“Recently, I chatted with someone who told me a story about her
young niece, who goes to a prestigious preschool and was eating rice with her
hands at lunchtime. The feedback her parents received was that this child
needed to work on her table manners and use proper cutlery to eat. I
immediately felt a rush of anger bubble up inside me when I heard this. The
message that eating food with your hands is an unmannered way to eat is a real
problem for me because it is dripping with the control and shame of
colonization, which is particularly dangerous in an educational context.
Suggesting that a child who eats with her hands has no manners is an echo of
European colonial powers looking to tame the wildness out of the people
they controlled. These European table manners were imposed on conquered people
in an attempt to ‘civilize’ them. It’s a damaging message about right and wrong
ways to do things. It positions the technique as superior and the people who
practise it as setters of the standard, leaving those with a different approach
to eating with a status of inferiority. The idea of a single standard of
acceptable table manners is just one of a host of strategies used to grow and
promote racism. It’s a subtle message but one that is reinforced three times a
day, every day, which makes it quite powerful.”
Link at knuckledraggin.com
(So if I am at dinner in a
country where everybody eats with his/her hands, and I ask for a fork. Haven’t
I greatly insulted my hosts? What if I ask where to wash my hands and am told
that is not a custom in that land? Again, I have insulted my host. Insisting on
cleanliness and specific table manners is used only by racist Westerners.)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.