How The Watermelon Effect Engineered Dishonest Black Customers

Until the late 80s, music, fashion or any quantifiable skill, allowed the Black consumer to give anything great it’s flowers. If someone was an excellent artist, musician, singer, chef, plummer etc, the community admitted the quality, and rewarded it with its support through consumer loyalty and money.

Once entertainment became the new Black commerce, the amount of money involved would breed detractors, discrediting campaigns, stans, and an overall morally corrupt creative community. As jealousy became the consumers motivator, this would eventually destroy Black business reputation turning into a 100+ year civil war with Black economics and consumer morale, and it all started with fruit.

How Watermelon, Led to Insecurity

After emancipation (chattel slavery) watermelon was one of the first widely cultivated cash crops Black farmers could grow and sell on their own. The sharecropping business, often launched with small plots of land, required little capital and was a familiar space for those who were imposed with agriculture labor from slavery.

Making the proverbial lemonade out of literal lemons, Black sharecroppers and smallholders became economically visible and confident, causing many white landowners and merchants to be come resentful of the faster yields, quality, and taste, with consumer support across racial lines. This small win, after working for free became the first economic success for many Black families who were finally about make a living, without White control.

In response, White businesses and unions would campaign to turn watermelon into a racist trope, using cartoons, films and ads to create a negative stigma with hopes to weak success. This marketing of Jim Crow‑era imagery would work better than expected, negatively portraying Black people as lazy, childish, and obsessed with watermelon. This tactic to discredit Black entrepreneurship and justify discrimination of Black establishments and products would start to wear down all confidence in anything Black related.

Still till this day, the only quality watermelon you can find are from sellers that drive up north from Mississippi and Alabama. If you’re lucky, you’d find that one resiilent seller coming around BBQ season with an 18 wheeler loaded with the juicy goods. And if you can’t grow them yourself, the only option, as this dying skill fades, has been to search through the cardboard for white bellies, sold in the general grocery stores (or Costco), all while dodging dirty looks from Black shoppers.

Jedi Mind Tricked The Community To “Humble” Quality & Standards

It’s unfortunately easy to find someone Black, shouting American lineage and Slavery clout that aggressively refuses to eat Watermelon as a political statement. The generational stigma from Watermelon still embeds in social ethics, now bled into negative stereotypes of celebrating ancestor-based success.

The soured Black consumer confidence would essentially hurt how Black people buy and (deceptively) sell to each other. For those who understood it’s symbol it never stopped being a staple and from a personal take, watermelon (or sugarcane) is an icon of finding a pure and honest way to wealth and respect of the past.

Quality Became An Entitlement

The power of quality in service, production, and business suddenly became a decider of who was good enough to be genuinely respected as a customer or on the flip, not good enough to even be compensated for work. With the stigma of Watermelon now seen as a social pariah, it disabled economic respect within the Black identity and self fulfilled the jim crow lies into real weakness.

The same ones in the community that would decry “reparations” and equity would also become some of the biggest violators of low to no compensation, credit, or respectable service for Black enterprise. This Watermelon Effect would now leave the customer disillusioned or the business owner grappling with getting paid, constantly in a battle to engage in honest economics other races didn’t have to go through.

Brainwashing the Black dollar would infect how anyone tried to break into seemingly White controlled markets. They would be quickly humbled by Black consumers to stop. Stop trying to be White, stop trying compete, stop trying to improve a product or service, stop thinking you better, anything that would be perceived as “uppity,” humbling a natural progression with unnatural restriction.

The Seedless Watermelons

The new tactic during the late 80s was to reward the untalented and place them in positions to later gatekeep. This would discourage any growing talent from becoming a greater threat to larger systems or individual egos. The customer that didn’t want to pay or the business presenting a service level that would make Keith Lee cringe, would weirdly receive high-priced backers and promoted by larger outlets. As we see the seemingly successful become more obnoxious in industries elders never set food in, many wonder why is it “just them, and not at least 10-20 others too,” when time itself should yield higher output.

We’d see generation after generation become over looked and talent having to work for free, just watermelon was abandoned. The loudest protesters of racism and lineage would now, not produce anything remotely close to enterprise. Understand, stolen talent never produces an infrastructure able stand on its own. Many of these novelty businesses we seen now in restaurants or even fashion, after COVD-19 fail because the consumer wasn’t anti Black business, it’s because the consumer simply wanted to duplicate modules that eventually weaken the long term impact. Enterprise has become pedestrian and this is why social media followings get the backers, but lack the background.

When businesses do succeed where the consumer can’t steal the concept, the Black consumer now spends time trashing the business or the product in the same way White businesses once discredited Watermelon sharecroppers, making quality the ultimate sin. And now we see the same tactics when a film, album, restaurant, or any Black project that evolved past Watermelon sharecropping see’s the same fate. Nowadays, the untalented campaign’s to discredit in the hopes of eventually controlling the outcome. It’s hard to think but, now, nothing is ever good enough as long your OPP/customer can’t get paid from it.