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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Aramark apologizes for insensitivity of school lunch served on first day of Black History Month

Specifically,

A middle school in New York and its food vendor, Aramark, apologized after students were served chicken and waffles, along with watermelon on the first day of Black History Month.

What stood out to me about this story, though, is how weirdly banal it registered. What year do you suppose it was when the very first $ETHNIC_MINORITY originally complained that the serving of $STEREOTYPED_FOOD was "insensitive" instead of "delicious?" The word "microaggression" was apparently coined in 1970. Recent philosophical treatment of the term suggests that a core feature of microaggressions is precisely that they cannot be empirically validated (if you could empirically validate it, it would simply be an aggression). This makes them non-falsifiable (that is, if someone feels microaggressed, then they are by definition being oppressed, and no further argument is warranted). But none of this answers the historical question: at what point did people view attempts (or even just possible attempts) to celebrate their culture as offensive?

I suppose it could be related to notions of "cultural appropriation," which were apparently in circulation by 1945 or so. But nobody seems to think you can't serve chicken and waffles with watermelon ever. You just can't serve it (apparently!) on the first day of February? Or perhaps any day in February? Maybe it also cannot be served on MLK day? Cynically, I suspect the real answer is deliberately obfuscated so that outlets like CNN can run absolute non-stories peddling racial outrage whenever it suits them, but like... at this point it's just not clear to me why they would bother. Maybe thirty years ago I would have raged about thin-skinned idiots who see fit to complain about food instead of being grateful they have food, but at this point it's such a boring cliché it just kind of... bounces off. It fits the whole "signal your ingroup" thing, sure, but even the ingroup seems at least inured to it, if not actively opposed--as over on reddit I often see putatively black posters respond with "whatever, man, who doesn't love chicken and waffles?"

I seem to be more and more often encountering claims that the "Great Awokening" is losing steam, cooling off, or at least running up against hard limits of what people will accept as the new, elite-imposed "normal." I am skeptical of these claims, but I was honestly a little surprised at my own bland reaction to this story on CNN. It was like... "oh, look, how original, someone is mad that soul food got served in February, can't wait for them to tell me not to wear white after Labor Day." On reflection, I definitely continue to regard anyone who complains about soul food being served in February as fundamentally unreasonable, I have heard all their arguments and found no value whatsoever in them. But there's no shock value remaining in it--like a girl playing football, being mad about food culture is purely performative outrage, an occasional sacrament for a tepid ideology.

What I can't decide is whether that means the "Great Awokening" really is on the wane, or whether it has become so integrated into our culture that it is now impossible to excise--something on its way to becoming so boring and broadly accepted that no one bothers to challenge it. Like--the advent of no-fault divorce has brought to pass all the scary slippery-slope arguments its critics made against it, but now it's too late to do anything about it because our culture has moved on so irrecoverably that we don't even regard the bad outcomes as bad anymore. Should I be more upset that performative outrage is carving holiday-based dietary restrictions into the public consciousness?

This may be low effort, but all I can think is that Gabe's racist gift basket has entered the chat. All you need to know about this story is that everyone involved have always been and will continue to be friends. That being said...

I thought watermelon was specifically an old meme about Africans not being smart enough to grow anything else on their own. The other two items I don’t have an issue with as if anything their just poor people Foods and every culture has their poor people food. Frying something with breading being a good way to increase the calorie count of a thing cheaply.

But what do I know I’m Irish and our signature American holiday is about us being drunkards.

I had never heard of that before, despite living in multiple different states, enjoying fried chicken and watermelon in several of them. TIL I learned, I guess. This seems like Jewish goblin and black orc kerfuffles -- it didn't seem obvious, but I guess if you feel a kinship...?

I remember learning of the watermelon thing for the 1st time some time ago during Bush 2 when some physics teacher got in trouble for using "Condoleezza throws a watermelon off the roof" as a word problem in a homework problem set. And fried chicken from Dave Chappelle who had a bit about how everybody likes fried chicken because it's really really delicious. It doesn't seem like a particularly strong or strongly reinforced stereotype, though, just a vague dull background radiation thing that everyone knows that everyone else is supposed to know, but nobody talks about it.

I thought watermelon was specifically an old meme about Africans not being smart enough to grow anything else on their own.

Easy to grow and delicious??? Man, watermelon is awesome!!

