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发帖数: 29846 | 1 November 29, 2012 by Warner Todd Huston
You can’t even eat turkey on Thanksgiving without being called a racist by
our friends on the extreme left side of the aisle in America today,
especially if you prefer the white meat over the dark.
Just before Thanksgiving last week, the liberal site Slate dredged up a 2010
piece claiming that the reason Americans love the white meat on a turkey is
because we are all racists.
The rant written by Ron Rosenbaum is a great example of all that is wrong
with the race baiting left in America these days. It is a sad example that
literally everything under the sun is just another excuse for the far left
to cry racism.
But before Rosenbaum goes into how turkey meat is racist, he prefaced his
turkey talk with a digression on white bread, that one-time most favorite
American sandwich bread. Rosenbaum says that white bread was once “regarded
as the peak of social refinement by the new middle class.”
White bread fell from grace, Rosenbaum says, because “white bread” itself
became an epithet — as in “that is so white bread” — and because
nutritionists decided it was not a healthy food choice.
He’s right, of course, about the attack that health nuts led against white
bread. But he makes it sound as if America initially fell in love with store
-bought, bagged and sliced white bread because it signified the “social
refinement” of the white, middle-class. This is not likely.
In the mid 1900s, store-bought, white bread was not sold as a “socially
refined” product. It was sold in two ways, one being pure convenience.
After all, previous to when packaged white bread became an American staple
in the 1930s, homemakers had to bake their own bread. It was a great time
saver to go buy a bagged loaf of bread at the grocery store instead of
having to bake your own.
Secondly, white bread was initially (and up until the 1970s) sold as the
healthy choice in bread and was featured prominently as a part of a diet
enrichment campaign started by both manufactures and even the U.S.
government. It should be noted that calcium was added to bread in 1941 when
the U.S. government began to notice that many female recruits had rickets
and by 1956 it became a federal law to enrich all bread products.
White bread was not sold based on class or race. It was a health and
convenience thing. So, Rosenbaum’s wrong on his attack on white bread.
Then he gets to bashing our turkey.
You see, Rosenbaum wants you to know that if you are a white meat eater, the
only reason you could be so stupid to like that “tasteless” part of the
turkey is because, you guessed it, you are a racist. Rosenbaum wonders about
the racism of liking white meat. “It was enough to make me wonder whether
there could be a racial, if not racist, subtext here,” he wrote.
Rosenbaum couples the discussion of turkey with that of pork, “the other
white meat.” He harkens back to pork chops being racist because the phrase
“high on the hog” originated as a phase to denote what part of the hog
rich, white, plantation owners ate from first leaving the lower parts — the
feet, haunches, and innards — to their slaves.
Of course, it is also absurd to claim that “the other white meat” is
considered a “racist” meat 150 years after slavery disappeared and long
after any one had any memory of the origins of the phrase “high on the hog.”
In any case, Rosenbaum goes on to claim that dark turkey meat is less
favored because of its racist “darkness.”
Despite its superior taste, dark meat has dark undertones for some. Dark
meat evokes the color of earth, soil. Dark meat seems to summon up ancient
fears of contamination and miscegenation as opposed to the supposed superior
purity of white meat. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that white meat
remains the choice of a holiday that celebrates Puritans.
Here Rosenbaum falls back on the rote “black = bad” concept that so many
racebaiters insist underscores our entire society.
Amusingly, at the end of his piece Rosenbaum shows he has a total inability
at introspection by claiming that someone else’s writing is “nonsensical”
when he slams the work of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Whatever the
merits of Sartre, it is amusing that after Rosenbaum’s whole exercise in
logical fallacy he calls someone else’s work “nonsensical.”
But in the final analysis, Rosenbaum’s entire piece is just another silly
exercise in the long reach to find racism under every bed, around every
corner, and now even in our turkey.
For the record, I like the legs. That would be the dark meat. Rosenbaum
could have made his overreaching screed much shorter by sticking with his
initial “White meat is just a tasteless slab of dry, fibrous material”
theme. At least there he was closer to the truth and could have saved us
from all his absurd, racebaiting rambling. |
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