If you follow through to NPR and then to another (NPR?) piece, you get to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VsnZxfkkoKQ ... where I read the first cogent YouTube comment I’ve ever witnessed, which I quote wholly(added italics):

“Virginia Connor
To everyone who came here from Twitter wondering how this song could be racist: THIS ISN’T THE VERSION WITH RACIST LYRICS.

A lot of different takes on this song exist, using the same tune but with different words. Non-racist examples include “do your ears hang low” and “donut shop”.

The original tune came from a Scots-Irish folk song “The old rose tree”. However, the majority of Americans were first exposed to the tune in the 19th century, through traveling blackface minstrel shows - which set the tune to their own, ahem, misguided lyrics. Multiple times.

The most overtly racist version was literally titled... and I shit you not...“N* love a watermelon, Ha! Ha! Ha!”

That racist version of the song just so happened to be a popular song in the late 1800s when ice cream parlors first sprang up, so it got played a lot in there and people associated it with ice cream. So when the first ice-cream trucks rolled out, it was one of the iconic melodies chosen to announce the truck’s presence to all the kids on the block.

Most young people today, myself included, know the tune from innocent, non-racist campfire songs. Hell, I spent my entire childhood thinking it was strange that an ice cream truck always played a song about a donut shop, because that’s the version I heard first. “N-word love a watermelon” has, thankfully, been relegated to the moldy dustbin of history where it belongs.

So, while I’ve gotta admit that learning of the history behind something as random as an ice-cream jingle is oddly fascinating, I don’t think the tune itself should be labeled racist. Racists have always hijacked little things, but unless those little hijacked things end up turning into something major and horrible (like what the Nazis did to the Hindu swastika) then we as a society shouldn’t cede control of those little things to the racists - if we do, that just gives the racists more power over our culture, it makes them seem more relevant and valid than they deserve.

The only reason “turkey in the straw is racist!” is trending, is because Good Humor made an instagram post about it and said that they’re “doing something to change it” - which wound up being a collaboration with Wu-Tang Clan singer RZA to produce a new jingle. Good for them, I have nothing against a new jingle. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Good Humor corporation deliberately dug up this piece of history & inflated the relevance of the racist parts to a modern audience with no connection to 19th-century minstrel shows. There’s only one reason for them to do this: opportunism. Very real issues with racism are on everybody’s minds, lately, and this corporation is taking advantage of it, dredging up this “dark secret” from ice cream’s past specifically so they can make a show out of changing it. Long-dead racists once hijacked the tune of “turkey in the straw”, and now Good Humor is doing the reverse: hijacking today’s fight against racism. They’re exploiting it for PR and reducing it to an advertisement.

It’s irresponsible. The more that companies pull dumbass stunts like this, stunts that literally nobody asked for, it only serves to make the real fight against racism appear shallow and petty and babyish in the eyes of uninformed onlookers who don’t know what the protestors have gone through, what they really want & why.
16 hours ago (edited)
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