Food and Race
This is International Blog Against Racism week, and fewdblawg is getting in on the act! How can I participate too, you ask?
1. Announce the week in your blog.
2. Switch your default icon to either an official IBAS icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBAS icon, you may modify one of yours yourself or ask someone to do so, or ask oyceter to do so as she has agreed to make a custom one for everyone who asks, or go to her LJ and take one of the general-use ones she put up (which is what I did).
3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn't yours, portrayals of race on TV, review a book on the subject, etc.
I actually heard about this week from this post over at reappropriate. Although she thinks that we should be blogging about racism all the time, I think it's ok for a food blog to do it a bit more rarely.
Wow that was a long preamble.
I was watching a news/current affairs program yesterday (I'm in Melbourne at the moment), and they were saying that 1/3 of Australians still think that immigrants are a "bad influence". "On what?!" exclaimed my aunt indignantly. Luckily the program framed this attitude as the problem (rather than immigrants themselves), and talked to some community organizers about how they were combating the stereotypes and hostility to immigrants.
One of the activities they mentioned was getting together for cross-cultural eating. "Food is a great way to get to know new people" said one organizer (or something like that). Which got my little overeducated mindwheels spinning, refusing to let me have that warm fuzzy racism-is-being-solved feeling:
1) Is this true/effective? Mexican and Chinese food is pretty damn popular in the U.S., but racism and xenophobia against those two groups is still pretty prevalent. Perhaps it has diminished over time, but is that really due to food?
2) Even if it is true, is it problematic that the way for (presumptively white) citizens to accept foreigners is to literally consume a part of their culture?
3) Also, where the immigrants are Asians, does this play into the stereotype of Asian immigrants just being able to be cooks and cleaners?
What do people think?
posted by manoverbored at 10:15 PM
4 Comments:
Food! One of my favorite things to talk about ever!
While I enjoy eating food from all sorts of cultures and think it can help, I'm not sure if introducing people to food from other cultures necessarily reduces racism?
Of course, on the flip side, I'd always get annoyed at people who kept saying that my Chinese food was gross without ever trying or thinking that maybe meatloaf was just as weird as eating fish heads.
On the other (third?) hand, there's something to be said about how food travels across cultures and how it changes; Chinese food in the US is very, very, very different from Chinese food in Taiwan and China and Hong Kong. And then there are people who think they are somehow getting into another culture when in reality, they're just ordering General Tso's chicken all the time, not even realizing that different regions of China have different foods.
In conclusion, I only have completely random thoughts =(. But... food and race!
I think food can be a good start but, like anything, it depends on where individuals take it.
As Oyce suggests, it cuts down a lot on hurt and annoyance if the people who are already living in the country are already familiar with other culture's food, and so, rather than saying, "Ewwww! Gross, fish heads," might say, "Yum, fish heads." Of course, common politeness would work just as well.
Eating at a westernized chain is not going to bring anyone into contact with another culture, or even another culture's food. But a person who gets really into the food may well have to venture into unaccustomed neighborhoods and restaurants full of actual people from that culture to eat the best stuff.
I'm not sure how far that really goes, since restaurants aren't communal except for the people at the same table; I still can't speak any Thai except for food-related words, nor do I know all that much about the culture that doesn't have to do with food and bits I picked up from going to the restaurants and nearby shops and markets.
Still (my capitalist side says) there is something to be said for people being able to open restaurants and markets that serve the food they're used to, and be patronized by both old and new fans of it, neither of whom want it westernized, but just want it good.
Rachel Brown
I think that for the majority of people, food is a negative influence on perceptions of race.
As you mentioned, it actively promotes the idea that a cultural or racial group is a "service-oriented" group, belonging only in the kitchen or as waiters. Secondly, it often forces individual restraunteurs to choose between assimilation (i.e. whiteyfication of their food), creation of what amounts to a segregated cultural space (i.e. only members of that group frequent the restaurant) or face going out of business.
I've heard people talk about how they won't go to particular eateries because they'd be the only white person there--White America is not generally open to having an "outsider experience" when it doesn’t have to.
Additionally, eating "ethnic" food can give pseudo-enlightened people a meaningless way to say they interact with and experience other cultures. A sort of culinary equivalent to "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."
Ultimately, we, as consumers of food from different cultures, have to be honest with ourselves. We are not changing the world by having a bowl of Pho. We are not experiencing another culture--we are consuming cultural artifacts, the same way we would with a statue or painting.
Food can certainly act as a catalyst for deeper engagement, but I think that depends much more on the individual than on food as a medium.
oyceter - It's interesting what you're saying about food changing as it moves from its geographical point of origin. In a way it suggests to me that food may be more useful as a metaphor for race and immigration than as something to be consumed. In other words, it is the contemplation of cuisine rather than the mere eating of food that leads to deeper understanding of the mechanisms of race, and how people negotiate the assimilation/integration/separatism problem.
Of course, in order to understand the metaphor in all its richness it helps to consume a wide variety of food, especially diaspora food, in different locations. In other words, being a thoughtful, widely-travelled foodie with an adventurous palate.
fuson - Panda Express, Taco Bell et al are the blackface (yellow/brownface) of food. They are commercialized caricatures of the original cuisine, rather than an organic syncretism. I have little but contempt for such establishments. You say that we rarely see the ideal situation for cultural dialogue - what is this ideal? I actually find myself at a loss to even begin to see how eating a certain food would lead to cultural dialogue and a lessening or eradication of racism.
I think there may be a certain fallacy at work here - that racism is merely about individual attitudes towards other races, and that it will end when people "just get along" - in other words, the racial harmony myth.
Rachel - I like your observation that people who are into a certain food may have to venture into racial and ethnic enclaves that they might not otherwise enter. Perhaps in doing so there will be some increase in understanding through experiencing a form of the "racial outsider" experience. On the other hand, this is a relatively brief, geographically and legally contained version of such an experience - perhaps actually worse than not having the experience at all, insofar as it encourages complacency or an underestimation of the challenges facing those who are racial outsiders all the time and everywhere they go. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
ervan - Good point about White America being averse to the outsider experience (even in the most controlled circumstances!).
Also, I don't know if any pseudo-enlightened person would consciously view the mere eating of ethnic food as an indicator of their lack of racism. Can you imagine someone saying "I'm not racist, I eat Thai food!" Or perhaps I'm too sheltered or move in circles where that sort of statement would be so ludicrous as to have you laughed out of the room. I could see it leading to an unconscious sense of self-satisfaction and complacency, however - a contribution to the culturally-sanctioned unwillingness to examine one's own involvement and complicity with racism.
Here's a thought, though, in a presumptively democratic country like the U.S., is there not room for culinary exchange to foster a more ethical foreign policy. I don't mean to suggest that merely having more Iraqi restaurants, for example, would have averted the Bush invasion of Iraq, but perhaps it would have shaken people up sooner, and journalists would have been more outraged and published more photos and stories about the devastation of civilian life there, and those stories would have been given more play. Perhaps Guantanamo wouldn't have happened, or wouldn't have gone on for so long. Perhaps the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities would not have occurred.
While not wanting to overplay the role of cultural identification, I also don't think we should underplay it. The more that groups with political power see certain "others" as familiar and "like us", the less likely they are to take/allow actions that flagrantly violate those "others" human rights.
Post a Comment
<< Home