I don’t understand op’s post history

There are a variety of stereotypes that have come from a variety of different sources, but what kicked it off was the African slave trade, where it was extremely profitable to enslave people. During the colonization by Europe of, uh, the entire rest of the world TBH, but especially the “New World” as it was called, Europeans needed a lot of labor.

Many West Africans were in a particularly vulnerable position to be enslaved due to a combination of conditions, particularly warring between West African states (leading to the capture of prisoners of war, who would then be sold as slaves), and being on a convenient position for European traders looking for alternate trade routes that didn’t involve going through the Ottoman Empire. (The Europeans also initially enslaved many Native Americans, but their greater vulnerability to European diseases led to greater mortality and thus fewer survivors amongst enslaved Native Americans.)

There was a long history of some form of slavery throughout Europe, the Middle East and many parts of Africa, but there were also traditions of not enslaving cultural insiders, and justifying the enslavement of prisoners of war or subjugated conquered people by making stereotypes and casting them as savage or uncivilized. In Christianized Europe, there were often rules about not enslaving Christians, and in Muslims controlled territories, it was forbidden to enslave Muslims. The enslaved people from West Africa were neither Christian nor Muslim, making them targets in the eyes of the slavers

Some were initially brought on as indentured servants, but soon even those protections were lost. The European demand for labor, especially agricultural labor for things like sugar cane, was insatiable, and the less the Europeans empathized with their enslaved victims, the worse the treatment they felt empowered to dole out. With a strong economic incentive to ruthlessly extract every possible ounce of labor from their victims, with the conversion of many enslaved people to Christianity removing the justification of enslaving heathens to Christianize them, and with an incentive to keep white indentured servants and enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants from joining forces to overthrow their oppressors, it became necessary to make up new justifications.

Because the enslaved Africans had striking phenotypic differences in appearance from Europeans, and because the rise of scientific thinking also made for easy pseudoscientific justifications to become widely accepted, the slavers found any excuse they could to classify those of African descent as inferior and best suited for the work they were forced to do.

And after the Civil War, not only had racism become a beast that perpetuated itself on the basis of true believers spreading their beliefs, but the fact that slavery was still a legal punishment for crimes led governments that had relied on slave labor for their economic engines to find ways to criminalize and thus re-enslave the newly liberated formerly enslaved folks. The economic ruling class across all America also had ample incentive to keep African-Americans from gaining self-sufficiency, wealth and autonomy, because they relied on having a disenfranchised population who would work for cheap. And of course, when worker labor movements began and workers were unionizing, using the existing racism by then steeped into American culture to drive a wedge between working class White and Black folks was an effective tactic to keep workers from organizing. So once again, stereotypes were used as one of several weapons to keep working class folks of all origins from uniting and to further continue the existence of African-Americans as a pool of easily exploited cheap labor.

And of course, once the demon of racism was loose, it created its own progeny just because people genuinely believed it now, and would act on it even if it wasn’t in direct service of economic ends. So at a certain point, people were creating more stereotypes just because they were racist.

But to give an example of a specific one: there’s a stereotype of associating Black folks with watermelon and fried chicken. Watermelon? Native to Africa, its seeds were brought over by many enslaved folks. It was easy to grow in marginal soils and a good source of hydration through intense agricultural labor, and thus widely used by enslaved Africans. Fried chicken? Chickens were often the only animals enslaved folks were allowed to keep for themselves. After the Civil War, they were still cheap and easy to raise. Various Black entrepreneurs would sell fried chicken as a convenient food in their communities. So naturally, racist assholes took these methods of survival and empowerment and turned them into a source of mockery.

Read about it, tons of history books on this exact topic.

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