By Tom Knighton
Talk to anyone who has tried to run a business and ask them how hard it is. I can speak from experience when I tell you that it isn’t easy. Long hours, sleepless nights, and concerns you never even thought about as an employee are the norm. Add in the fact that you get paid last, which can mean some very lean times, and the challenges of owning a business become rather obvious.
Now, you may also have to consider the idea that Social Justice Warriors think you have the wrong DNA for your line of work, because they’re horrible.
Reason.com reports that some have put together a spreadsheet of Portland, Oregon, restaurants that allegedly engage in “cultural appropriation”:
The list, a Google Docs spreadsheet, includes about 60 Portland-area restaurants, the names of their white owners, and the kind of cuisine they serve. (For example, the list informs us that Burmasphere “was founded by a white man who ate Burmese food in San Francisco.”) The spreadsheet also lists competing restaurants that are owned by people of color and urges customers to try them instead.
“This is NOT about cooking at home or historical influences on cuisines; it’s about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture,” wrote the spreadsheet’s authors. “These white-owned businesses hamper the ability for POC [people of color] to run successful businesses of their own (cooking their own cuisines) by either consuming market share with their attempt at authenticity or by modifying foods to market to white palates. Their success further perpetuates the problems stated above. It’s a cyclical pattern that will require intentional behavior change to break.”
The spreadsheet seems to be a response to the controversy over Kooks Burritos, a Portland-area pop-up food truck run by two white women. In an interview with Williamette Week, Kooks owners Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly explained how they fell in love with authentic Mexican tortillas during a visit to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico.
It’s funny that these oh-so-caring and tolerant individuals fail to understand how outright insulting they are to everyone, whether white or minority.
Restaurants open and close all the time for a variety of reasons. To say that minorities can’t compete simply because white people are cooking the same type of food? That implies that minorities are incapable of succeeding without these benevolent white knights who compiled the listing.
They are literally saying that “people of color” can’t possibly make it without a group of SJWs to clear the road for them.
Sounds like this is about the SJWs own self-esteem more than anything else.
Reason also offers this thought on the cultural appropriation charge against Kooks Burritos:
When people criticize cultural appropriation, they are often irritated that a non-ethnic person has pilfered an ethnic tradition in an insufficiently authentic manner. That’s not exactly the case here. Say what you will about Wilgus and Connelly — peeking into windows was certainly rude — but it sounds like their burritos were pretty darn accurate. They went to the trouble of learning how a native Mexican would cook them. The same may well be true of some of the restaurants on the spreadsheet. Who knows: Some of them might even employ nonwhite cooks who are in fact preparing their own traditional cuisines.
As an interesting aside, my all-time favorite Chinese food place was owned by a Chinese family. You know what they cooked? Americanized Chinese cuisine.
So, which is more “authentic”? A place owned by a Chinese family that prepares Americanized dishes, or a place owned by a white family that cooks authentic dishes?
More to the point, who cares?
Just racist SJWs, that’s who.
Eat where you want to eat, do what you want to do, and stop trying to bully people because your personal sensibilities were offended.