The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins

Puppycow

Penultimate Amazing
Puppycow
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I have become concerned that these gourds may be inherently racist.

The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins


This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.
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:jaw-dropp
 
Puppycow said:
I have become concerned that these gourds may be inherently racist.

The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins




:jaw-dropp
Click to expand...

Man what a groundbreaking and helpful study. It always helps when we say how a race is obsessed with a certain food.

Imagine how much better it would be of it was more inclusive though. I know plenty of people that all kinds of evidence on the feeding habits of various races. It's strange though they all are over 50 and I wouldn't have guessed they had much interest in social justice. But they must as this article couldn't be anything other than gospel.
 
A real /r/nottheonion vibe about this. I was kind of thinking that the study's authors might have been trolling, especially with the clickbait-style title. Anyone actually read the study?
 
I live in (well, near) chapel Hill where one of the authors works, and we have a few mutual FB friends. If I had a few more sips of bourbon before I read that summary I'd have surely asked her when she planned her watermelon study.
 
Everyone else in the world knows that all Americans (without exception) are...

  • inherently racist
  • subject to gross generalisations about other people
  • prone to deny their worst and most obvious attributes.
 
mikado said:
What on earth is pumpkin spice?
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The spice extends taste. The spice expands Starbucks' bottom line. The spice is vital to the holiday season... He who controls the spice, controls the white girls.
 
That's gotta suck for ultra progressive Starbucks to get called out by name.

The leftist cannibal feeding frenzy continues.
 
mikado said:
What on earth is pumpkin spice?
Click to expand...

A spice mixture that might be similar to what is included in pumpkin pie. Nutmeg, cloves, perhaps others.

Starbucks sells a seasonal beverage, Pumpkin Spice Latte, flavored with such a spice mixture.


To the question of whether this might be a Sokal style paper, I looked up the authors' other work. I strongly suspect that they are serious. The sad thing is that they are taken seriously.
 
As Bruto says, not only is punkin’ chunkin’ a very “white” activity... They actually prefer WHITE pumpkins!

My god, the horror.
 
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