On August 31st GraniteGrok posted a report about a banana peel with the power to put the full meaning in the word retreat. An Ole Miss Greek Life event came to a screeching (weeping, horribly terrifying) halt (followed by a full retreat) when a banana peel was found in a tree.
In a letter to the editor, Makala McNeil and her sorority sister share the details of this life-changing event and (of course) how it made them feel.
My sorority sister was the first to see it. We – myself, my sister and another NPHC member – were heading back to our cabins after our large group session was dismissed. As we approached the cabin, she abruptly stopped. Her eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. She frantically pointed at a tree, exclaiming, “Look! Look! In the tree!” It was a banana, dangling from a limb.
My heart dropped instantly. I began to scan the area around us to see if we were in any immediate harm. Once we realized we were alone, questions started flying: “Was this here this morning?” “There’s no coincidence that this happened right after we just got done talking about race, right?”
My first question is, is there a time when you’re not talking about race? Because until Obama no one I know of any color or ethnic origin spent much time on the matter. It never came up.
Now, thanks to more than a decade of political and media focus on race, and who knows how many decades of Social Justice programming, nothing in the world can be examined outside that context. It has gotten so bad that failing to consider race as a factor is racist.
Not all that long ago the banana peel would have been ignored. Casual observers of all races would fetch it and dispose of it properly. Worst case, it would have given rise to a discussion about being lazy and littering. Today it is heart-stopping and “an opportunity to discuss the racial realities of our university community with our white peers.”
Bananas have historically been used by white people as derogatory to dehumanize and denigrate black people; a symbol that makes us fearful of our racist past and present. Scientific racism permitted biological stereotypes surrounding the “apelike” qualities of black people to bleed into popular understandings of blackness.
The far-reaching effects?
Future iterations of Mario Kart will need to exclude the most common of its item box rewards.
And cartoonists beware. All those gags where someone slips on a banana peel must be banished or scrubbed for their inherent racism unless you are looking for “an opportunity to discuss the racial realities.”
And if I’m not mistaken, with a few exceptions in Hollywood and media, you only have yourselves to blame.
Finally, Dole™ will need to make some changes. We can’t possibly continue to have a company that harvests and sells curved yellow fruit sounding like it was named after welfare.
H/T CampusReform
