this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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No such thing. Ask away!

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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.

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[–] xantoxis 252 points 6 months ago (45 children)

Watermelon and chicken were two of the ways that black people started supporting themselves after being freed from slavery. They were agricultural products they could raise with very little investment and start building wealth from essentially nothing. Racists, not wanting them to prosper, mocked them for their preference for these things, but it's important to note that the mockery didn't stop them from supporting themselves with the foods they were able to produce. To this day black people enjoy these foods, and there's nothing wrong with them enjoying the foods. If you're with your black family, and you want to celebrate your own heritage, this isn't actually a bad way to do it.

However.

When a corporation, particularly a corporation run and staffed by white people, makes a choice to celebrate a significant black cultural date by presenting people with foods that white people used to mock black people, it reads as mockery. (This is especially true in North Carolina, a place where racism is rampant and open.) At best, this is tone deaf; someone along the way should have said "hey, do you think any black people will feel like you're doing this as a racist attack?" And if any one of them had answered "yes" to that question, they wouldn't have done it. It made it through the pipeline to being something they actually did because nobody in the decision chain cares about the racist overtones of what they were doing.

If you're going to do anything to celebrate black history or black culture, failing to ask any black people what they think about it is racism. Cultural sensitivity would have meant getting some input from a few black folks about how they think it should be celebrated--and, had they done that, they would have avoided this mess.

And, just in case anyone was wondering, the VP in charge of this situation is white.

[–] insaneinthemembrane 7 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Who's the company involved in this? I'm not in the US so I've probably missed a lot of context here.

[–] xantoxis 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Spectrum. I think they're mainly an ISP, cable TV, stuff like that. We don't have them around here but I understand them to be a fairly big company.

This one doesn't fall on the whole company, mainly just this one call center, but still, Spectrum corporate should get interested in how this happened.

[–] insaneinthemembrane 2 points 6 months ago

Ah okay. Thank you!

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