Yasmin Tayag is very worried that McDonald’s might make a horrible decision in bringing back its popular Szechuan dipping sauce for their Chicken McNuggets.
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It’s “low-key racism” she writes on Inverse.com in a column that is definitely not a parody or a joke.
Because the sauce – which she has never tasted – reduces an entire country’s cuisine into one flavor is “problematic” and “disrespectful,” Tayag is demanding that the fast food giant not bring back the popular sauce.
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How did this start? The cartoon show Rick and Morty dedicated an entire show to asking McDonalds to bring back the Chinese-inspired sweet-and-sour sauce that was created as a marketing tool for the release of Mulan in 1998. It was wildly popular, and fans began asking them to bring it back.
Disney is re-making a live-action version of Mulan, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring it back.
McDonald’s response was cryptic – to say the least – but Tayag says it would be racist if they did. It’s “culinary and cultural reductionism,” she writes.
How on earth is it racist? Objectively, it’s not. But Tayag says that Szechuan sauce doesn’t actually resemble the flavors of Sichuan, the region in China that the sauce is named after. It’s a sweet, Americanized version of a mix of Chinese flavors. In fact, it’s “low-key racism,” she writes.
it's low-key racist to ask @McDonalds to bring back #szechuansauce for the Mulan remake. sorry @RickandMorty fans https://t.co/n104zvScTj
— Yasmin Tayag (@yeahyeahyasmin) April 12, 2017
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Also, Mulan itself is racist because “there’s nothing Chinese-American” about a legendary girl who grew up in China centuries before America even existed,” Tayag says, and “the last thing Asian-Americans need is a sauce to obscure the diversity of their cultures in the same shade of faceless, nationless, Western-approved brown.”
Why does this matter? It doesn’t really, unless you care that the professionally offended left have decided that anything remotely connected to another culture that is popular in the United States is “cultural appropriation.” Essentially, they’re arguing that America steals from other cultures. Of course, any sociologist will tell you that this happens everywhere in every culture. How much of American culture has been “appropriated” around the world by other countries.
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Does this make you a racist? Well, of course it does, you silly white person. Now shut up and eat your fries.