Frying something with breading being a good way to increase the calorie count of a thing cheaply.

OP didn't even mention that it was fried lol but yeah "fried chicken and watermelon" is a pretty obvious stereotype. it takes a lot to try and deny that.

It's definitely a stereotype, but the question is: why is it an offensive stereotype? Italians eating pasta is also a stereotype but no one seems to get offended over that.

Yes, but what are the bad parts?

Because being BLACK black is still very low status.

Being an "Ay! Oh! Ah-spicy meatbahall!" 8th generation removed Italian is a charming little bit of americana.

I don’t care if it’s a stereotype. My concern is watermelon does seem to have a stronger connection to actual racism other than be a cultural a food a people eat. I got no problem serving a person from New Orleans gumbo or someone from Thailand a curry. The issue is watermelon I think has connotation to negative characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermelon_stereotype

I didn’t even notice it didn’t specify fried chicken. But the chicken and waffles I believe is always fried and just assumed. The breading soaks up the syrup.

Every culture has their “stereotype” food. You can’t celebrate a culture without eating their stereotypes. I might have considered leaving out watermelon but the other stuff seems fine.

Serving fried chicken and watermelon at post-Michelle Obama school lunches is the #1 way to get children actually excited for black history month. Sometimes I wake up thinking about that time I got a churro as a teen during some Hispanic-themed cultural school trip. That churro definitely swung my positive valence for all things Hispanic by 5%.

That churro definitely swung my positive valence for all things Hispanic by 5%.

Now, is this additive or multiplicative? If the cost of ending anti-Hispanic bigotry is buying everyone 20 churros...

I'm not sure this counts. Fried chicken and watermelon was a known stereotype long before woke existed.

Should I be more upset that performative outrage is carving holiday-based dietary restrictions into the public consciousness?

If the school celebrated the day by staging a mock robbery to celebrate Black History Month, on the grounds that crime is black culture, and someone complained, would you call that a "holiday-based theater restriction"?

If the school celebrated the day by staging a mock robbery to celebrate Black History Month, on the grounds that crime is black culture, and someone complained, would you call that a "holiday-based theater restriction"?

Robbery is not a value-neutral sort of thing, and also the vast, vast majority of black people never commit any robbery at all. Highlighting plainly negative stereotypes about a group is obviously not "celebrating" that group.

Fried chicken and watermelon was a known stereotype long before woke existed.

Is this any different than Italians and spaghetti? Mexicans and tacos? Navajo fry bread? Jewish matzo balls?

There are negative food stereotypes, I suppose... like British food, American food, surely some related to ethnic groups as well though I can't think of any off the top of my head. I personally don't even much care for what is sometimes called "soul food," but I know it is quite popular and beloved of many, and I don't know anyone who regards it as low status or anything. Maybe in the distant past "fried==cheap" was a thing? But I don't know anyone who thinks in those terms today.

Fried chicken and watermelon were historically used to mock black people. This is not generally true for matzoh balls and Jews. (And whether fried equals cheap is irrelevant. The exact history of the food item doesn't matter any more than the exact etymology of a racial epithet.)

If spaghetti had appeared in popular culture for a century in the context of Mafia dons eating spaghetti before they chopped someone's head off, and pretty much never in any other way, Italians might object to Italian culture month being celebrated using spaghetti.

This is not generally true for matzoh balls and Jews.

One of the most widespread antisemitic canards is that Jews murder Christians in order to drain their blood to make matzo:

Blood libels typically claim that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzos, an unleavened flatbread which is eaten during Passover

That isn't the predominant context where matzohs are associated with Jews.

Just like watermelon and fried chicken aren't primarily known as foods used in mocking and degrading stereotypes of black Americans.

You have to consider the magnitude of the stereotype in addition to how widespread it is. It's a historical fact that dozens of pogroms were started on the basis of blood libel. How many black Americans were lynched specifically because they are stereotypically said to only eat fried chicken and watermelon?

Watermelon is known in innocuous contexts. The combination of watermelon and blacks isn't. The combination of matzot and Jews is.

I don't know how you could possibly expect to falsify that assertion, other than that millions of black Americans eat watermelon every day and no one thinks it's funny or weird or "ha ha just like the stereotype".

