It’s easy mocking cultural revolutionary insanity and laughing it off as day room, psychiatric institution behavior. But with the inmates now running the asylum and ensuring that our heroes, history, and institutions are defamed or renamed, it’s really no laughing matter. After all, we’ve already heard that teaching math reflects “white supremacy” and, while the claim in question here isn’t that destructive, it does flow from the same dark and distorted spirit.
And the claim is that “curry,” the term, should largely be canceled and that it’s rooted in “white, Christian supremacy.” Seriously.
The Indian Express reported Thursday on how this hot debate was cooked up:
In a viral Instagram post, Indian-American blogger Chaheti Bansal called on people to “cancel the word ‘curry'”, deemed a universal term for Indian dishes in the West.
In a recipe video for Rajasthani dish ‘Gatte ki sabji’, Bansal said that the term “curry” has been misused by “white people” to name any dish made in India.
Stating that one can “still unlearn”, she said, “There’s a saying that the food in India changes every 100km and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularised by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes”.
Well, having more than 250 different languages and dialects, perhaps we could say the culture in India changes every 100km, too. Should we really refer to the whole place as “India”?
But this gets better (i.e., worse) still. “According to Bansal, the word curry is believed to be an anglicized — aka made more English sounding — interpretation of the Tamil word ‘Kari,’” adds CultureWatch.
“So, clearly, since the original word, according to this scholarly ‘food blogger,’ was twisted to sound more English, that makes it racist.”
This blather would be inconsequential if Bansal’s video hadn’t been viewed more than three million times and if, deciding to tag team with her, one Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst hadn’t decided to lend her claim an academic imprimatur. Fuerst, who clearly appropriates too many words in her name, is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Vermont. And she says of “curry,” CultureWatch also tells us,
that the word is rooted in “white, Christian supremacy” because, to her knowledge, the word curry doesn’t actually exist in any South Asian language and is a word that most historians attribute to a “British bad ear.”
The religious studies professor claims that Indians catered to the palates of European colonizers.
“They wanted food that was spiced, but not too much. Fragrant, but not smelly,” Fuerst declared.
She continued, “And that lack of temperance, in our food, or in our emotionality, is a problem. That’s one of the things that is rooted in white, Christian supremacy.”
Now, having been to India and to countless Indian restaurants, and having cooked the culture’s food many a time, I well know that not every Indian dish is a “curry.” Also, as someone valuing knowledge and language precision, I could appreciate it if these women would limit themselves to educating others on their chosen topic. What’s more, I even love spicy, smelly food (some Thai is on today’s agenda). But what I can’t tolerate is the stink of unintellectual agitation.
In reality, the criticism here is rooted in anti-Western, anti-white prejudice, as the curry crusaders are holding their ire’s targets to a standard applied to no one else. In fact, they’re essentially saying that European-descent peoples have no right to a culture.
First, for those who’d complain of “cultural appropriation,” know that this is what everyone does. Businessmen in Asia and elsewhere often exhibit the Western sartorial norm of wearing suits and ties. Our food and drink — hamburgers, hot dogs, Coke, etc. — are embraced the world over. Then there’s our technology, without which disgruntled Westerno-phobes couldn’t be online complaining about the West.
In fact, “cultural appropriation” is more rightly known as something else: normal human exchange. It’s people taking the best (hopefully) from each other to create something better still (ideally). It’s also a prerequisite for advanced civilization and culture.
As for “curry” not existing in any South Asian language, Les États-Unis and Estados Unidos don’t exist in English. But that’s still how, respectively, French and Spanish speakers reference the United States. In China and Japan and many other nations, they don’t call “hamburgers” just that but have their own terms. French fries are thus named because they possibly originated in France (or Belgium), but in Britain are called “chips” and in France “pommes frites” (literally, “apples fried”).
Should we institute a World Commission on Name Rectitude to establish universal terms for everything and punish transgressors? At least that would apply to everyone. As it stands now, only Westerners are impugned for exhibiting human cultural norms. And if anything is “offensive,” to use a favored leftist term, that’s it.
Speaking of which, there is no “British bad ear,” only bad thinking by Professor Fuerst. In reality, every people has a “bad ear” regarding particular languages. Certain Asians, for example, have trouble pronouncing “r” sounds in the middle or ends of words.
If we condemned them for this, we’d be guilty of intolerance — and that’s precisely what the anti-Western Civilization destroyers are guilty of. Upon adopting things from other cultures, all peoples assign terms to them that accord with their language norms and which they can readily pronounce. Why, they purposely Sinicized my name and called me when I was in Taiwan decades ago, to present it phonetically, “Shŏw-win” (and they hadn’t even adopted me!). I didn’t complain and insist they had a “bad ear.”
As for what drives the cultural revolutionaries, it would be nice to suppose they think very highly of Western Civilization, that it is so supreme that its peoples are not subject to the same cultural limitations and governing principles as everyone else. In reality, though, it’s just hate.
