Shane Gillis, the comedian who was fired from “Saturday Night Live” “in 2019 for making racist and homophobic jokes, recently called Jalen Green’s Wingstop advertisement “the most racist” he has ever seen on an episode of his podcast, and criticized the NBA for running it often during the playoffs.
Gillis said at one point during the podcast that “They (presumably, the NBA) are targeting the African-American community with intensity. Every single commercial is catered to Black people…It’s not race war stuff, but Wingstop’s taking up a bunch of ad space….It’s like every chicken place. You’re watching it going, ‘Dude, chill, spread it out, dude. Put one on the PGA tour to throw it off a little.’”
Gillis continued, “The Wingstop commercial is the most racist commercial I’ve ever seen,” Gillis said. “I can’t even describe the Wingstop commercial without sounding racist. I think it’s supposed to be an NBA player, and he’s doing the whole fashion walk-through that they do, and then he hops in a limo and just crushes chicken. And every white guy on Earth goes, ‘I knew that’s what they’re doing. I knew that’s what was going on in those cool limos.’”
According to Little Black Book, Green’s spot with Wingstop is the Houston Rockets’ rising star’s first collaboration with the brand, which is the Official Wing & Chicken partner of the NBA, and was unveiled in February as part of the league’s advertising roll out for the NBA All-Star Game.
As NBC News reported, Gillis’ entire schtick is based around “pushing boundaries,” according to his now deleted tweet which apologized for the firestorm of controversy, which led to his ouster at SNL, but people from marginalized communities, the butts of some of his more controversial jokes, would most likely describe those boundaries as punching down.
According to Life And Thyme, fried chicken is a staple of the American South, where Wingstop hails from, it began as a small operation in Garland, Texas, and the relationship of Black people to fried chicken is not as straightforward as Gillis makes it out to be, just because a Black person is eating chicken on camera does not make it racist. In fact, fried chicken in particular, helped Black people in the South achieve a form of financial freedom.
“If you look at the historical roots of entrepreneurship of people of African descent, since they became enslaved people, [fried chicken] was one of the few things that one could multiply and sell. It’s really a part of what I call African American subsistence of culinary freedom, that the fried chicken evolves out of entrepreneurship,” Babson College professor of history and foodways, Frederick Douglass Opie told the outlet.
Similarly, associate professor and chair of American studies at the University of Maryland, and the author of “Building” Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power,” Psyche Williams-Forson, described the tense relationship between Black people and negative stereotypes associated with eating fried chicken in mixed company.
“By virtue of what people think you look like, you’re subjected to whatever crazy stereotype is circulating at the moment. You can be the most intelligent, the most brilliant, and you will get reduced to a stereotype. I think it’s important that we celebrate, but I also think it’s short-sighted to celebrate without pointing out the other side of this narrative, which gives rise to why we need to celebrate on some level,” Williams-Forson said. “It’s not just because we’re celebrating our innovation level. It’s also because if we don’t continue to remind people of our economic, social, political empowerment vis-à-vis foods, it is very likely that we will fall prey to the stereotypes by regurgitating them.”
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