White privilege. White supremacy. White fragility. Whiteness. For the academic left, there’s no aspect of life which cannot be shoehorned into a relationship with these terms.
Law (yes, law) professor Mathilde Cohen of the University of Connecticut recently gave a talk at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Nanterre in which, according to The Times, she argued “French eating habits reinforced the ‘dominance’ of white people over ethnic minorities.”
“By this,” Cohen says in the clip below, “I mean the use of food to reinforce whiteness as a dominant racial identity.
“The French meal is often presented as the national ritual to which every citizen can participate equally. But French food ways are shaped by white middle- and upper-class norms … and the boundaries of whiteness are policed through daily food encounters.”
Cohen says a “strategy” by which non-whites in France try to “act white” is eating typical French food — like pork. With regards to her specialty (law), Cohen notes French schools are exempt from “having to accommodate dietary requests based on [students’] identity.” The “default” for schools are “white, Christian norms.”Cohen’s seminar was based on her academic paper “The Whiteness of French Food Law, Race, and Eating Culture in France.” The paper makes use of the concepts “food studies, critical race theory, and critical Whiteness studies,” and “sheds light” on the allegedly “neglected area” of food and race.
A snippet:
