Southern US strawberry festival sparks a race row
A poster for a Louisiana strawberry festival showing two faceless black children has prompted sharply split online opinion over whether it is offensive and racist.
The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival attracts hundreds of thousands of people to the small city near Lake Pontchartrain every April, and according to organisers is second in popularity in the state only to Mardi Gras itself.
When the festival unveiled its official poster on Wednesday - featuring faceless African American children wearing their white Sunday best and holding a basket of strawberries - it took less than 24 hours to generate bitter disagreement.
Katy Monnot, who runs a community and parenting news group on Facebook, quickly shared the image asking for people's thoughts.
"At first the comments were about how cute the image was and how sweet," Monnot said.
"Then a couple of hours later someone posted, 'Am I the only one cringing a bit here?' followed by another 'I don't like this at all.'"
Within a few hours the post exploded and she had more than 600 comments from all over the US.
Many people said the children are made to look like images from the Jim Crow era or "pickaninnies", a word with negative connotations that refers to caricatures of black children.
The comic irony of all this is probably some judges picked this poster exactly because they did not want to be seen as 'racist.' Sorry White people, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
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