reason this particular meal sparks bad feelings, she said, is because Blackface-era cartoons and plays showed African Americans eating these foods in ugly caricature depictions.
The school community could have prevented this, she said, by reaching out to the key stakeholders – black students and parents – and asked them what they think was appropriate. In Silicon Valley, she added, many blacks are not even from the United States, but from around the world and may have enjoyed another cultural dish.
Several students told NBC Bay Area that Libby talked to members of the Black Student Union on campus and the students suggested that the watermelon be taken off the menu.
Eating fried chicken and watermelon are indeed stereotypes. Where did they come from? In May NPR cast light on how the fried chicken and watermelon cliches grew:
I asked Claire Schmidt for help. She’s a professor at the University of Missouri who studies race and folklore. Schmidt said chickens had long been a part of Southern diets, but they had particular utility for slaves. They were cheap, easy to feed and a good source of meat. But then, Schmidt says, came Birth of a Nation.
D.W. Griffith’s seminal and supremely racist 1915 silent movie about the supposedly heroic founding of the Ku Klux Klan was a huge sensation when it debuted. One scene in the three-hor features a group of actors portraying shiftless black elected officials acting rowdy and crudely in a legislative hall. (The message to the audience: These are the dangers of letting blacks vote.) Some of the legislators are shown drinking. Others had their feet kicked up on their desks. And one of them was very ostentatiously eating fried chicken.
“That image really solidified the way white people thought of black people and fried chicken,” Schmidt said.
And more:
Schmidt said that like watermelon, that other food that’s been a mainstay in racist depictions of blacks, chicken was also a good vehicle for racism because of the way people eat it. (According to government stats, blacks are underrepresented among watermelon consumers.) “It’s a food you eat with your hands, and therefore it’s dirty,” Schmidt said. “Table manners are a way of determining who is worthy of respect or not.”
But why does this idea still hold traction, since fried chicken is clearly a staple of the American diet? Surely, KFC, Popeyes and Church’s ain’t national chains — and chicken and waffles aren’t a brunch staple — because of the supposed culinary obsessions of black folks.
“It’s still a way to express racial [contempt] without getting into serious trouble,” Schmidt said. (Among the Code Switch team, we’ve started referring to these types of winking statements as “racist bank shots.”)
“How it’s possible to be both a taboo and a corporate mainstream thing just shows how complicated race in America is,” Schmidt
The school would have probably found it much easier if there had been a Jewish History Month and they had to come up with a menu: Just offer Chinese food.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.