MrMary Responds: Poverty Higher Among ‘Black Race’ Because They Eat Too Much Chicken

Colorado has a population that is 4% African American. When I was travelling through Colorado I went into a place with my lady and they would not serve me there was an uncomfortable silence and I felt like I was going to be lynched. Seriously my lady and I got the fuck out of there.  Colorado isn’t down south, but you can be fooled. The amount of the gun shops is also insane. Don’t believe me:

With that Said, This Chicken Thing

In a meeting of the state’s Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force Wednesday, Colorado State Sen. Vicki Marble (R) delivered a long monologue suggesting that the reason for poverty among certain minority groups was that they eat too much chicken and barbecue.

Discussing statistics about racial disparities in the poverty rate, KVDR Denver reports, Marble claimed that the studies ignored drug addiction and poor diets common among Latino– and African-American families.

MARBLE: When you look at life expectancy, there are problems in the black race: sickle-cell anemia is something that comes up, diabetes is something that’s prevalent in the genetic makeup and you just can’t help it… Although I’ve got to say, I’ve never had better barbecue and better chicken and ate better in my life than when you go down south and you — I mean love it and everybody loves it. The Mexican diet in Mexico with all of the fresh vegetables. And you go down there and they’re much thinner than when they come up here… they change their diet.

Listen to the hearing here.

Where the Fried Chicken Stereotype Came from

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.

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. “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.”

What Poor people Eat!

Poor people I know regardless of race eat the same things either nothing or

Starchy foods, fatty foods, and highly processed foods !!!!

You know the kinda stuff you can get a bunch for for a dollar !!!! Things with dies in it and chemicals you cant pronounce. Stuff that you never find in neighbourhood which are predominantly white outside of Appalachia, our in the Whole food at Columbus Circle or another other where the well to do wear their bullshit jogging outfits just to look the part when they buy their bullshit.

and Btw – Lemme Clear up something else

Watermelon

The Stereotype Explained:

Early-1900s postcards often depicted African Americans as animalistic creatures “happy to do nothing but eat watermelon” – a bid to dehumanize them. Other such “Coon cards”, as they were popularly known as, depicted African Americans stealing, fighting over, and becoming watermelons. One poem from the early 1900s reads:

“George Washington Watermelon Columbus Brown
I’se black as any little coon in town
At eating melon I can put a pig to shame
For Watermelon am my middle name”

Several of the films depicted African Americans as having a virtually uncontrollable appetite for watermelons; for instance, The Watermelon Contest and Watermelon Feast include scenes of black men consuming the fruits at such a speed that they spew out mush and seeds. The author Novotny Lawrence suggests that such scenes had a subtext of representing black male sexuality, in which black men “love and desire the fruit in the same manner that they love sex . . . In short, black males have a watermelon ‘appetite’ and are always trying to see ‘who can eat the most’ with the strength of this ‘appetite’ depicted by black males uncontrollably devouring watermelon.

The Research

from the article

Non-Hispanic white consumers represent 73 percent of the U.S. population but only consume 64 percent of watermelon. Thus, on a per-capita basis (market share divided by population share), white consumers had a consumption ratioless than 1. About two-thirds of the category “others” in the race/ethnicorigin table consists of Asians. Thus, it is likely Asian consumers were the top consumers (in terms of per capita consumption) of watermelon, with a ratio nearly 3 times as great as their proportion of the population.Black consumers represent nearly 13 percent of the U.S. population yet only accounted for 11percent of watermelon consumption during the 1994-96 survey period.

Finally, Poverty

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. More than 46 million Americans live in Poverty USA.  It’s a myth to think that people in poverty are people who squandered their resources or are  drug users and irresponsible people on a whole.  I see people of all ages and skin colours at the soup kitchen. Rhetoric like this serves to continue to sequester time effort for the continual perpetuating of stereotypes and not addressing the real topic.

Related articles

• Colorado lawmaker blames minority poverty on fried chicken (rawstory.com)
• Sparks fly after Sen. Marble’s ‘fried chicken’ comment in poverty hearing (kdvr.com)
• Colorado GOP Senator Claims Link Between Fried Chicken And Black/Hispanic Poverty (thesterlingroad.com)
• Colorado Legislator: Poverty Higher Among ‘Black Race’ Because They Eat Too Much Chicken (thinkprogress.org)