Dingbat of the day: Milk is white supremacy

quote:

---

What about racism? White nationalism? If you’re having trouble finding the connection between these institutions and milk, you’re not alone. You, along with the rest of the nation, have been so accustomed to hearing the benefits of milk that you probably didn’t even realize the subtle racism hidden in our health facts.

It may not surprise you that the United States was founded on racism. That every institution we uphold has racist roots that are sometimes difficult to catch and even harder to fight against. This phenomenon affects our voter ID laws, state testing and, yes, even our federal dietary guidelines. But how can our health guidelines, a system meant to be built upon scientific fact alone, have racist messages? Where there is a deep-rooted tradition to suppress an entire race’s existence, there’s a way.

The federal endorsement of milk in American diets contributes to the problem by uncritically pushing people to drink milk, despite the potential detriment it has on non-white people’s health.

Our current federal dietary guidelines urge people to drink three cups of milk a day, according to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The main health benefit of milk is to guard against osteoporosis, a disease that weakens your bones — hence the “stronger bones” rhetoric. While this is a very practical health benefit, osteoporosis affects Africans at a significantly lower rate than it does most Americans, according to an article on Mother Jones.

These facts about milk were brought to attention by a scientific magazine that got trickled down into the world of 4chan, where the facts were distorted and exaggerated to fit a racist rhetoric for white supremacy. The online trollers decided to take their milk jugs to the public using Shia LaBeouf’s social experiment livestream project, “He Will Not Divide Us,” which began as a protest against President Donald Trump. The installation has since been shut down by the host, The Museum of Moving Images, for being being “a serious and ongoing public safety hazard,” according to a February article by USA Today.

---