The New Black
[2007-02-27 14:30]

"In honor of Black History Month," the cafeteria at the place where I work is serving fried chicken and collard greens. I'm not sure if I am, or should be, annoyed by this. I'm certainly perplexed.

While I understand the company's desire to celebrate Black History Month, reinforcing stereotypes doesn't seem to be the most enlightened way to do so. It's not even the regular fried chicken that they occasionally serve on non-honored days. On those days, the fried chicken is a bit like KFC's or the frozen stuff you get at the grocery store. Today, it's more like Shake'N'Bake.

I can't believe that the food service folk would change their recipe on a whim -- it must be simpler and cheaper to stick with what they usually do. So I'm assuming that someone suggested that this particular recipe is more authentic than the other one. I'm not sure how I feel about that either.

It appears that everything on today's menu can be categorized as Soul Food. In any event, this got me wondering, is this any different than serving Chinese food to celebrate the Chinese New Year? And, maybe more importantly, do I care?

My knee-jerk reaction was that there is a difference. It seemed to me that serving Soul Food to honor Black History Month was like saying "If you're black, then you like Soul Food." And this seemed like a horrible generalization to me.

But, thinking about it, it's really not that different from serving fried rice and barbecued pork to celebrate Chinese New Years'. Cha siu is really a Cantonese dish. So serving this particular dish lumps all of us Chinese together about as much as serving Soul Food to honor black people does. And certainly it's no less a generalization than serving corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day.

So, after further review, I think the cafeteria is just an equal opportunity offender. And, ultimately, I guess I don't care all that much.

Still, I was concerned that the Fried Chicken reference had its roots in some deeper derogatory meaning. So this got me to googling to see if there was some consensus about things like this.

The first site I found was this article about the stereotype of blacks and watermelon. I found this particularly interesting both because I never knew where that stereotype came from and because I've had similar internal struggles about doing things that might appear to legitimize the stereotypes of asians.

Searching also lead me to That Black Girl. I'm not a blog connoisseur, but I like this one because she seems like an articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking person. Heh.

Seriously, though, it's interesting to hear things from another point-of-view. And it's interesting (to me) to discover where our experiences and perceptions differ and where they're alike. Besides, we got that Northwest (Portland-Seattle) thing going.

Tangential Whiplash Alert!

Speaking of which, there's a TV show called Northwest Afternoon that's produced here in Seattle. This is a very unimposing show about soap operas and other light fare. But the show's acronym is NWA which always makes me think of a not-so-unimposing rap group, and that always makes me chuckle.

I'd love to see Cindi Rinehart throw down (or get down) with Ice Cube and Dr. Dre some day. I wonder if Dr. Dre watches Days of Our Lives...