Preface: I was curious about this so I did some research. I read some rather upsetting and disgusting things. I noticed some comrades were also uninformed on this stuff so I am sharing what I have learned. I have done my best to treat this topic respectfully. Links at the bottom if you don’t care to read my rambling effortpost. If, like me, your reaction to being told the dunk tank has “racist roots” was a lib’d out “yeah, but reeeeally tho?” I suggest you go read the Jim Crow Museum links and hopefully you too will be revolted by what you see and will also recognise the importance of the community name change.
I assume this has already been discussed here, since I didn’t really see anyone go ??? about that aspect of the c/*_tank critique. I didn’t ask for infoz or clarity on this in the midst of the recent strugglebrawl because that’s not really what everyone was fighting about. But while I’ve been catching up on some spin-off threads discussing the recent turmoil I’ve seen some of my fellow uninformeds express skepticism over whether that “long ago” history was really relevant, whether anyone would really associate dunk tanks with their apparent and maybe obscure racist history, that sort of thing.
long self indulgent rambling about my experience with dunk tanks irl and reflecting on my knee-jerk assumptions
I was mildly skeptical myself, like “I guess they had black people on the receiving end of the humiliation originally/in some places” “probably problematic, but also probably we’re just erring on the side of abundance of caution for the most vulnerable people” “heh, amerikkkans.”
Maybe skeptical isn’t the right word- good people with more knowledge than me were saying it was problematic/tone-deaf/hurtful and that was/is good enough for me.
Still, I had no idea about this history and I was curious about it, so I did some searches to catch myself up. I am not from the United Snakes, but dunk tanks were (are?) a thing in my settler country too. I remember them at school fairs and rural easter shows (etc) growing up.
Usually the person in the tank was a “respected” member of the community- at a school fair it might have been the principle or vice principle, at a local show it was often a fellow student volunteer/worker, or a local council person. Or it was a professional clown.
My experiences were in a shithole so infested with cracker bigotry that I copped years of bullying for being a different type of white person. I’m not sure we had any people of colour to do cruelty to. (Mild exaggeration, there were two (2) racial minority families and they copped brutal bald faced racist abuse and violence.)
Dunk tanks also featured on kids TV in those zany slime and ooze based obstacle course game shows. Very normalised. There was no apparent racial component in my experience, so I assumed that this was not an inherent part of the dunk tank game.
All that to say: my personal experience is totally irrelevant and my assumptions couldn’t have been more wrong.
This is my current understanding:
Firstly: The genesis of the Dunk Tank WAS inextricably linked to brutal, sometimes fatal, often disfiguring and brain damaging racial violence for the entertainment of white people.
When the Dunk Tank was created in America it was part of a progressive-for-the-time reform that replaced a hugely popular game that went by several names, the only one of which I’m comfortable typing out is “African Dodger” - the aim of the game was to throw a baseball (allegedly, usually, a lighter ball than was used in actual baseball) or eggs at a black man poking his head out between some curtains.
It appears that it was not uncommon for people to bring their own heavy balls to the game to use instead. There are multiple stories sourced from newspaper articles of the time that report on local professional baseball players attending to pitch at the victim. Some assholes just threw rocks.
There are a number of upsetting stories detailing the damage done to the victims. Horrible stuff to read- the degree of physical damage to teeth, eyes, faces and heads. Multiple deaths.
The Dunk Tank did not (immediately) replace African Dodger everywhere, but where it was introduced it was more or less a stand-in for the earlier “game” trading physical violence for humiliation. It was still about doing cruel shit to black men for fun at the carnival.
African Dodger continued to be a thing until at least the 1950s, overlapping the introduction of the Dunk Tank by about 40 years. During that time, whether the white-people-do cruelty-to-black-people game was about inflicting physical damage or inflicting humiliation (dodge or dunk) depended on where you lived and whether locals were still comfortable smashing people’s faces in and cracking skulls to impress their girlfriends.
Both games were a vehicle for violence, abuse and degradation of black men for sport.
If you want to subject yourself to the gory details, slurs, offensive promotional posters etc, these are my sources for this part:
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2012/october.htm
https://freedium.cfd/https://dalebrumfield.medium.com/non-lethal-lynching-f9ee5bbbfbcc (medium post, paywall bypassed)
https://ameripics.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/the-african-dodger/
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2019/september.htm
Secondly: Yes, people do still know this history and associate dunk tanks with white supremacy and racial violence. This issue is not just concern trolling / a convenient cover excuse to modify hexbear culture as I have seen suggested or implied in the wake of the happening.
School district bans dunk tanks this year, presumably because people were upset with and/or alienated by the continuation of this foul legacy into the modern age after the black victim was generally replaced with a clown.
https://www.mapleridgenews.com/community/no-more-dunk-tanks-for-maple-ridge-and-pitt-meadows-schools-7374988
2019 article about dunk tanks being phased out. It’s wishy washy on whether that is because people are uncomfortable with its legacy or because people are bothered by the modern dunk tank clown heckling and insulting them to bark customers to the game, but still, this has evidently been a subject of modern mainstream discourse:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/style/insult-clowns.html
2019 Jim Crow Museum website responding to a reader query about the retirement of the dunk tank from “polite society” (hah…) https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2019/september.htm
2022 article about the same thing, mentions NAACP helping to ban the explicitly racial implementation of the dunk tank by the end of the 1950s: https://www.pushblack.us/news/troubling-history-dunk-tank-carnival-games
2023 blog post: https://allthatsinteresting.com/african-dodger
2024 EXCELLENT blog post, loss of urban amusement parks and carnivals as third places. Segregation in those venues etc.
ctrl-f Drop the Chocolate, or a Black man in a dunk tank to jump to the part most relevant to this effortpost, with an interesting observations about the awkwardness of continuing these sorts of games while black men were dying in the trenches of WW1.
https://www.melaninbasecamp.com/trip-reports/2024/3/29/third-places-lost-to-racism-urban-amusement-parks
Random other interesting post about dunk tanks not making it into the San Fran 1915 expo. Interesting/challenging photos: http://davegilson.com/african-dip.html
2·11 days ago