My history lobe is a bit rusty but after emancipation, black folks grew a lot of watermelon because it was easy and cheap to grow and it sold well. It was a symbol of the time as well as former slaves reaching financial independence. As usual, shitheads will turn any symbol against it’s people as a tool of oppression (see DEI as a recent example) so watermelon was associated with black people in the worst way. Now the racism has died down a lot but to this day some people will say (and think) that black people love watermelon and think of it as a poverty food.

It goes way deeper but that should be the semi-accurate gist.

Looking it up it looks like it originally spread from a racist context. Not sure how reliable Know Your Meme is but here’s one of the pages I was looking at. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/finally-synthetic-watermelon

Seen plenty of other bad ones on the Facebook and the Twitter before I quit though.

I’m so fucking happy to be seeing this meme without a racist context. Maybe I troll the wrong corners of the internet but all I see this captioned with other places is zero effort racist jokes.