Charlie and the Social Justice Factory: is Harvard right to teach chocolate is racist?
By Steven Tucker, Mercator. (image: Wikimedia Commons)
If you’re white and you buy your children chocolate eggs to eat this Easter, aren’t you training them to become infant white supremacists? This question is so incredibly stupid that it could only be posed by someone with a PhD.
Sad to say, even chocolate has now been tarred with the brush of “white supremacism” – at least according to the Harvard African and African-American Studies (AAAS) module E119, “Chocolate, Culture and the Politics of Food”. This subject at Harvard Extension School, a continuing education division at the University, now appears to have been discontinued. But its legacy lives on in high-school lesson plans.
Looking up the course’s content online, it would appear to be entirely free of any known nutrients, intellectually speaking. Particularly notable is the warning to students with chocolate allergies that the course does involve eating chocolate, especially in “Unit 4: Eating Chocolate”.
As useful as a chocolate teapot
How can chocolate be racist? You would have to ask Carla D. Martin, PhD, the designer of the course in question, founder of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute, which bills itself as “a scholar-led research organisation that seeks to reduce information asymmetry in the cacao and chocolate value chain.” What does this actually mean? Having spent some time looking through their extensive website, I’m none the wiser.
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