« It's Trying to Push Right Through My Skin | Main | Another Revolutionary »
January 17, 2006
Race Without Food
Yesterday's remarks by New Orleans' Mayor, Ray Nagin, got me thinking.
I love food. I love cooking it, I love eating it, I love discussing it, and I love writing about it. But I'm wondering if, after all, there is one area where food should just stay out of the discussion: race metaphors.
There is practically an entire genre of esculent imagery for racial identity. An "oreo" is someone who is black on the outside but "acts white." "Bananas" are those who appear Asian, but act white. "Eggs" are the opposite: white folk who act "yellow." A Native American who has lost touch with his or her ethnic identity is an "apple." Red and yellow black and white...
It's not that all food-inspired, race-related terms are necessarily pejorative. Caucasians may refer to themselves as having a "whitebread" upbringing or value set. Blacks may call themselves "chocolate." Sometimes, the edible analogies are intended to create a helpful picture of racial harmony. America may be called the "melting pot," a big vat of fondue that has mixed cheeses, wine, and spices into a smooth, rich mixture of indistinguishable parts. Sometimes, our country is instead termed a "mixed salad," where distinct ingredients are tossed together to form a single dish. Some, dissatisfied even with this, dream of an "ethnic stew," where ingredients maintain particularities while contributing to the greater, complex flavor of the whole.
It's strange how food plays a hugely important role in creating cultural and ethnic identity, and yet it fails so miserably when applied analogically to race relations. In the case of oreos, eggs, bananas, and apples, the metaphors mash the intricate, multi-layered tapestries of personality, upbringing, and other influences into a single, flat tone. Certain interests, actions, and preferences are equated with a color which, in turn, supposedly represents a racial or ethnic group. Such sweeping generalizations and simplistic renderings of what it means to "be Asian" or to "be black," color coded like a paint-by-numbers worksheet, can hardly be helpful when unpacking something so historically and emotionally charged. It is a telling irony that though invisible flavors are the primary distinguishing characteristic of different foods, it is color that gets the attention in our culinary, racial imagery.
Even those well-meaning metaphors, meant to assist in teaching multiculturalism, reveal deep set ideas about race relations. The "melting pot" image seems to spring from idealist, post-Enlightenment beliefs in the harmonizing power of democracy. It has been criticized for merely emphasizing cultural integration into the dominant group, expecting those from radically different cultures to be absorbed into the mainstream. The "toss salad" concept, on the other hand, perhaps places too much of an emphasis on the distinctives. In the analogy's own terms, one may ask, "Who gets to make the dressing to keep it all together?" Even the "ethnic stew," a new favorite among multiculturalists, breaks down relatively quickly. After all, not all ingredients meld well together.
Imagery can be a powerful, helpful tool for explaining difficult concepts. It makes the abstract concrete and provides a familiar context for uncovering new ideas. I do wonder, then, why our attempts to relate race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage to food have proven at best one-dimensional and at worst actually hurtful. Perhaps part of the problem lies in insistence on limiting our explanations to visual observations. I don't have a solution, but perhaps we would do well to start tasting.
Culture, Yo | By elissa | 05:05 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/28803
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Race Without Food:
