A young man with neo-Nazi tattoos spits milk toward the video camera. Another man, holding a jug of milk, says, “You might not like it, but this is the face of white nationalism.”
The group of men were gathered to protest an anti-Trump video installation, “He Will Not Divide Us,” in Queens, New York, in February 2017.
Following the protest in New York, depictions of milk alongside white nationalism went viral. Figures affiliated with the alt-right, including Richard Spencer and Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, added milk emojis to their Twitter display names and the hashtag “#MilkTwitter” was used as a dumping ground for racist trolls. Later in 2017, Lucian Wintrich, a former correspondent for the right-wing news blog Gateway Pundit who has appeared on a white nationalist podcast, drank from a glass of milk as protesters heckled him during a speech.
These and other incidents have been described as evidence that some white supremacists are co-opting cow’s milk as a symbol of their belief that white people are wholesome and pure.
Right-wing news sites like Breitbart have mocked that suggestion. Those who noted milk’s popularity with white supremacists have been taunted as fools who fell for what was just a prank that was not meant to be taken seriously.
But whether or not the alt-right was indulging in a trolling exercise, some academics say these events are part of a murky history involving cow’s milk.
Iselin Gambert, an associate professor of legal research and writing at George Washington University in Washington, is co-authoring a forthcoming paper that argues milk has long been used as a symbol for and tool of white supremacy. (A draft version can be read online.)
Animal milk products, Gambert told HuffPost, have become ubiquitous around the globe, including in regions with little or no history of a dairy industry. She noted the dairy industry has long marketed milk as universally healthy, even though roughly 65 percent of the world’s population has a reduced ability after infancy to digest lactose found in unprocessed milk.
Lactose intolerance is complex and very difficult to measure, but several studies, including a 2010 report produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have found that people of
color are more likely to report symptoms of lactose intolerance.
Yet milk and milk products have formed the backbone of some food initiatives in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program and Special Milk Program all provide milk to children in public and nonprofit private schools. It’s a policy that has been criticized by law professor
Andrea Freeman for pushing harmful amounts of saturated fats into the diets of children and disproportionately affecting communities of color.
...
Originally Posted by Ron Paul
Reply With Quote
Connect With Us