A TikToker shared why and how butter pecan ice cream became popular among the Black community.
In the latest edition of Tales From TikTok, user @nikki.mov and other sources, racial segregation during the Jim Crow era was the driving force that led Black people to butter pecan ice cream. Blacks were reportedly prohibited (not by law, but by custom) from eating vanilla ice cream in public except on July 4, Independence Day.
Nikki explained in a TikTok video posted June 1, 2023, that the information mainly came about from seasoned Black people spreading intimate anecdotes from generation to generation about experiencing this form of prejudice.
“While it was never officially a law—just as many other racist practices were accepted but never codified into law—there are countless anecdotal stories from Black people passed down from generation to generation that they, or a friend, or family member had been denied the right to purchase vanilla ice cream or that they’d experience violence when caught eating vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow South,” Nikki said.
She continued, “It was seen as a privilege that some white southerners didn’t believe Black people deserved to have. So, it is theorized that Black people turned to other ice cream flavors to satisfy their sweet tooth.”
Late and great poet Maya Angelou discussed it in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
“People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days, he had to be satisfied with chocolate.”
In her autobiography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, late poet Audre Lorde recalled when her parents attempted to treat her to vanilla ice cream at a soda shop around Independence Day, only for a white waitress to reject giving them service.
“The waitress was white, the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C., that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and white pavement and white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the rest of the trip,” Lorde wrote.
Ironically, a Black man named Edmond Elbius, born into slavery in 1829 on the Réunion Island revolutionized the cultivation of vanilla.
Nikki added in her TikTok video that an enslaved man from Louisiana, Antoine (no last name), learned to successfully propagate a pecan tree and turn them into a commercial crop, and ultimately, someone (it’s still unknown) married pecans and ice cream, birthing butter pecan ice cream. The crunchy and creamy dessert would become hella popular between the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Regarding why white people rejected Blacks eating vanilla ice cream, Christopher Carter, an assistant professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, explained to the Daily Dot that vanilla and “whiteness” were linked to purity, the opposite of how whites viewed Black folks. Therefore, eating vanilla ice cream was seen as a privilege.
“It’s all about what you can and cannot do in front of white people,” Carter explained. “Because when you are a person of color and you’re enjoying yourself, you’re having fun, you’re smiling, that’s not really—at that time especially—what they [white people] would have wanted to see.”
