Feeding people can be tricky business. Just ask my left hand.
Last Friday night, I cooked for friends after drinking. Everyone relaxed while I served up the angel hair. No problem. But the next day, I noticed that my left hand now sported several obviously cooking-related burns and cuts. People warn you not to drink and drive, but they never mention that drinking doesn't mix well with fire and knives either. Like I said, feeding people can be tricky business.
But it takes a truly special person to craft a diet that's culturally insensitive. On that count, ask UW dining services. Or Dr. Phil.
Several friends of mine still live in the dorms here, and last semester, one of them approached me incredulously after a dinner at Pop's. She told me that as part of a series of ethnic food nights, the dorm dining hub held a black food-themed dinner in honor of Kwanza. I couldn't help but cringe when she told me the special menu: you guessed it-fried chicken.
I'm usually as put off by political correctness as the next guy, but sometimes it's valuable to remember why it came about in the first place. Dining service officials undoubtedly spent hours agonizing over whether it was proper to call it \African-American food"" or ""Afro-American food,"" yet never seemed to realize that serving fried chicken under the guise of appreciation for black culture was calling on an ever-so-slightly touchy history of stereotyping. You can only imagine how excited my people are for ""Jew Night,"" where they'll be serving up gefilte fish and circumcisions.
But easy as it is to pick on the UW campus' somewhat spotty recent history of racial sensitivity (and really, what's a little house fellow persecution and brochure photo doctoring among friends?), Ed's was recently one-upped in that department by talk show superstar Dr. Phil McGraw. In the past few weeks, the jovial afternoon chat-man has been appearing all over the place to promote his new diet book, ""The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom.""
Dr. Phil doesn't seem to realize that mustached public figures with final solutions hold an entirely different significance to Jews. ""Ultimate solution""? ""Freedom""? Dr. Phil must be the first person to ever so clearly invoke Hitler rhetoric and Bush rhetoric in the same title, let alone for a weight loss book. Apparently, people who work out all the time can now consider themselves freedom fighters-or Nazis. It just depends which half of the title they prefer.
It's hard not to see a jarring good news/bad news situation in times like these. When you look at Dr. Phil's book title, or the dorms' notion of ""black food,"" or Disney's recent decision to re-release the culturally icky ""Song of the South,"" what you see isn't a society that's actively, maliciously racist. That's good news, and certainly hasn't always been the case. What you do see is a society that's often dumb as rocks when it comes to its own cultural history. People like me often complain about the restrictiveness of political correctness, but really, it's just a form of socially baby-proofing our language that we might need in light of such stupidity.
But don't ask me. I'm just an African-American studies major who likes fried chicken. And I'm not the brightest person for approaching something this tricky either.
Just ask my left hand.
Amos' column runs every Thursday in The Daily Cardinal. He can be reached at AmosAP@hotmail.com.