Pasta has indeed played a part in mob movies, and there are indeed pasta-related (and garlic-related) slurs about Italians. Just as there are about beans and Mexicans, or potatoes and Irish (obsolete, but so would be slurs about fried chicken and watermelon if the progressives wouldn't keep bringing them up).

It's just the political gains involved in being incredibly oversensitive to perceived insults to blacks that keeps this happening.

There are mob movies with pasta, but it's only a fraction of all the associations of pasta with Italians. Most of the time pasta is associated with Italians, it's not in a negative context.

Most of the time blacks have been associated with watermelon, it has been negative.

This is only because progressives have kept it so. Most of the old nasty bits about black people and watermelon are just that, old; Wikipedia notes the stereotype had mostly vanished by 1970. It's been brought back over and over again, mostly by progressives. Modern racists picked it up from them.

I have to wonder how much of the difference with other ethnicities there is "degree of absorption into the 'White' category."

There's a difference between the assertion "fried chicken and waffles were invented by black Americans" and the ugly stereotype that "fried chicken and waffles are the only foods that black Americans eat". If the former statement is always read as being a "dog whistle" for the latter, I don't know how it'll be possible for us to celebrate any of the contributions black Americans have made to the culinary arts.

To be clear, that assertion is false. The soul food dishes actually invented by black people are far more difficult to get elementary age children to eat.

I don't know what specifically counts as soul food, but I'm pretty sure that getting children to eat fried chicken and watermelon isn't hard.

That was my point. There are dishes used in soul food that are not shared with general southern food, as well as southern or soul food dishes that are probably rooted in African cuisine rather than European(and fried chicken is an extremely European dish), but they’re far less appetizing and have a lot more beans and vegetables in them.

Non-Louisiana styles of gumbo, hoppin Johns, and chitlins are all far more specifically associated with the African American community than fried chicken, which is realistically just a generally southern dish derived from Scottish cuisine that happens to also be something people actually want to eat when they weren’t raised doing so. Ditto for watermelon.

He's likely referring to okra based dishes (most kids find it to have the consistency of boogers and dislike it), some collard green applications, and offal applications such as fried chitterlings (chitlins), livermush, and cheap game (possum, squirrel, rabbit).

That and bean dishes absolutely identical to peasant food from every other country on earth but we have to pretend it’s special and beloved despite black people themselves mostly avoiding them these days.

I'm assuming stuff like chitlins (read: weird meat) and collard greens (read: veggies).

What I can't decide is whether that means the "Great Awokening" really is on the wane, or whether it has become so integrated into our culture that it is now impossible to excise--something on its way to becoming so boring and broadly accepted that no one bothers to challenge it.

My disagreement with the "on the wane" argument is that it misses why we call it the culture war, not culture battle. Battles are a part of war, but war encompasses a much larger phenomenon. I agree with your second explanation - "white-coded institute does something that can be used as progressive outrage bait" is so commonplace a story that it doesn't do anything anymore. It's like a car crash - sucks but just a fact of life.

My disagreement with the "on the wane" argument is that it misses why we call it the culture war, not culture battle. Battles are a part of war, but war encompasses a much larger phenomenon.

Sure, but wars can also come to an end. The main culture war dominating Western society is woke vs. anti-woke, but not so long ago it was religion vs. anti-religion. The specific woke vs. anti-woke culture war currently being fought may come to an end, but that doesn't mean it won't be immediately replaced by something else.

I know a guy who was a working reporter for a broadsheet in the 80s-90s and he was a reporting machine, multiple stories a day, every day.

How do you even write multiple stories in a day? Are these like short reports that just say "X happened today"?

Have you ever looked at an old school paper - pre WWIII, even 19C. Tiny type, multiple pages of columns of reporting (our reporter in Cairo, our reporter in Berlin), almost no opinions outside the editorial. Reporters used to be productive.

Actually, their just used to be a lot more reporters. Almost every decent-sized (let's say Top 25) had multiple international correspondents and there were actual strong local reporters. Now, you're lucky if there's a single 24-year old covering city council meetings even in pretty major cities, and it's not a case of Gen Z not wanting to do that job, it's that the hedge fund that bought the paper decided to cut the jobs in the first place.

Also, due to the Internet, it turned out most people didn't buy newspapers for the articles, but for the classifieds, and once that moved to the Internet, the only people still reading were partisans.

