When you’re a woke academic (a tautology?), everything, but everything, is ‘racist’. Except, of course, being very, very racist in the name of so-called ‘anti-racism’. But, I digress. Sombreros are racist. Being polite and punctual is racist. Speaking correct English is racist. Having two parents at home is racist.
And don’t get them started on food.
The Australian Catholic University – which, as the name suggests, is supposed to be traditional – has hired an American expert in critical race theory, “whiteness” and “food studies”. Not the culinary art. Not gastronomy. But rather – and he’s written reams on the topic – how if you’re white and you eat couscous, or pho, you might be doing something racist.
His name is Dr John Burdick. He’s currently an associate dean at New York University, and starting in January he’ll be director of student experience and enhancement at ACU’s North Sydney campus. In 2018 he wrote a 409-page dissertation about how white people eating ethnic food is deeply problematic.
Now, given the demographics of Good Oil readers, you’re almost certainly old enough to remember the sales pitch for multiculturalism: colourful costumes, exotic cultures and, always, always, the ethnic food. In fact, according to the Multicult, the Anglosphere was a wasteland of boiled cabbage and tripe until the ‘ethnics’ showed up to brighten our dreary lives and palates.
Well, say goodbye to all that. If you’re white and you dare to eat anything more exotic than beans on toast, it’s off to the gulag for you.
Burdick has made an academic career out of asking whether white people eating delicious foods from foreign lands – what he terms “culinary slumming” and “cross-racial eating” – might be voyeuristic, exploitative, and might reinforce “a particular sense of social, class, racial superiority over the immigrant populations who inhabit urban neighbourhoods” […]
From his 2018 dissertation: “The foods of racialized groups are not simply used to articulate or challenge a marginalized racial positionality, but are also a central part in the construction, articulation and perpetuation of racial privilege, whiteness, and as such are central to the very foundations of the racial hierarchy.”
This, if you strip away the academic jargon, is designed to conceal rather than reveal the author’s meaning and boils down to: if you eat curry, you’re a racist (never mind that half the ingredients in most curries are not even indigenous to India). No wonder these clowns write as if, in the words of Theodore Dalrymple, “every sentence conceals a guilty secret”.
That secret being that they’re completely and utterly demented.
Because according to him, white interest in ethnic food “must be read within the logic of a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that … commodifies ethnicity and racial difference and views it as ‘spice’ or a ‘seasoning that livens up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’”.
Ah, yes: the culture that gave us Beethoven, Mozart, Homer, Tolkien, Plato, Kubrick, haute cuisine, roast pork with all the trimmings and the full English breakfast is just so very dull.
Now, you may be asking yourself, just what is the Australian Catholic University doing pandering to such lunar-left wokeism? Shouldn’t a Catholic university be some sort of bastion of Western traditionalism?
Think again.
This is the university, after all, whose administrators grovelled when their woke students walked out of a speech criticising abortion (and you thought opposing abortion was a fundamental Catholic belief).
What matters here is that Burdick’s appointment is clearly annoying some of ACU’s Catholic leadership. Archbishop Anthony Fisher wrote a furious letter last year after students walked out of Joe de Bruyn’s graduation speech. Then the university hired a pro-abortion dean of law, quietly sacked her for her views, and paid her $1m to keep quiet about it.
Except now, when challenged about hiring Burdick, ACU is suddenly championing “academic freedom”. They say it “allows scholars to publish on a wide range of ideas, including the PhD thesis and academic paper” belonging to Burdick, which date back “more than five years”. As though that makes any difference whatsoever.
I can’t wait to see how the students react when their new super-woke professor forces the cafeteria to serve nothing but boiled turnips and liver. They wouldn’t want to be racist, after all.
