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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29312 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?

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).

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