Benign Atrocities Studies has uncovered a new horror:
Two San Diego State University professors contributed a chapter to a new anthology arguing that farmers’ markets are “insidious” “white spaces where the food consumption habits of white people are normalized.”
The obvious retort doesn’t even need to be voiced, but here’s what it looks like:
Here’s what I think is behind this nonsense:
- The publish-or-perish world of academe keeps social-justice scholars ever on the lookout to “discover” things in society that supposedly reek of racism, sexism, etc.
- By now, their predecessors have laid claim to all the obvious bad stuff.
- Today’s scholars either need to give a new twist on the obvious bad stuff or find their own new thing to denounce for racism, sexism, etc.
- By now, however, the only things left undenounced are nice things that people enjoy.
- The “scholarship” is being the first one clever enough to dream up a fanciful tale on how this thing everyone likes is really a horrible evil thing smart people should hate.
So we are left with the spectacle of presumably intelligent people affecting to find racism in the existence of farmers’ markets, rape in eating cheese, racist and antifeminism in Greek yogurt, racism in pumpkins, genocide in canoes, and intolerable violence in common platitudes and speaking of golf and Christmas.
