Despite widespread rejection of the incessant, divisive toxicity of an ever-growing rainbow of perceived grievances, social justice con artists scour the dogmatic universe for more faux causes to fuel their platforms. A recent example is the laughable-if-offensive effort to transform the phrase “food deserts” into “food apartheid.”
Food Apartheid
Food deserts refer to urban areas where “people have limited access to healthful and affordable food.” These regions are often ideologically blamed on “systemic racism.” Yet, this false narrative is uncoupling from the reality that many businesses operating in areas with high poverty are leaving because they are losing money. The problem isn’t that grocery stores in Chicago or Seattle were never constructed because of white supremacy. They are closing down, overwhelmed by violence and shoplifting encouraged by left-wing agitators, defunding of police, and liberal prosecutors who ensure there are no consequences for the crimes.
This vicious cycle of decline fuels a new round of histrionics alleging that racist motives in store closings inflict struggles for poor neighborhoods “of color.” In a recent column titled “Some not-so-hidden truths about Seattle grocery stores,” columnist Naomi Ishisaka claimed that racism, not variations in crime rates, is responsible for the lack of grocery stores in some parts of that ultra-liberal (and thus racially enlightened?) city. She clamored for a redefinition of the inadequate phrase “food desert”:
“While ‘food desert’ might lead people to think there’s something inevitable… ‘food apartheid’ argues that these inequities are the result of intentional choices, and can be changed…
“These inequities… contribute to health disparities that fall along racial and socio-economic lines….”
The term apartheid refers to oppressive and divisive segregation policies long prevalent in South Africa. Unlike closing grocery stores to avoid staff being robbed daily and to stop business losses, the policies of apartheid were “the result of intentional choices… that [fell] along racial and socio-economic lines.” In the social justice milieu, “people of color” has stepped into the currency of political correctitude with little consideration of the disfavored phrase “colored people.” “BIPOC” is a race-defined term that acronymically classifies people as black, indigenous, or colored, and the social justice phrase “black and brown people” is often bandied about in virtue-signaling circles.
Divisive Stereotyping
Such divisive phraseology is precisely what the South African government employed when it implemented apartheid. Citizens were divided by the Population Registration Act of 1950 into three racial groups: white, coloured, and native (later renamed “Bantu,” and then merely “black”). The “coloured” category came to incorporate seven subgroups: “Cape Coloured,” “Malay,” “Griqua,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” “Other Asiatic,” and “Other Coloured.” Often, siblings from the same biological parents could be separated into different racial classifications.
Social justice trolls like Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka repackage their “diversity and inclusion” schlock in new bottles. For Ishisaka, this means tormenting the word apartheid into the nouveau term du jour for food deserts.
ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) rhetoric, decriminalization, open borders, BLM, and “Critical Race Theory” (claiming all whites are racist oppressors and all blacks are perpetual victims) have decimated most major American cities. Opportunists like Naomi Ishisaka jump into the breach they helped forge, to fashion yet more division in the oxymoronic label of “diversity and inclusion.”
The LGBTQ+? classification system is another dimension of labeling people diversely for the stated purpose of then including them justly. This is identity politics 101, to which must be added the confusing chaos of gender, which Americans are told is “fluid” and can change hourly, along with an infinite, swirling lexicon of ridiculous, mandated pronouns.
Unity Illusions
Ironically, on February 3, Naomi Ishisaka published an op-ed with the Seattle Times titled “How to put true ‘inclusion’ into DEI” in which she called for unity within the ranks of the bedazzled-if-bewildered woke alphabet crowd:
“The hyperfocus on small divisions is what I heard someone call “disorganizing” strategies, or the opposite of organizing strategies.
“How will we change so that we say to more people you are welcome and wanted, even if you don’t know everything, even if you still have things to learn?
“In the coming months and years we have an opportunity to build community through openness, vulnerability, curiosity and, yes, kindness, embracing contradictions and nuance with humility, knowing none of us has all the answers.
“Or, we can go back to fulfilling the wishes of our digital overlords and continue to fuel the outrage machine, scolding and shaming like-minded souls on social media, racking up profits for Big Tech while ensuring our communities get smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker.”
Ms. Ishisaka seems to be floundering in her myopic identity soup, which has been overboiled and left on the stove for too long. “Food deserts” are created not by white supremacists but by business decisions compelled by the racist, transgender, climate change, open-border, and anti-semitism policies upon which she feeds.
In his insightful book, The End of Race Politics, Coleman Hughes perfectly explains this tasteless use of apartheid to gaslight the real causes of “food deserts.”
“Neoracists don’t want peace, but endless ideological war,” he explains. “Racial strife is what fuels the neoracist industry. Neoracists need people to believe in monstrous and ongoing racial oppression. If racism were eliminated from society, neoracists would be out of a job: they’d no longer have anyone or anything to accuse; their agenda would lose social relevance, and they’d no longer be able to garner the cultural power they crave.”
The book continues: “It’s only by perpetuating interracial hatred – by continuing to make old racial wounds seem fresh, by spreading the myth that our society has made little progress toward eliminating racism against people of color, and by exaggerating the threat of white supremacy – that neoracists can continue getting what they want….so that they can continue depicting themselves as heroes.”
Ishisaka’s application of “apartheid” to American neighborhoods is an instant backfire (likely mistaken for gunfire, in the neighborhoods she feigns to champion). Her cultural appropriation of the term is an abject perversion of the suffering of millions under a brutal South African regime. It is also a mirror, reflecting the racist delineations she agitates and exploits to rack up algorithmic profits for her shrinking platform and “digital overlords,” ensuring her community of race-baiters gets “smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker.”
