https://thehardtimes.net/culture/old-family-recipe-unnecessarily-racist/
Deceased grandmother Anita Reilly’s bereaved found a trove of family recipes, including one for a beloved, secret family soup that was also “racist as fuck.”
My grandma called chocolate cream drops what they call Brazil nuts in the article. All of the family did (from Missouri). As a kid I was freaked out that anyone would name anything you ate after toes if any kind. Just gross.
But racists gotta be racist every chance they get.
I just tell myself they're all hiding a foot fetish under a thin patina of racism as it's more socially acceptable there to be racist than kinky.
My neighbor was a old racist, but hid it under a "I'm just a widdle ol lady". And she loved to remind me and my brown skinned family that you used to be able to say like N*gger Cake and then go, "Oh my I hope I didn't offend "
I was raised in the Deep South of the US, and cashews were called... N+#$%r Toes.
Edit: I talked to my 87 year old mother, and she confirmed it was referring to brazil nuts, and not cashews.
We were just talking about this (at work). I never considered my parents racist, but I definitely heard Brazil nuts called that, it's uncomfortable to think about how pervasive systemic racism is.
Same thing with "monkey bread", though less overt and I'd argue in some ways more sinister
Please explain how monkey bread is racist? I know calling people monkeys can be racist, but that has nothing to do with monkey bread or why it's called that.
Honestly it's kinda wild to me that we just automatically assume racism when we hear the word monkey these days. We either need to rename the animal then or learn nuance imo.
Like ok fine "can't say monkey" but I really like the members of the climbey hairy bois genus, they're adorable especially Squirrel Climbey Hairy Bois.
mmm, monke
calling someone a monkey is just scientifically accurate anyways, it should be as offensive as calling a female dog a bitch, like hm yes that is indeed what it is
It’s an odd name for bread anyway. It looks nothing like a monkey.
I can sorta see “bear claws,” but it’s a stretch.
We should really just let the French name all food products.
Man, America never fails to surprise me. They're white, as well, so it's not even realistic. My little toe kind of does look like a cashew.
As their edit suggests, this name actually was for Brazil nuts, where they are at least kind of the right color.
This name also dates back to the 18th century, which best I can tell was before that word was considered a slur in those regions, if not everywhere.
... You think it wasn't a slur in the 1700's? The height of the Transatlantic slave trade?
Antiquated terms can and frequently do become more offensive when they refer to a characteristic people consider undesirable. This is true of >!negro!<, >!retard!<, >!cripple(d)!<, as well as several other terms.
You see the term ">!negro!<" used a lot in abolitionist literature, because it was a polite way to refer to a black person at the time. As we all know, that is very much not the case anymore.
Just... Shut the fuck up.
it was the era of racial chattel slavery and your dumbass is pretending it wasn't a slur, that every interaction between the slavers and black people wasn't an attack.
It literally was not a slur. You are trying to burnish your progressive bonafides way too hard. Word meanings change over time.
As you mentioned, there was actual slavery happening at the time. Being called a "negro" was the last thing a slave would worry about. They wouldn't even identify as that, because they would consider themselves Ashanti or Igbo or some other West African ethnic group. It'd be like calling you "North American" (I assume).
MLK junior literally refers to himself and other black people as "The Negro" repeatedly in his "I have a dream" speech, if you still want to imagine that it was a slur then you're simply deluded.
” I don’t even think this soup needed brazil nuts — they just added them to make it more racist.”
Lol
The Reillys were unavailable for further comment, as they were having their Grandfather’s signed copy of Mein Kampf appraised for insurance purposes.
Along with The Trump Bible, and their beanie babies, they're sure to be hundredaires.
So I get the reference to Brazil nuts, but am drawing a blank on the other ingredients. Are there other foods that actually had horribly racist nicknames?
Jews, Italians, and Latinos were all represented with words I won’t repeat.
Like what foods were they referring to, or are they just being vague for the sake of humor, with Brazil nuts being the only one that actually existed with that type of nickname?
I'm realizing I don't even know the slurs associated with those races, never mind food referring to those slurs.
...I should really go thank my grandparents.
"Kaffir lime leaves" are generally being renamed as "makrut lime leaves" in the shops here in the UK. No problem with the rename, obvs, although it confused me a moment the last time I wanted to buy some. The thought that any of my grandparent's old recipes having any herb or spice more unusual than black pepper is more of laugh, tho.
So I had to Google that. If anyone else is curious, there's a Wikipedia article on the word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_%28racial_term%29?wprov=sfla1
I'm kind of morbidly curious what some other foods could be.
My grandma used to make Hot Dago sandwiches, basically a wet roast beef. I don't know what the Spanish had to do with it.
One of the old knitting books I have asks for two yarn colours in a pattern: cream and n***er brown.
Best friend's grandad fucked with him no end. Sent his 9-yo ass down to the store to ask for "N-word toes". To ask the black grocer. Kid had no idea it was a bad word, kinda like Archie Bunker: "That's what we called dem nuts in dose days!"
Another time they were watching some barn cats. "Want those kitties to really love you? Give 'em a bath and they'll love you forever." You can imagine.
I have an old pyrotechnics manual from 1943 and it tells you how to make a particular firecracker called an "N-word chaser." Fun fact this doodad was also referenced in the book The Shining.
Reminds me of another recipe book, this one with (what is hopefully) an accidental typo: 5 Worst Typos of History - vlogbrothers
Number 5, the Pasta Bible. Hank, this is a totally normal book about pasta except that it contains a typo so horrific that the publisher found every copy it could, and destroyed them. There was a recipe for tagliatelle that called for salt and ground black... people. They meant pepper. They - they wrote people.
This stuff is wild, here in the nordics we call chocolate balls rolled in pearl sugar "N- balls" and of course a certain subset of people love to go "but you can't say that anymore".
yeah no shit einstein, it's a slur