I’ll answer the first query in Null Pointer’s excellent Comment of the Day on the great congee cultural appropriation brouhaha: “I’m not sure I understand why the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf.”

There are two reasons. One is part of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. In order to tar President Trump as a racist before the 2020 election, the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the unholy and undemocratic “resistance,” Democrats and the news media alliance), claimed that what we knew pretty much then and now know almost certainly now, that the pandemic originated in China’s Wuhan province, nonetheless was racist to speak out loud because so many idiots were attacking Asian-Americans as a result of telling the truth. This was accompanied by absurd inflations of the actual number of such attacks without any evidence in most cases that the attacks there were had any nexus to calling the Chinese virus a Chinese virus.

Thrilled nonetheless to finally have a platform from which to cry “Victim!” like women, blacks and Hispanics, some Asian-American activist groups gleefully embraced the new discrimination fable, neatly sidestepping the inconvenient fact that a disproportional number of the attacks on Asians were carried out by African Americans.

The second reason the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf is to avoid dealing honestly with the approaching reckoning for elite colleges and universities that are making Asian-Americans real victims of discrimination as the pursue unconstitutional affirmative action policies.

That’s why.

Here is Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Cowardly, Culture-Betraying Grovel Of The Month: Karen Taylor Of Breakfast Cure.”

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I work almost exclusively with Asians, mostly from India. I have never, not once, ever heard any of my Indian coworkers say ANYTHING about cultural appropriation or condone any woke causes. On the contrary, they are almost all quite eager to share their cultural traditions and cuisine, and eager to learn about American culture and cuisine.

I’m not sure I understand why the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf. I work almost exclusively with Asians, mostly from India. I have never, not once, ever heard any of my Indian coworkers say ANYTHING about cultural appropriation or condone any woke causes. On the contrary, they are almost all quite eager to share their cultural traditions and cuisine, and eager to learn about American culture and cuisine.

They put on little performances during the Hindu festivals to show off the dancing and food and fashions. They are always inviting me to go to Indian restaurants and explaining which part of India the different foods come from and how to eat them.

They also love going to the American holiday events and partaking in our traditions. When one company I worked for had a gingerbread house-making contest for Christmas, all my Indian coworkers went and happily made gingerbread houses and proudly showed them off. There were no tantrums about Christian holidays, white oppression, or anything else the Woke like to have fits about. Just fun and little houses made out of cookies.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen happened during a day long training session for some new technology we were going to be using, when the managers decided to order lunch from a Japanese restaurant. One of my Indian coworkers ordered some vegetarian sushi rolls, but had never had Japanese food before. We were sitting next to each other eating and chatting, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pickup….the wasabi. It took a second for me to realize she was going to eat it rather than use it as a condiment, and then it was like something out of a sitcom with me yelling in slow motion “Noooooo….don’t eat that…”! Too late! She had already popped the entire portion of wasabi in her mouth. She turned purple, slid under the table, then maybe a minute or two later came back up with tears streaming down her face, coughing and laughing at the same time. “What was that?!? I thought it was avocado!!” she finally exclaimed. After I was done laughing, I explained what wasabi was and how you were SUPPOSED to eat it. I think I’ve actually seen almost that exact scene on “The Nanny.” My coworker did not complain that the evil Americans were out to get her by feeding her wasabi, or that we were appropriating Japanese food. She treated it like a hilarious story she got to tell in the future.

I am usually the only white person on the teams of 10-15 people I work on. If everyone I worked with was also woke, it would be a miserable experience, walking around on eggshells all the time. Since my coworkers are not woke, it is usually fun and interesting. I learn new things about a country I really don’t know much about.

You know something else? Every culture on earth takes other cultures foods, changes them to fit the local palate, and calls it the originating cultures food. I watch a lot of YouTube videos about trying different food in different countries. I don’t know why, but it amuses me to watch things like “Koreans Try American BBQ!” or “Kids Try Food From Around The World!” In all those videos, the food isn’t actually what it says it is. If Koreans are eating American BBQ, and they are eating it in Korea, the food is not really American. It’s Koreanized American BBQ. They cook the meat in a smoker like we would, but the type of meat is a different cut than we would eat, the BBQ sauce is made of ingredients that would never occur to us, and the side dishes are dishes we would never pair with BBQ. ALL cultures do this. It isn’t racist, cultural appropriation, or xenophobic. It’s completely, 100%, universally NORMAL. I don’t want to eat a BBQ sauce made out of fish paste, but if Koreans like it that way, then they should absolutely do that, and they should call it American BBQ if they want to, and tell everyone how amazing American BBQ is, even though it’s not exactly like ours, and NOT apologize for it.

Apologizing for normal behavior is the epitome of stupidity. It takes a normal behavior and makes it abnormal. It alienates and divides.

What the woke want to do, is make everyone hate and fear each other. They don’t want you talking to anyone about the differences in your culture. They don’t want you finding common ground and mutual understanding. They don’t want you solving any cultural issues that come up peacefully like responsible adults. They want tantrums, tears, recriminations, bad feelings and grudges. It is ridiculous, and will cause nothing but problems.

The only way to stop the divisiveness is to refuse to participate. By refusing to participate, who will you really be displeasing? The cultural groups white leftists claim to speak for? No. You will be upsetting white leftists. Who cares what they want? They are the ones appropriating cultures and races by claiming to speak for them. The are the ones spreading discord and disharmony by throwing massive public tantrums over things that could be dealt with over a simple, private, open-minded discussion. They are taking advantage of small cultural differences to create huge divides in our society, and letting them get away with it is wrong. They are infantilizing entire continents worth of people, most of whom probably don’t agree with them in the first place.

It is wrong, and it needs to stop.