Check your pantry! If you can open the door and find exactly what you're looking for right away without having to dig through it because you spent a few minutes organizing the mess then, you guessed it, you are a racist!
That's what this one Professor of Marketing had to say in response to a recent TikTok trend of people showing off their organizational skills with their pristine food cupboards.
Through her research at Loyola University, Associate Professor of Marketing Jenna Drenten noticed a recent uptick in what she calls "pantry porn," a plethora of social media videos where women show off their fully stocked kitchen and methodically organized home supplies.
While minimalist designs used to represent an anti-consumption mindset of using less and buying less, the "new minimalism," according to Drenten, means "more is more," so long as it is not dirty or cluttered.
Historically, Drenten says that tidiness is intertwined with status and a person's messiness often breeds assumptions about a person's capacity to be responsible and respectable.
Yeah, okay, let's pause there.
Even if all that is true, and I think there is definitely something good about being organized, clean, and tidy, how does this professor make the jump to racism?
Is it her own racist assumption that black moms and wives can't keep a clean home? Because I just gotta say...
"Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of 'niceness': nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods," Drenten writes. "What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures."
Are Oxford commas racist too? Because she definitely should have used one right there.
The whole argument is that it's a status symbol to have a nice pantry and show it off. But to make the assumption that people of high status are white is... well, you know.
Eighty-five percent of large new homes in America built today feature a walk-in pantry, listed as the most desirable kitchen feature for new homebuyers, according to a 2019 report. Drenten credits, at least in part, the Kardashian-Jenner family, the Hadids and other social media influencers for turning the pantry into a "modern-day status symbol."
The Kardashians and the Hadids may be the modern "status influencers" but, I may be crazy here, but aren't the Kardashians Armenian and the Hadids Palestinian?
But they are, indeed, rich. And I guess if you live in woke academic world rich people are automatically white and problematic.
What an absolutely racist and ridiculous take.
