WC: 250
“The butter merchants tried to use the exchange to influence state legislators to limit the sale of margarine in Illinois.” Page 66 – The Financial Life of Food
“Bummer to be the team with no name.” Page 103 – The Winona LaDuke Chronicles
“[the numerous images linking black subjects to food are] Products of the dialect between commodity capitalism and popular culture.” Page 90 – Tompkins quoting Doris Witt in Racial Indigestion
(2017, February 6). Amnesty: At least 13,000 Hanged in Syrian Prison Since 2011. Retrieved February 6, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/02/07/world/middleeast/ap-ml-syria-mass-hangings.html
This article reports the murders of at least 13,000 people that were hanged in Syrian prison since 2011. The article shows inhumane comparisons of the death totals from hanging nonviolent prisoners to the war casualties in Aleppo since 2011. This information helps support the vernacular shift of dehumanizing people in order to treat them inhumanely as seen in the term to describe the place where hangings took place: the slaughterhouse.
The quote from The Financial Life of Food symbolizes the attitude of the butter-and-egg men. Not only have these men commodified a shared interest, but they attempted to share the interest of an already commodified shared interest. Different levels of the development of commodification reminds me of the quote from The Winona LaDuke Chronicles. This quote speaks to me as a young adult who was apart of changing a racist high school mascot name because it acknowledges the newly experienced loss of identity of the members of the racist athletic program while non empathetically relating it to loss of identity that stems from a lack of representation for Indigenous people. Tompkins quote of Doris Witt reminds me of this concept because the evolutionary nature of a social mechanism this complex will show up in seemingly abstract places. In An Indigenous People’s History, the author states that according to John Grenier’s work The First Way of War, violence was already present before the war and racism did not incite it, but was used to mask the unnatural violence as a tool to release the desire to kill. The masking of this desire evolved into an emotional and spiritual feeding upon all non-white bodies. In Racial Indigestion, Tompkins writes there is a limit to how much the white body can ingest the black subject, when the black body inhabits its own stickiness, the white consumer is upset by the black subject trying to leave the stickiness, upsetting the okayness of their treat.
Bibliography
Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
Grenier, J. (2005). The first way of war: American war making on the frontier, 1607-1814. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
LaDuke, W., & Cruz, S. A. (2016). The Winona LaDuke chronicles: stories from the front lines in the battle for environmental justice. Ponsford, M.N.: Spotted Horse Press.
Tompkins, K. W. (2012). Racial indigestion: Eating bodies in the nineteenth century. New York: New York University Press.