Thanks for your response. I’m not so into dichotomies like left and right. There are too many people in each of those categories with divergent views to be able to say “the left is doing this” methinks. Also, I don’t think anyone’s just “trying to destroy” something good. People have different ideas about what will improve people’s lives. It’s trickier and trickier though as the us and them become more and more entrenched.

Speaking to your steak example, I don’t know anyone who would take issue with that as a simple observation. An observation without context though? Well, that’s different. (I know that my crowd is different than most, and many just avoid discomfort by not talking of race at all.) What one has been raised to eat is always influenced by cultural heritage (either familial or externally imposed). This is what I suggested in the article you commented on. Whatever interests you, use it as a gateway to understand the history of our nation. Everything we see as a “personal taste” is influenced by culture, and with African American folks, that includes slavery, subjugation and poverty in a big way. Even departures from those tastes by middle-class and upper-class black people in the U.S. are a distancing response. We all do this — embrace and distance from our family and cultural heritage as it makes sense to us in the present day.

Far from suggesting we don’t notice and talk about those differences, I think we should discuss, laugh at, learn from those moments — and then also work to ensure that the lingering privileges of whiteness (of which there are so many) are uncovered and remedied as well.