Happy Halloween! Pumpkin spice is racist!
Sorry to start your day off on such tragic news, but The Washington Post let us know this month that you can't even enjoy the most basic of "basic white girl" treats without a side of white guilt.
You, like I, probably thought "Oh, The Babylon Bee has gotten a little TOO on the nose with this one" before you realized that, no, this is a genuine story from one of the nation's most prestigious newspapers.
In 2023, WaPo discovered the cutthroat spice trade of previous centuries and has now decided that we, who had nothing to do with it, should probably feel bad about it and drink our PSLs (Pumpkin Spice Lattes) with a hint more bitterness.
"Some spices are part of a natural course of trade," said Sarah Wassberg Johnson, a food historian. "It just happens that the main spices in pumpkin spice are fraught with colonizer histories."
"Fraught with colonizer histories" is journalist/academic code for the history of evil white people (the only evil people there are or have been).
Because nutmeg used to be rare and the Dutch East India Trading Company conquered an island for access to the spice in the 1600s, it "complicates" our enjoyment of pumpkin spice, which includes nutmeg, today.
Even The Post acknowledges that this is a RIDICULOUS story, as they refute the entire point in this paragraph:
"It's true that if we didn't consume food that hadn't been touched by slavery and Indigenous displacement, we wouldn't be eating a lot of food," Johnson said. "But whenever foods enter the pop culture lexicon the way pumpkin spice has in the U.S., it's important to acknowledge how it reached us."
Slavery has existed for all of human history, so all food came from slavery, migration, and conquest/colonization in some way. Go read this history of pasta sometime. Foods like sweet corn, tomatoes, and potatoes were taken to Europe from the Americas. Do I need to profess an "acknowledgement" every time I eat sit down to dinner, WaPo?
I guess it's important to acknowledge it when it comes to pumpkin spice ESPECIALLY.
They don't say explicitly what those reasons are, other than being a pop culture phenomenon.
(But I can guess what the reasons are.)
Here's what comes up if you type in "pumpkin spice is racist" on Google:
- Premise 1: Pumpkin spice latte is associated with white women.
- Premise 2: White people are evil
- Premise 3: Evil people should feel bad about themselves.
Therefore, it's "important" to recognize the history of pumpkin spice to make the evil white women feel bad about themselves.
It's all one big endeavor to cultivate white guilt.
Enjoy your fall treats, you racist!
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