What's with the Kool-Aid?
UPDATE: From the Department of Not Getting It, a
post at rightpundits.com:
The ‘Obama Bucks’ image shows Obama surrounded by food that has historically been stereotyped with southern black individuals, most notably fried chicken, watermelon, ribs and Kool-Aid. Those are racial stereotypes from our past that are rightfully repudiated in 2008 when noticed.
But the good news is that we are progressing beyond the power of such stereotypes. At a basic level, Barack Obama is merely surrounded by food we all eat. That is the way the San Bernadino GOP woman from ‘Chaffey Community Republican Women’, Diane Fedele, says she saw it when she sent a newsletter out containing the image which she had found in her email box.
She says that she was making an argument that Barack Obama will usher in a socialist welfare state, not that Obama is black. We all know that already. Diane Fedele has since apologized profusely. Assuming she is telling the truth, in an odd sense she seems to be the enlightened one among us.
Poster (above) goes by the name MCCAIN and claims to be "a man of color" who asserts that Kool-Aid "has historically been stereotyped with southern black individuals". So that answers this post's title question, although it was an association I was unfamiliar with until today.
posted by Quiddity at 10/17/2008 05:55:00 PM
I vaguely recall some stereotyping connections between blacks and kool-aid. Odd thing is that a lot of generially southern (black and white folks') food is somehow called "soul food" or associated with blacks when seen from elsewhere in the country.
I don't know the racial breakdown of the phenomenon of Koolaid pickles, but they're certainly a southern thing and probably will be stereotyped as being a "black" thing even if they're not actually so in their southern homeland.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/dining/09kool.html
http://www.slashfood.com/2008/06/13/kool-aid-pickles-koolickles/
Down in the suburbs of New Orleans, where I came up, this was the case -- everyone "knew" those black folks on welfare fed their kids Kool-Aid with tons of sugar in it, b/c they were too ignorant to give them milk, or too trashy, or whatever. It's why Kool-Aid was never served in any of our mama's houses: black people drank that.
