Posted by
John Caile on Wednesday, April 08, 2009 11:37:31 AM
In a major food store near my house, there is an aisle marked "international" foods. Above the aisle, banners hang from the ceiling announcing various cuisines. But a couple of these banners seem to be more about political correctness than food choices.
For instance, one of the signs says "Asian" - but don't bother looking for delicacies from Mongolia or the Philippines, both of which are Asian countries. Also missing are specialties from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, Bangladesh, or any of the more than two dozen countries on the world's largest continent.
Not even Russia, by far the largest country in all of Asia, garners even a foot of shelf space. But you WILL find lots of space dedicated to Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese foods and sauces. But why only these particular countries?
When did "Asian" stop being about geography and instead come to mean ONLY those cultures with...wait a minute. What DO these cultures have in common? Oh, that's right, these are all cultures whose people have, you know, "those kind of eyes" - the people we used to call "Oriental" precisely so we could distinguish them from the other "Asian" peoples.
Seems that the politically correct just HAD to come up with some different word to describe "those people" - and indicate umbrage at a term that had nothing to do with "racism" in the first place. Then again, these are the same people who imperiously pronounce that henceforth, "colored people" would be "racist" but that somehow, "people of color" would not. Get it? Oddly, the PC crowd used to say that "Oriental is a food, not a person" - apparently, now it's NOT a food, either.
In reality, the thought police have simply engaged in the same kind of racial generalizing that they pretend to abhor - putting all people with similar physical features under one bland label: Asian. Imagine someone describing a friend whose ancestors came from Sicily as "my European friend" - you'd look at them like they were a bit weird. But had the same person referred to "my Asian friend" you wouldn't raise an eyebrow.
As for me, I simply describe people of Vietnamese descent as Vietnamese,
people from Korea as Korean, and my many Hmong friends as, well, Hmong
- I prefer to recognize the true "diversity" that these very different
cultures represent, rather than lumping them into some catchall term like "Asian." And setting aside why it is that some people feel compelled to define people by their ethnic ancestry, if you do feel such a need, do NOT refer to me as
"European" - my ethnic background is Irish. Not Italian. Not Norwegian.
Not German. Nor any of the other very different countries that make up the continent of Europe.
And can we all please refrain from that "hyphenated-American" nonsense - but that is a subject for another day.
The other example of idiotic political correctness run amok in the "international" food aisle: right down from the "Asian" banner there is one indicating "Hispanic" food - Uuuh, folks, there is no such thing as "Hispanic" food. Hispanic does not refer to a specific ethnic heritage, or even a country. Hispanic merely means "Spanish speaking." Thus Cubans would be considered Hispanic, just as immigrants from Mexico, Spain, or Nicaragua would be.
Anyone who is well-traveled will know that there is an ocean of difference between Cuban and Spanish cuisine, or between Mexican and Nicaraguan food, for that matter. But then, sanity and reason must never be allowed to interfere with the march toward ever more absurd political correctness - not even in a grocery store.