EDIT: Okay, it was a bit silly of me to drag my heels in, I don’t strictly hate it and there are good things about British cooking (mostly veggies), but I find the meme’s meat obsession super silly. I am having stomach pains and cramped arteries just looking at this stuff.

Highly underrated

I love how it’s superimposed on the diapers lmao, I hope the meme was ironic

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    11 months ago

    All of these are fusion cuisines. A Tex-Mex taco is essentially a completely different thing than a Norteno Mexican taco. Chinese American food has only the most the most distant relationship to Cantonese food. This food exists and, guess what, is often enjoyed by white people as well as people in the diaspora as well as everyone else. This food objectively exists and is what people actually eat. Whether it’s good that it exists and how we should put it in it’s historical context in the legacy of racism, colonialism, etc. is important but it’s fucked up to say that this stuff essentially doesn’t exist

    This has the same basic prejudices as saying a creole language is just a bastardized version of a European one

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      The food 100% exist, but they are food of their respective diaspora, not their host countries. To use the Chinese diaspora as an example, Chinese American food is lumped in with Chinese Korean food, Chinese Peruvian food, Chinese Japanese food, and so. They are unified by the fact that the origin cuisine is ultimately Chinese even if they’ll obviously be differences from each other and from their origin cuisine.

      Now, the reasonable question is whether Chinese American food is Chinese food with American characteristics or American food with Chinese characteristics, so this is where my comment on the Chinese Exclusion Act comes in. Given that there’s the legacy of racism, colonialism, etc as you said, then Chinese American food ought to be considered Chinese food (or Chinese diasporic food if you think they diverge too much from “pure” Chinese food) to reflect on the Chinese diaspora’s continued estrangement from being considered “true” Americans due to Sinophobia and general white supremacy. It goes back to my earlier comment. By what grounds can white Americans spit on the collective faces of Chinese Americans while claiming Chinese American food as their own?

      • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        22·
        11 months ago

        It was a a cuisine developed in America that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It was developed by Americans (Chinese immigrants and their descendents) and eaten by Americans, and not only white people lol. There is a Chinese takeout place in virtually every poor urban neighborhood in the country. What should we call it, if not American? Do you not count as American if you’re of Chinese origin? If you want to insist on it being specifically Chinese American, I agree! Chinese-American is a subset of Americans

        Of all the things to go off on, it’s bizarre to choose a cheap, tasty cuisine primarily beloved by the proletariat.

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Do you not count as American if you’re of Chinese origin? If you want to insist on it being specifically Chinese American, I agree! Chinese-American is a subset of Americans

          This is the fundamental disagreement we have. Chinese Americans are a subset of the Chinese diaspora. They really aren’t Americans outside of legal status and citizenry. They certainly aren’t treated like Americans, especially right now with the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and various Chinese American scientists being investigated by the FBI for perceived “CCP” and “ethnic” loyalty. Really, most diasporic Americans (or at least most nonwhite diasporic Americans) aren’t actually Americans if we understand Americans to be the inheritors and heirs of the settler colonial project known as the United States of America. This is true even for Black people whose ancestors have existed in this country for centuries. A Chinese American has far more in common with a Chinese Canadian than a white American, so it makes more sense to lump your average Chinese American together with your average Chinese Canadian. The things that unifies them both is that both are members of the Chinese diaspora, in particular the English-speaking members of the Chinese diaspora.

          • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            15·
            11 months ago

            They really aren’t Americans outside of legal status and citizenry

            Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

            aren’t actually Americans if we understand Americans to be the inheritors and heirs of the settler colonial project known as the United States of America.

            Why would we define Americans in that very specific and idiosyncratic way?

            Please go around talking to people of color in the United States and explain this to them and see what they think I guess.

            It just seems like you’re accepting all of the premises about the intrinsic alieness and foreignness of people of color in the US that your standard white nationalist would have but woke

              • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                2·
                11 months ago

                No, they aren’t American because they haven’t completely assimilated into whiteness. This is arguably a good thing because American is a fake settler-colonial identity anyways.

                Kinda bizarre how people here are having these patsoc-adjacent takes.

            • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              2·
              11 months ago

              I mean, you shouldn’t want to be American in the same way you shouldn’t want to be Israeli. Pretty much every single Black radical like Malcolm X reject being American, so I’m not saying anything particularly new. There’s that famous speech by a Hawaiian activist titled “We are not Americans.” Modern Pan-African orgs and Indigenous communities also reject the label American as well as the settler-colonial borders of the US and Canada. There’s plenty of Indigenous tribal nations and communities that have their ancestral lands separated into a US Native American half and a Canadian First Nations half, but they still understand themselves as one people because unlike the two illegitimate settler-colonies, they constitute a real nation.

              The only real reason why you don’t hear this rhetoric among the various diasporas is because most diaspora communities function as a buffer zone between white settlers at the top and the Black and Indigenous at the bottom. There’s a degree of assimilation/gusanofication among the diasporas too, but for the nonwhite diasporas at least, white settlers are too pathologically racist for them to be fully integrated into whiteness and the settler-colonial order. Just like how the US-Canadian border is largely a legal matter among Indigenous nations, whether your nationality is American or Canadian is largely a legal matter among the diasporas.