Classifieds are one thing. But you used to need the paper to:

-- Check the weather for the upcoming week (radio and tv were options, but until cable and the weather channel that always meant waiting for ten minutes minimum to actually get the weather)

--Check sports scores/standings. Used to be that fans would get the paper just to find out how the game ended and where the standings sat. Until the internet this wasn't practical without at best 45 minutes of sportscenter.

--Check what time a movie was showing.

-- Find out about local meetings, laws, road construction, transit schedule changes.

These were every day, unintellectual tasks that most men needed a newspaper for every day.

Yeah pretty much, and it was even like that on the internet for a while. We'd have to find stories then write 500 words outlining the primary events and actors, and then summarising the most likely potential consequence - plus some colour (like a funny aside or a milquetoast personal opinion) if it's published on the net. If you couldn't bang out ten of these in half a day (because you had other proper work to do too) you weren't cut out for journalism.

Yeah, newspapers used to be mainly reporting on facts, not thinly veiled social activism

yellow journalism was an extremely popular form of journalism. cruddy articles is nothing new and is as old as time immemorial

at what point did people view attempts (or even just possible attempts) to celebrate their culture as offensive?

While this incident is supremely idiotic, the article makes clear that this was not an attempt to celebrate black culture: "In a statement, Aramark apologized for the “unintentional insensitivity” shown by the company but said the menu was not intended as a cultural meal."

the article makes clear that this was not an attempt to celebrate black culture

The article makes clear that Aramark would like you to believe that this was not an attempt to celebrate black culture. Maybe it is also true that this was not an attempt to celebrate black culture! But under the circumstances, it may be a bit like Netflix claiming it only released its new password sharing policies accidentally.

As the article also notes, waffles and chicken with watermelon was apparently not the meal listed for that day on the meal calendar:

Johnson said the lunch menu changed from what was originally planned. A lunch menu for the month of February posted on the school’s website shows the food vendor had planned to serve Philly cheesesteak, broccoli and fresh fruit on February 1.

So I feel like there's a very good chance there is more to this than "oops, we accidentally served waffles."

That is not impossible, but I am very skeptical that, in 2023, someone thought it was a good idea to celebrate Black History Month by serving watermelon. That would have been cringe 40 years ago.

There are many cringe stereotypes from previous eras that are now inexplicably being reassesed as authentic ethnic and cultural expressions.

It's certainly not unanimous, and it has resulted in many eyebrow-raising episodes like this one. But I can absolutely see a well-intentioned 2020s progressive pushing for watermelon and chicken during Black History Month, and being caught completely flat-footed when this doesn't go over well at all.

I'm not totally sure that's what happened here, but its not remotely in the realm of disbelief either. The cultural consensus of the 90s and 00s continues to fracture further, so I no longer use it as a touchstone for how I predict people to largely act today.

The usual example of this with African American culture is black eyed peas(international name cowpeas), which, being beans, are far less easy to get people to actually want to eat. Although I suppose it’s possible.

Perhaps, but watermelon is particularly cringe, given its specific history. Though of course, I suppose the person in charge of the menu might be young and unaware of the history. But, if they were aware, and did it anyway, then Aramark should apologize and I rescind my statement that the incident is idiotic.

There are many cringe stereotypes from previous eras that are now inexplicably being reassesed as authentic ethnic and cultural expressions.

Not "inexplicably". The "cringe stereotypes" were based on authentic ethnic expressions.

That certainly seems to be the takeaway I'm left with, given how progs have boxed in these arguments. And I don't think they appreciate how psychically destructive it is. Like everything you were taught from your childhood upbringing to adulthood was actually just total bullshit, and we all decided this last year.

This is the kind of thing that annihilates any and all integrity of your political project, AFAIC. gj

I am very skeptical that, in 2023, someone thought it was a good idea to celebrate Black History Month by serving watermelon. That would have been cringe 40 years ago.

And yet somehow Aramark also managed to do so just four years ago. I feel like you are being exactly as skeptical as you should be, about exactly the wrong things.

All the more reason to think that it was not intentional this time.

so backing this up, from downloading the actual PDF file, it does look like this PDF file was created on 1/27, so I find it unlikely that the school was intending it.

and... it's pretty obviously not an attempt to celebrate black culture lmao

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