NYU's Watermelon-Flavored Controversy

The Weinstein Dining Hall at NYU

Examples of incidents involving racial insensitivity on American college campuses have been the subject of more than a few of my blog posts over the years.

It's not like I plan that, they happen - now and then and I write about them.

What's fascinates me is how often those types of incidents tend to occur around the federal holiday recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, or during Black History Month.

As if there's a weird intentional spike in racial resentment that surfaces during those times of the year when contributions to American society and history by prominent African-Americans are recognized by a federal holiday, events and various types of media programming or entertainment.

Remember the Arizona State chapter of TKE's "Martin Luther King Black Party" back in January of 2014? (And yeah, that was a real thing.)

A recent controversy that erupted over soul food, Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water served at a dining hall on the campus of New York University offers perspective on enduring racial stereotypes, how students of color perceive a climate of racial insensitivity on major American college campuses - and the backlash from those who feel such claims are invalid.

As Tony Marco reported for CNN on Thursday, this latest controversy started when NYU student Kayla Eubanks walked into the Weinstein Passport Dining Hall and noticed a menu posted advertising a special meal in recognition of Black History Month.

NYU students in front of the "Black
History Meal" menu

The food choices included barbecued ribs, collared greens, mac and cheese, mashed yams and corn bread, which is fine - those are all delicious foods (depending on one's taste) commonly recognized as belonging to the broader spectrum of distinctly African-American southern cuisine.

Personally speaking, I don't find those specific food choices listed on the NYU dining hall menu "offensive" in a racial sense - and frankly just writing those down made me hungry. Really.

But it was the beverage choices paired with that menu that really stood out for Eubanks, large containers of red Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water.

Click the link to the CNN article above to see the cell phone video she recorded of the dining hall offerings; the video of the drink display helps put it in perspective.

Eubanks quickly told others about it.


As Maggie Astor's New York Times article notes, 19-year-old NYU sophomore Nia Harris heard about the menu from Eubanks and went over to the dining hall to check it out for herself.

Troubled by what she saw, she spoke with dining hall staff and asked the head chef of the dining hall about the selection of the choices on the special Black History Month menu - including the drinks.

In her now widely-read email, Harris says he told her that the menu choices were not in any way intended to be offensive, and he claimed they'd been created by two African-American cooks on the staff.

Harris wrote an email to NYU officials expressing her concerns, and then posted the email on her Facebook page and the story blew up - NYU President Andrew Hamilton released a statement calling the menu choices "inexcusably insensitive".

Aramark, the huge food service provider that actually handles meal service for the NYU dining hall, quickly released a statement apologizing for the incident and promptly fired the two cooks who supposedly came up with the menu and drink selection.

Was it right to fire two employees who came up with what they felt was an appropriate menu with a Black History Month theme?

Personally speaking I think firing them was a bit extreme.

According to the NYU and Aramark statements, the two fired employees violated policy by not consulting with NYU before creating the menu choices.

For a moment, let's forget whether the two cooks were white, black or Hispanic.

If they sat down and took the time to come up with a menu that would in some way recognize or honor African-American culture, it doesn't seem like they did that out of any kind of malice.

As I said above, I thought the foods on the menu seemed pretty good choices if they were going for soul food.

But I can see where the selection of watermelon-flavored water placed alongside those foods could be perceived as being racially insensitive.

Particularly when viewed in the larger historical context in which degrading imagery portraying African-Americans as having some kind of fetish for watermelon that sends them into some kind of trance.

Images like the one seen above were quite common in the late 19th and early 20th century in America - images with clear racist connotations - and that one is fairly tame.

If you're interested, just go to Google and type in the words "watermelon, racist" to see some of the more degrading visual representations of African-Americans and watermelon.

But to get back to those two fired cooks, let me play devil's advocate for a minute.

What if they just thought that the taste of watermelon would go well with the menu they came up with? (Admittedly, pairing that with the red Kool Aid did make me think, Hmmmm...)

Jamaican bobsled team's watermelon helmets
at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi 

Now obviously there's no "rule" about when you can eat barbecued ribs with corn bread and collard greens.

But those are foods I generally associate with summer when watermelon is in season and people grill outside in warm weather.

As Nia Harris observed in her email to NYU officials, watermelon is not in season, so maybe the choice struck some as odd - but would slices of actual watermelon have made the meal seem racially offensive?

My blog post about the Jamaican two-man bobsled team's watermelon-themed helmets at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi came to mind when I first read the story about the NYU dining hall menu.

Something that some viewers wouldn't have considered as having anything to do with race - but others like me, saw as having a distinctly racial aspect to it in light of the degrading imagery I mentioned above.

Regardless of where one stands on it, the NYU menu dust-up is a pretty interesting look at how race is perceived in America.

NYU student Nia Harris' Facebook photo

Admittedly, I was quite taken aback at some of the many heated replies Nia Harris received on her Facebook page in reply to her posting the email she sent to the NYU officials - a number of people were downright hostile to her.

Some guy called her a "snowflake" for being overly sensitive, another girl fat-shamed her and criticized her for being overweight.

It's not like Nia Harris took over the NYU campus or blew something up.

She just wrote an email expressing how something she saw made her feel as a woman of color on a college campus.



The reaction to the story is an example of how deeply racism circulates within the depths of the collective American psyche.

I honestly don't know if there's a "who's right or who's wrong" to this story.

But it offers insight into how quickly deeply-ingrained prejudices can bubble up to the surface, triggered by seemingly innocent or harmless things (like a menu or a fruit) that can be perceived as being linked to darker, more sinister aspects of this nation's history.

The reactions to her email posted on her Facebook page serve as a reminder that even though we're in the 21st century, it's easy to underestimate the degree to which racism, or prejudiced thinking has permeated American society.

And it shouldn't come as a surprise when we see it on the campuses of institutions of higher learning; after all, what are college campuses but microcosms of our larger society?

Again, I don't think it's fair that Aramark fired the two cooks, but the speed with which they did demonstrates that as a corporation, Aramark clearly learned from the debacle with Chili's back in 2016 when an insensitive manager named Wesley Patrick took away the food of a black U.S. Army veteran in Cedar Hill, Texas simply because an old dude in a Trump t-shirt made a loose accusation.

Perhaps, if this NYU dining hall-incident inspired such spirited debate on social media, maybe that watermelon-flavored water those two cooks made was actually a positive thing overall?

Funny there was no mention of how it actually tasted.