I had a Russian driver last week (back to regular blogging on Monday) who insisted on practicing his English on me even though I had warned him that what he took away from our conversations might get him in trouble with linguists and language purists. So we stuck to simple subjects.
Until he started talking about his tips and tricks for cooking eggs. After two minutes I had to ask him if he had attended Bocuse or maybe the Swiss school. He said, sadly no. Seriously, when he got into his oeufs en Meurette I could smell the bacon and mushrooms. Finally I said flat out, "You're a chef" and he said "no, a chemist, don't cook your eggs on high heat, the proteins tighten too much"
Huh.
Anyhoo, that little vignette reminded me of this from law Professor and Appellate counsel Jonathan Turley, July 6:
In recent years, there has been an explosion of academic work declaring everything from meritocracy to math to be racist or vehicles of white dominance. Offering statistical analysis to support such claims is itself problematic since statistics have also been declared racist. Now however Law professor Mathilde Cohen of the University of Connecticut has found an untapped area of white dominance. In a talk at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Nanterre, Cohen explained how “French eating habits reinforced the ‘dominance’ of white people over ethnic minorities.”Presumably, the French themselves are allowed to continue to eat their own food without violating the Civil Rights Act. However, Cohen explained that the cuisine is used “to reinforce whiteness as a dominant racial identity.” The reason is the white people value it and thereby force minorities to “act white” by eating it:“The French meal is often presented as the national ritual to which every citizen can participate equally. But French food ways are shaped by white middle- and upper-class norms … and the boundaries of whiteness are policed through daily food encounters.”
The remarks are based on Cohen’s paper “The Whiteness of French Food Law, Race, and Eating Culture in France,” which explores the “neglected area” of “food studies, critical race theory, and critical Whiteness studies.” Cohen works “to identify and critique a form of French food Whiteness (blanchité alimentaire), that is, the use of food and eating practices to reify and reinforce Whiteness as the dominant racial identity.”....
....MUCH MORE
Huh.
