The white race cannot survive without dairy products.
--Herbert Hoover
In continuation of this blog's ongoing examination of "white world-traveling," I submit here another item for consideration and discussion. Look at all the "whiteness" in this video, and at all the non-whiteness used as a backdrop for it. Is this racist? Species-ist? Milk-ist?
Watch. Listen. Drink from the milky white river. Ponder. Discuss.
[hat-tip to Alterdestiny for the Hoover quote]
THAT...does not make me want to drink milk. Not even considering my lactose intolerance.
ReplyDeleteAlso, black people backing up a white lead artist? Yawn, so tired.
oh. my. gawd. that's so very . . . white. Um, thanks for sharing?
ReplyDeleteNah, it's not racist, speciesist, or milkist. It's just stupid.
ReplyDeleteNow there's a milk commercial you ain't gonna forget. It was silly, creative, and funny.
ReplyDeleteI don't take offense.
*sips milk in defiance of Hoover*
Maybe I should. The music was a bit of a rip off from this song: Black Jesus, by Everlast. The video isn't one of his bests, but like the song. I freaked out a religious relative a couple years ago by asking to listen to a new gospel piece. Heh-heh. I coulda died laughing.
I'm weird like that; I like ALL kinds of music.
I've wondered if Everlast's soul flew into the wrong infant at birth - a white one - 'cause there's something distinctly ethnically black hardazz ghetto about him when he sings about the white ghetto experience. He's talented and has a black sound mixed with hard rock.
Warning: there's also an incredible darkness to him. I think he's the real McCoy and it's not an act. When shit hits the fan and the economic bubble busts, the next generation of white kids growing up in chaos and poverty will be more like him - pure, hard ghetto.
On YouTube, try listening also to Everlast's:
Ticking Away
White Trash Beautiful
What It's Like
End of Days
He also did The Shook Ones, Part 2, with Mobb Deep. (This video has the music but that's not him in it; listen to it rather than watch it.)
Mobb Deep and Everlast later parted ways and they did their own version. My son and I disagreed over which sounded better: I liked Everlast's and accused him of being a racist for not seeing this. He had to think about that shit, and finally agreed. I love me some Mobb Deep, but Everlast had a grittiness and killer pathos to his tone of voice which they couldn't touch on that song.
Macon, I know you would find some sociological significance to his music. I'd enjoy your feedback on this.
Very strange video...
ReplyDeleteBut it does bring up a good point: There's a really interesting history of the interactions between white people, Africans, "civilizing", economy and milk. The correlating Stuff White People Do title would be "flood colonized countries with unwanted/unnecessary food products". See Nancy Rose Hunt, “Bébé on Brousse,” in Tensions of Empire, Frederick cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 287-321.
"flood colonized countries with unwanted/unnecessary food products"
ReplyDeleteYes, thank you, that's actually an excellent suggestion for a future post here.
Have you all never heard of the Masai? They are cow herders, and they get most of their nourishment from what cows give them: milk and blood.
ReplyDeleteCow's milk is quite healthy. As long as you drink the milk from cows that only eat grass and if the milk has not been pasteurised and homogenised. In a few states you can purchase this type of cow's milk off the shelf; it is called "raw milk." Or if you are lucky, and know a farmer, you can get it directly from him--straight from the cow, that is. (Sorry to all you vegans, but cow's milk is good for you. I should know, for veganism destroyed my health. It was not until I "returned" to eating a traditional diet and eliminated all processed foods, did my health become restored.)
Redcatbiker, in addition to the Masai, a friend of mine I knew back in the late '70's, a Dinka man from southern Sudan, told me that his family and tribesmen herded cows, and drank their blood. I can't remember if he mentioned whether they drank the cows' milk or not.
ReplyDeleteAnd since raw milk is completely different from cow milk, it fits into what r. posted, too, if we flood countries with unwanted, unnecessary altered milk products.
I first got into nutrition in the '70's, first reading Adelle Davis, who was right on so much, wrong on so much. I remember in one of her later books she said that milk degrades a good diet but improves a bad diet.
I think there was something about studies of girls in very low income situations where the nutrients in the milk helped them, but only because the rest of their diet was so lacking.
Otherwise, why add an overheated, overhomogenized product into a good diet? I've heard milk and wheat are the two most allergenic foods in our diet.
What really worries me is that we are exporting not only unwanted, unnecessary, and unhealthy food products to other countries, but in the case of Africa, we are exporting our toxic waste, often unregulated by the countries receiving it, often in very questionable circumstances of where it ends up, and whose health it is degrading.
Not that we do anywhere near an adequate job in this country with our toxic waste, and many peoples' health here is poisoned too.
Apparently this travesty goes on in our exports of toxics too to India, Bangladesh, even China. There are companies in China that supposedly process and properly dispose of toxic substances we send, but the workers are undoubtedly at risk. (Not that China isn't generating its own population-harming toxics as well!)
And related, we send harmful pharmaceuticals banned in this country, to third world countries, which is apparently legal to do under our laws.
Does anyone know anything more about this whole subject? I'm really interested but haven't had time to research it as much as I'd like. Macon, could you do a post on how majority-white countries export toxic waste to others? Exemplifying what Lawrence Summers famously said, "Africa is under-polluted."!??!
Thanks Karen, another great idea--white people do so MUCH stuff! I don't know if I'll ever get it all recognized here.
ReplyDeleteThat Summers quote is, um, amazing. Good gawd.
Thanks, Macon. Another incident I was thinking about is meeting a young guy here from a coastal country in Africa, and I'm showing my typical white American geographic ignorance because I don't remember which country it was, but he told me they no longer swim where they used to because they don't feel good now, when they do.
ReplyDeleteAnd he said it was ships dumping.
It struck me because a friend of mine who moved to Wilmington, N.C., said a similar thing, that she stopped swimming in the ocean because she felt headachey afterwards.
With the hog farming runoff etc in that state, it's sad that the coastal swimming is probably affected.
(To correct a typo in last post, second paragraph should read that raw milk is a completely different product than PROCESSED cow milk. Sorry)
Veganism is not bad for your health. People can be healthy and unhealthy on any sort of diet including one which includes animal products. You were probably not eating very healthily, there are heaps of resources online about vegan nutrition. e.g http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/calcium.htm
ReplyDeleteCows must be raped for the production of milk and her male children killed for veal, her female children are raped when they are of age and so the cycle continues till the cow can no longer produce milk, then she is sent to the slaughter house.
Milk is unnecessary for humans, a large percentage of people in the world are lactose intolerant (the highest percentage being 90-100% of people from Asian countries).
In western farms, cattle are fed a range of things such as soy beans(which ironically is high in calcium and protein), yeast, sodium bicarbonate, dried blood from their own slaughtered relative, supplements including zinc methionine, niacin, anionic salts, and tallow (rendered fat) again from their slaughtered relatives.
Cows are not just fed grass, the space and resources used to grow food for these animals could be used to grow food for humans, this would be lest costly and feed more people.
Not to mention the environmental impacts:
“A single dairy cow produces about 120 pounds of wet manure per day, which is equivalent to the waste produced by 20–40 people. That means California’s 1.4 million dairy cows produce as much waste as 28–56 million people.”
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Notes from Underground, Fall 2001
In answer to your question yes I think this ad was racist, and speciesist. "milkist" I think takes the serious away from the first two, as if it's a joke... It is not a joke when you are objectified, exploited and killed because of your species or race.