Here’s one of the delights of Facebook membership:
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all of my readers!
(I refrained from responding “If a very pale-skinned person gets hungry for Taco Bell on May 5, would it be less (micro-)aggressive to put on brown face makeup prior to departing for the drive-through?”)
The kind of social insecurity this exhibits is characteristic of Massachusetts, going back almost 400 years. What makes your liberal friends slightly worse off than their Puritan 10-greats grandparents (also applies if their ancestors were in shtetls) is their lack of awareness of the nature of their belief system; when there is an official book of rules one is not quite as terrified of breaking them inadvertently and being shunned by the tribe.
If you get a significant number of “offensive” votes, you should follow up with another poll: “Were you aware that Cinco de Mayo is primarily an American holiday?”
Restaurant in Delaware posted on FB a choice tonight of margaritas for Cinco celebrants or mint juleps in honor of Kentucky Derby. Bring on the agave or the simple syrup.
Ken: this was not my post, but rather a friend’s in my feed.
Joe: the woman who posted this lives in Manhattan. She did attend Harvard so Massachusetts is partly responsible for her point of view.
Interesting that it said “offensive when people eat tacos”. Presumably it is not offensive when Mexicans eat tacos. So it is probably a question about white people eating tacos. But maybe she should also ask whether it is acceptable for black people to eat tacos? Are only white people subjected to this scrutiny?
My favorite part of Cinco de Mayo is that it is when Mexicans celebrate kicking out a horde of invaders to their country.
Roger:
“Are only white people subjected to this scrutiny?”
Of course, and there’s perfectly logical explanation for the scrutiny: if a non-mexican POC eats a taco, he/she/it commits a transgression that was caused by white racism directed at the transgressing individual. The “white” is always the ultimate villain, that’s one of the foundational progressive dogmas.
Parenthetically, a more interesting question is how to qualify for a POC coveted position. This country perhaps can borrow Brazil’s advanced expertise in this area:
“Lucas Siqueira, 27, was really excited. His high mark on the Foreign Service exam earned him a coveted position at Brazil’s highly competitive Ministry of Foreign Affairs[…] Siqueira considers himself to be mixed race, known in Brazil as pardo, or brown […]
People started investigating the background of who had gotten the slots. They got into Siqueira’s Instagram, his Facebook feed and they sent his personal photos to the government.
“A lot of people sent pictures saying, ‘Oh, this dude is white, he’s a fraud,'” Siqueira says.
The government was getting so much flack that it put Siqueira’s offer on hold.
In order to “prove” that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
[…]
race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width
”
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race
Get those machines from Brazil to separate the chaff from the wheat with the winnowing fork !
@Ivan – racial discrimination in Brazil has distinctive characteristics than in any other place. Due to the extensive interbreeding there is a large “palette” of skin colours, as the quote alludes to, with several “degrees” of whiteness or blackness.
The society is also extremely stratified, which leads to a splitting of the racial discrimination: it is not just whites vs blacks, but even among the mestizos, there is discrimination based on level of whiteness/blackness.
I do agree that cultural sensitivity and decorum should exist. I even consider myself a progressive. But these people have too much free time to conjure up ridiculous ideas.
A small trip to wikipedia:
«A 2007 UCLA Newsroom article notes that, “the holiday, which has been celebrated in California continuously since 1863, is virtually ignored in Mexico.”(…) The holiday crossed over (…) into the rest of the United States (…) but did not gain popularity until the 1980s when marketers, especially beer companies, capitalized on the celebratory nature of the day and began to promote it»
So, asking this to Mexicans seems to be somewhat pointless – over there, they don’t even know care about it. To Mexican-Americans… why would any one be offended with people partaking in a celebration (even if a highly commercialised holiday)?
Does this person ask if Irish-Americans are offended by people drinking beer on St. Patrick’s day? Or if Christians become offended if a Jew or a Muslim says to them “Merry Christmas”? If we’re not there yet, we’re definitely close to “peak snowflake”.
So we learned from our Brazil experts that it’s ok to be super racist apartheid states in 2018 if your grandparents and great-grandparents weren’t against miscegenation. South Africa should’ve taken notice.
Fransico, you’re asking questions that assume a certain kind of logic, not the Marxist religion that these people have. The proletariat cannot commit a transgression against the bourgeois, the bourgeoisie is the oppressor class. Replace proletariat and bourgeois with white and POC, womyn and men, straight and LGBTIQAARLAJSJKHFKSHSFK. In decades past when reality forced committed communists to become ex.communists, they kept the dialectical materialism principles and colonized feminism, environmentalism, and other progressive issues.