We Are What We Eat

The headline is an old mantra of the dieters.  That is not how I mean it, however.  I am not speaking of belly fat or thunder thighs.  I am talking about ethnicity.  Yes, ethnicity.

Readers of my commentaries already know that I am a staunch critic of political correctness and identity politics as they are being defined and used today.  The authoritarian left – which has great influence in the Democratic Party and the so-called news media – uses ethnic and racial differences as a fault line – used to create adversarial competition among groups.  Essentially it is a hostile battle between their side and the other side.

Ironically, in the name of “identity,” the left wipes out cultural identities. 

Why?  Because it is easier to manage and control larger amorphous groups as opposed to a scattering of smaller less homogenized communities.

For obvious reasons, Black Americans have been lumped into one large ethnic group. This is mostly because their more specific national origins in Africa have been lost over the past 400 years.  For political reasons, anyone who had the least bit of Negro features or ancestral history are summarily and arbitrarily declared to be African Americans – a monolithic interest group. 

That applies to people like my Black daughter, whose ancestors have lived in Jamaica for at least 300 hundred years.  In today’s America, she is considered an African American, not a Jamaican — except among her family and friends.

The left has also homogenized the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians and Peruvians into one big group to be known as “Hispanics.”   Likewise, all the Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and  Indonesians are to be lumped into a bland mass of “Asians.”  The original residents of what is now the United States of America came from a wide variety of distinct tribes, but they are now all “Native Americans.”

As if that is not bad enough, the left has now created only two competing populations according to political fault lines.  Republicans are a bunch of White folks – with no distinction among those with German, Italian or French ancestry. 

Politically juxtaposed is an illogical mass of “people of color” – who are claimed to be the beneficiaries of Democratic Party progressivism.   All the distinctive cultures by which people define THEMSELVES are canceled in this new racist re-assemblage of the citizenry.

So … that is where the title above comes in. 

Think of cultures by the unique foods they prepare.  There is a difference between Mexican and Peruvian food … Chinese and Japanese food … French and German food.  That is where you find the real ethnic cultures –the real identities.  Not the phony political identity determined by Big Brother politicians.

If you are among those who accept the new paradigm of political ethnic blending, the next time you go out for dinner, see if you can find a people-of-color restaurant.  What would be on the menu?  If you abide by another bit of left-wing nonsense, you will find nothing because preparing foods outside your own ancestry is “ethnic appropriation” according to the nutty left.

To the extent we are related to an ancestry, we should celebrate it – and share it.  That is the richness of diversity.  Not crushing it into a colorless mass – “colorless” as in bland and uninteresting, but highly controllable.

So, there ‘tis.