Auntie Tom’s Syrup
If there’s anything that can bring people together — people of all races, colours, and creeds, without regard to national boundaries, places of origin, or bizarre hallucinations about having an intimate relationship with Tetris — it’s pancakes. And what pancake feast would be complete without a heaping helping of high fructose corn syrup, artificially flavoured to taste vaguely like what focus groups in southern California assume is maple? Why, truly, it would be a sad day in America without our precious national heritage of remotely food-like bottled rubbish.
Because you’re a newly-hatched innocent little bright-eyed butterfly, I’m sure you’re startled to hear that pancake syrup is racist too.
The corporation’s Quaker Oats subsidiary announced that the Aunt Jemima pancake and syrup line would soon be retired in June and re-branded despite having already been changed years ago to “remove racial stereotypes.”
“Throughout the effort that led to the new Pearl Milling Company name, Quaker worked with consumers, employees, external cultural and subject-matter experts, and diverse agency partners to gather broad perspectives and ensure the new brand was developed with inclusivity in mind,” the company said in a statement.
Well, there’s lovely. They consulted with “subject-matter experts.” Experts in the subject of wild-eyed speculation about phony racism. Why, they even consulted with “diverse agency partners!” I expect that probably even means something in some language I’m not familiar with. Farsi would be my guess — it certainly sounds Farcical, anyhow.
The new “inclusivitified” brand name? “Pearl Milling Company,” a name that makes roughly as much sense as “diverse agency partners.” It will certainly “include” anybody who has ever spent time in a stuffy bureaucratic conference room assembling a list of jargon, but does it have any actual appeal to any actual person? How does one go about milling pearls, and what does that have to do with deliciousesque bottled diabetes? If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect they consulted with fewer experts and more dart boards.
[I]n removing the Aunt Jemima character from its products, the company is actually erasing an African-American woman, Lillian Richard, who served as a goodwill ambassador for the brand in 1925 and worked for Quaker Oats for 23 years before dying in 1956.
“A lot of people want it removed,” Richard’s family told KLTV in response. “We want the world to know that our cousin Lillian was one of the Aunt Jemima’s [sic] and she made an honest living. We would ask that you reconsider just wiping all that away.”
“She was considered a hero in Hawkins, and we are proud of that. We do not want that history erased,” Harris added.
Oh, be quiet, you white supremacist. Massa in the big house will tell you what racial justice is, and you’ll get it good and hard.
Speaking of racism
As any fule kno, inner-city gang violence is typically committed by racially-heterogeneous groups who are able to overcome their disparate backgrounds and propensity toward xenophobia and unite around their shared love of murder, rape, robbery, and arson. We know this is so, because Hollywood tells us only truth. As such, it stands to reason that the racial distribution in gangs should reflect that of the wider society — and, again, here we mean “the nation as a whole” rather than “the neighborhood the gang comes from,” because, what, are you some kind of white supremacist?
So naturally it’s a big problem if police departments make lists of known gang members and too many of them are the wrong colour.
A Virginia gang task force has dropped use of a database that catalogues thousands of alleged gang members across the Washington region after activists raised concerns that minorities are disproportionately represented in it and its use is shrouded in secrecy…
Kofi Annan, executive director of the Activated People, a police reform group, said the opacity around the database was troubling. He was also concerned that nearly 80 percent of people logged are Black or Latino, while Whites make up 20 percent, according to HIDTA statistics.
Your humble narrator is startled to hear that that name is evidently so common, though not as startled as he’d be to hear that it’s actually the same guy, reanimated as a voodoo zombie just like in Hollywood films of the same vintage and veracity as the ones with the multiracial gangs. I mean, I’m not trying to be that guy, but, honestly.
The most recent figures provided by law enforcement are 46 percent Hispanic/Latino gang members, 35 percent African-American/black gang members, more than 11 percent white gang members, and 7 percent other race/ethnicity of gang members…
Across all area types, the majority of law enforcement agencies report that African-American/black and/or Hispanic/Latino individuals predominate among documented gang members.
Turns out that the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force’s database of gang members exactly tracks the nationwide statistics. Really, it looks like there are two possibilities: either the preponderance of gang members actually are black or hispanic, or else it’s all a nationwide conspiracy by white supremacists. One of those possibilities matches up with what you can see with your own eyes, and the other with what you can see with the New York Times’ eyes. You make the call!
White supremacy throughout the ages
Isn’t it weird that nobody ever used the phrase “white supremacist” before, oh, 2015? I wonder why that could be. I guess there was just a spontaneous awakening in the Justice Sensors of right-thinking folks nationwide. Any other explanation is a horrible conspiracy theory, after all, and I wouldn’t dare. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the new enlightenment keeps uncovering great truths about the horrors of the past:
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a black academic, claims that Western civilisation is based on conceptions of ‘whiteness’ that come from interpretations of the ancient authors. Recently, some classicists have tied their own discipline to white nationalism, wanting to exculpate their discipline from supposed racism.
Padilla goes further and claims that classics departments are hostile to minorities. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he told the New York Times, “one could not do better than what classics has done.” He added that “classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it… the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
Book ’em, Dan-el! I, for one, cannot believe that not even one of these so-called “classical” authours and artists had the decency to be born with the right colour skin. That Plato guy was supposed to be so smart — what was he thinking? Did he not even care that lazy boneheads 2500 years after he died would be mortally offended by his very marrows?
I, for one, find my very marrows positively engorged with joy that a black professor of classics — one named after Superman, no less — would, despite all the obvious institutional racism preventing his doing so, nonetheless summon up the courage to tell the world how impossible it is for black professors of classics to tell the world about institutional racism. My marrows are all aflutter! So, it being Valentine’s Day and all, I got professor Peralta a card.
I tried to make it sensitive and racially justicey and not at all white and I made sure to find a girly font with hearts and everything. I hope you like it!
Public relations, my dear, public relations!
Eric Swalwell — best known for sleeping with an actual, for-reals Chinese communist spy and then having the audacity to declare president Trump a Russian puppet — has put his foot in it again.
Swalwell said calling witnesses wouldn’t have changed Republicans’ mind on voting to acquit Trump on the charge of citing Jan. 6’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, even if the witnesses were “God herself.”
That’s a level of virtue-signal even more stupid than the “amen and awomen” we were subjected to last month. Last Week in Weird remains, as ever, not the place for weighty theological discussions, so I’ll pass over the detailed proof of why God cannot be a woman (hint: read St. Thomas) and just focus on how bizarre this whole spectacle is. It’s almost as though every Democrat in congress is engaged in a race to see who can fall off the left edge of reality first.
My money’s still on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mind.
Ladies and gentlemen, the usurper-in-chief of the United States
Did you hear the bit about how Gallup has declared that Usurper Joe has the highest first-month approval rating of any president ever? Did you notice this happened the same week he got booed at the Super Bowl? There’s a slight chance we’re being sold an agenda here.