This story popped up in the news today and I was amused.
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. - The mayor of a small Southern California city who was criticized for sending an e-mail showing watermelons in front of the White House says he will give up the mayoral post but remain on the City Council.
Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose heard calls for his resignation this week when he forwarded an e-mail showing a watermelon patch on the White House lawn under the title: "No Easter egg hunt this year."
Grose has apologized and said he wasn't aware of the racial stereotype that blacks like watermelon.
None of the news items on this show the image in question, and it's not even clear if it was a picture or a cartoon. I assumed it was a cartoon, but I tried some google image searches and didn't come up with anything. This picture showed up several times though, so maybe it was the image in question.
I laughed not at the image or the joke, which is such a tired racial trope that it's not even worth a guilty smile at this point. No, I laughed at the cracker mayor, with his, "I didn't know there was a racial connotation between watermelons and black people?"
If he didn't know, why did he forward the email? It wouldn't make any sense. What if the picture had oh, a pumpkin patch, or a barnyard, or a carrot farm? No one would forward that since it would be pointless and nonsensical. Obviously he knew, just
like this dumb bimbo back in October, who was, you'll note, a fellow Orange County Republican
BTW, don't let the "Southern California" location of
Los Alamitos fool you. Yes, California on the whole is a blue state, but this cracker mayor is from Orange County, which is just south of LA, but very white and very conservative. California has a stereotype as a hippy liberal place, but that's only true for most of coastal NoCal, and parts of LA. SoCal is mostly white and conservative, especially Orange County and northern San Diego (home of a fairly strong white supremacist movement). Most of the people in Cali live in the metropolitan coastal clusters of cities around LA, SD, or SF/Oakland/San Jose, but while that's at least half the population, they're clustered into maybe 1/100th of the very long, very large state's land area. You go more than 10 or 20 miles inland anywhere else in California, and you're neck deep in redneck ranchers and farmers, with a generous sprinkling of and pot-growing anarchist survivalist kooks in the redwood forests.
Labels: bigotry, obama, politics
