Unfunny Watermelons

2/27/09

Twice in a week I found myself accosted by racist slurs on President Barack Obama, and, by extension, on others of darker skin loosely but not always accurately called “African Americans.”

The first came in a group e-mail — I have asked to be taken off the sender’s distribution list — depicting the White House. In place of the Rose Garden was, courtesy of Photoshop, one supposes, a watermelon patch. “What a waste of a perfectly good Rose Garden,” the caption read. I stared at the screen for a full five seconds unbelieving, unable at first to grasp the meaning of what I was seeing, then unable to hold back the anger. “NOT FUNNY!” I e-mailed back to all on the list. “Un-American! Racist! Stop it!”

I had just gotten over the shock of the e-mail when while vacationing in Arizona I encountered a man in a Starbucks wearing a baseball cap adorned with a replica of the Confederate flag and a T-shirt depicting a broadly smiling Barack Obama in waiter’s livery proffering a watermelon. The lettering across the T-shirt read: “M.F. Obama.” Saving me the trouble of picking a fight, another customer said to Mr. T-Shirt, “Hey, you can’t go around wearing that sort of thing.” Whereupon a young woman employee of the place weighing certainly no more than 90 pounds and being all of 4 foot 9 inches tall stepped between the two men and asked them to take their argument outside. They did, and the rest of us caffeine addicts stood there rather stupidly, saying nothing, absently paying for our beverages and getting the hell out. The Arizona Republic newspaper that morning featured much information on the President’s visit scheduled later that morning for Phoenix, making the unfortunate coffee shop event a major embarrassment. I have failed to mention that among the staff and patrons present were several Hispanic Americans. They seemed to shrug off the incident, perhaps long since inured to the taunts of rednecks. They seemed, in fact, rather resigned to the appearance of the big boob and his obscene T-shirt. That racism — incipient and otherwise — exists is no surprise. What is surprising in a very unpleasant way is how some people think they dare express it so freely and outrageously as did my (former) e-mail correspondent and the lout in the T-shirt at Starbucks. More disturbing than the incidents themselves is what must lurk not so far beneath the surface of the impulses that create them.

I’m sure the watermelon patch and the offensive T-shirt are and should be protected by free-speech laws. But that’s not the point. It’s whatever makes people think such things are either a) funny or b) somehow appropriate as part of what’s left of civil discourse. The linking of any person of dark skin to watermelons is, perhaps at most, merely a dumb grammar-school prank. However, the pairing of such a silly and pointless symbol with the likeness of the Confederate flag verges, it seems to me, on sedition or, at the very least, inciting to riot.

Even though it took more than a century following the Civil War to begin in earnest the restoration of descendants of freed slaves to full citizenship, the war has been over for all that time — the Confederacy definitely having come out on the losing end. It is well to remember, as Abraham Lincoln said, the South desired war to destroy the Union. The North accepted war to preserve it. Meanwhile, the persistence of the Confederate flag as variously displayed on pickup truck bumpers, hats, shirts and the occasional billboard is obviously meant as a thumb in the eye of African American dignity and of the political will to preserve the Union with liberty and justice for all. Last November, by a healthy and determinative majority, American voters black and white alike — joined by millions of Latinos, Latinas and Asian Americans — elected Barack Obama President of the United States.

True, millions more voters — mostly in the Southern states where all these years along resentment of the surrender at Appomattox still simmers — cast their ballots for another. It is as if justice had not triumphed in April 1865 when lilacs bloomed in Walt Whitman’s dooryard “and the great star early droop’d in the western sky …”

Therefore, along with the implosion of the nation’s economy and the unresolved disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans must also devote attention to the glaring problem of racism that is, undeniably, the proverbial elephant in the room — a turn of phrase, by the way, that is sometimes a political truism. They are the flat-earthers of the politico-economic world.

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© Copyright 2009, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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