The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins

by Dave Blount | October 13, 2016 1:11 pm

The above title was taken from an actual scholarly article published in the journal GeoHumanities. Here’s the abstract:

This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.

The article rambles for nearly 12,000 words, including the word “motherf***er.” All of it appears to be gibberish. This typical sentence addresses a subtopic relating to the intersection of decorative gourd season and lifestyle magazines:

We move from a pumpkin-spiced world where race was (over)stated to one of allusions, implications, elisions, and obfuscations of race, class, and imagined rurality.

When socialists like Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Shrillary bark that college education should be “free,” they mean that you the taxpayer get to finance perpetual adolescents wallowing in this nonsense indefinitely instead of seeking constructive employment.

pumpkins
Academics explore the whiteness of pumpkins.

On a tip from Steve T. Hat tip: Bayou Renaissance Man. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/education/perilous-whiteness-pumpkins/