One of these Jungle Fevers is not like the other. Upper left: Chakachas’s 1972 hit single. Upper right: Jean-Paul Goode’s 1982 photo book featuring a caged Grace Slick on the cover. Lower left: Ida Corr’s 2013 track. Lower right: from the Instagram page of Stephanie Ward’s new home-based plant store.

“This is a tough one,” says Natasha Trigger-Warning, chairperson of San Diego’s newly formed Cancel Culture Committee. “Obviously, the term ‘Jungle Fever’ has racist overtones, since it refers to a white person’s erotic desire for a Black person, simply because of their Blackness — which Blackness is indicated by the word ‘jungle.’ The connotation is clear: that Black people are savage primitives, living in the wild, outside the safe structures of white civilization. And so, for a bored, bland white person, the Black serves as an enticing object of sexual exotica. Just awful: exploitative, othering, objectifying, dehumanizing, and just plain racist. And yet. Spike Lee made a movie called Jungle Fever. Stevie Wonder recorded a single called ‘Jungle Fever.’ And now, Imperial Beach resident and woman of color Stephanie Ward has opened a plant store called Jungle Fever. Her use of the term could be taken as a sly, anti-racist inversion, shifting the so-called ‘fever’ away from what is connoted - Blacks - to what is denoted - the literal jungle and the plants that grow there. So while our first instinct was, rightfully, to cancel Ms. Ward, it appears that the situation may benefit from further consideration. Canceling is a complicated business. Thank goodness San Diego has the right people on the job.”

One of these Jungle Fevers is not like the other. Upper left: Chakachas’s 1972 hit single. Upper right: Jean-Paul Goode’s 1982 photo book featuring a caged Grace Slick on the cover. Lower left: Ida Corr’s 2013 track. Lower right: from the Instagram page of Stephanie Ward’s new home-based plant store.