Overthinking Clickbait
Feb. 26th, 2019 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingYelp Reviewers’ Authenticity Fetish Is White Supremacy in Action
https://ny.eater.com/2019/1/18/18183973/authenticity-yelp-reviews-white-supremacy-trap
According to my data, the average Yelp reviewer connotes "authentic" with characteristics such as dirt floors, plastic stools, and other patrons who are non-white when reviewing non-European restaurants. This happens approximately 85 percent of the time. But when talking about cuisines from Europe, the word "authentic" instead gets associated with more positive characteristics.
This article makes two main points. The first point is that sometimes people are racist on Yelp, and the second point is that racist reviews on Yelp hurt nonwhite business owners. These are both good points, but the writing and research are full of problems.
This article is a representative example of a bizarre fallacy I keep seeing in leftist social media spaces: deciding that a specific group is bad and that therefore every bad thing is the doing of the bad group. I see this a lot with people who use the word “cishets” as a pejorative, but what the writer of this article in particular is doing is assuming that, since white supremacy is bad, everything she finds problematic is therefore the fault of white people. This syllogism sort of makes sense on a superficial level, but the reification of “white” as the automatic default for all people in all circumstances has major issues.
First of all, this writer claims to have surveyed 20,000 Yelp reviews written about restaurants in New York City. The city gets a lot of tourism, obviously; but, even if we account for that, it does not have a majority white population. The assumption that all 20,000 reviews were written by white people – as if no one else existed or was marginal at best – is white supremacy in action.
Second, the writer assumes that all customers eating at NYC restaurants are white, which is equally unlikely. Like, why do “people expect” restaurants serving Asian food to be cheap? I don’t know, maybe because many of these restaurants cater to the HUGE ASIAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES that live where they’re located? The writer also does not address the obvious fact that there are restaurants targeting multiple price points based on style and location. Grouping wildly different businesses and even entire cuisines together according to Eurocentric perceptions of ethnicity – while assuming that all customers are white – is white supremacy in action. (Granted, this is largely a reflection of Yelp’s own categorizations, but the writer’s treatment of the data needs unpacking.)
Third, given that this material comes from an MA thesis, I would have expected the author to have at least glanced through the two recent scholarly monographs and one recent academic essay collection about Asian-American cuisines in the United States (the latter of which seriously complicates a lot of what she’s saying), as well as the dozens of peer-reviewed articles I found about Mexican food during a ten-second search. Arrogantly believing that people of color with advanced academic degrees have not drawn conclusions about similar data sets and have therefore never had anything to say about race and culture and assimilation and the immigrant experience is white supremacy in action.
There are a ton of other things going on with this article, from the offhand assumption that MSG sickness (which is not limited to white people, for fuck’s sake) isn’t real to the implication that one “authentically” ethnic person can serve as the sole expert on the entirety of a certain culture to the blatantly attention-grabbing reference to Charlottesville, but it’s not worth my time to get into this mess any more than I already have.
It’s important to say what the author is saying, but I really wish she could have found a more meaningful and nuanced way to say it. The restaurant industry in America is super fucked up on multiple levels, but a reliance on statistically meaningless generalizations and cultural essentialism doesn’t strike me as a productive way to start a conversation. And again, it’s not as if the author’s main points aren’t valid – it’s just that her research is flawed in so many easily avoidable ways (at least as it’s presented in this short article). So it’s not that the conclusions are wrong, necessarily, but rather that this article is mainly useful as an example of how social justice can’t really do the work it’s supposed to do without the critical thinking, empathy and compassion, and basic acknowledgement of diversity that are the foundations of progressive thinking.
https://ny.eater.com/2019/1/18/18183973/authenticity-yelp-reviews-white-supremacy-trap
According to my data, the average Yelp reviewer connotes "authentic" with characteristics such as dirt floors, plastic stools, and other patrons who are non-white when reviewing non-European restaurants. This happens approximately 85 percent of the time. But when talking about cuisines from Europe, the word "authentic" instead gets associated with more positive characteristics.
This article makes two main points. The first point is that sometimes people are racist on Yelp, and the second point is that racist reviews on Yelp hurt nonwhite business owners. These are both good points, but the writing and research are full of problems.
This article is a representative example of a bizarre fallacy I keep seeing in leftist social media spaces: deciding that a specific group is bad and that therefore every bad thing is the doing of the bad group. I see this a lot with people who use the word “cishets” as a pejorative, but what the writer of this article in particular is doing is assuming that, since white supremacy is bad, everything she finds problematic is therefore the fault of white people. This syllogism sort of makes sense on a superficial level, but the reification of “white” as the automatic default for all people in all circumstances has major issues.
First of all, this writer claims to have surveyed 20,000 Yelp reviews written about restaurants in New York City. The city gets a lot of tourism, obviously; but, even if we account for that, it does not have a majority white population. The assumption that all 20,000 reviews were written by white people – as if no one else existed or was marginal at best – is white supremacy in action.
Second, the writer assumes that all customers eating at NYC restaurants are white, which is equally unlikely. Like, why do “people expect” restaurants serving Asian food to be cheap? I don’t know, maybe because many of these restaurants cater to the HUGE ASIAN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES that live where they’re located? The writer also does not address the obvious fact that there are restaurants targeting multiple price points based on style and location. Grouping wildly different businesses and even entire cuisines together according to Eurocentric perceptions of ethnicity – while assuming that all customers are white – is white supremacy in action. (Granted, this is largely a reflection of Yelp’s own categorizations, but the writer’s treatment of the data needs unpacking.)
Third, given that this material comes from an MA thesis, I would have expected the author to have at least glanced through the two recent scholarly monographs and one recent academic essay collection about Asian-American cuisines in the United States (the latter of which seriously complicates a lot of what she’s saying), as well as the dozens of peer-reviewed articles I found about Mexican food during a ten-second search. Arrogantly believing that people of color with advanced academic degrees have not drawn conclusions about similar data sets and have therefore never had anything to say about race and culture and assimilation and the immigrant experience is white supremacy in action.
There are a ton of other things going on with this article, from the offhand assumption that MSG sickness (which is not limited to white people, for fuck’s sake) isn’t real to the implication that one “authentically” ethnic person can serve as the sole expert on the entirety of a certain culture to the blatantly attention-grabbing reference to Charlottesville, but it’s not worth my time to get into this mess any more than I already have.
It’s important to say what the author is saying, but I really wish she could have found a more meaningful and nuanced way to say it. The restaurant industry in America is super fucked up on multiple levels, but a reliance on statistically meaningless generalizations and cultural essentialism doesn’t strike me as a productive way to start a conversation. And again, it’s not as if the author’s main points aren’t valid – it’s just that her research is flawed in so many easily avoidable ways (at least as it’s presented in this short article). So it’s not that the conclusions are wrong, necessarily, but rather that this article is mainly useful as an example of how social justice can’t really do the work it’s supposed to do without the critical thinking, empathy and compassion, and basic acknowledgement of diversity that are the foundations of progressive thinking.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 08:28 pm (UTC)#worthit
Also I'm a petty bitch and am judging the author hardcore for including a graph that is legit left on the default settings for Excel did you literally have no time to make your own style AND actually find better source materials for this article???
no subject
Date: 2019-03-24 06:23 pm (UTC)I hate how anyone who puts anything on social media is subjected to intense and merciless scrutiny from every rando who stumbles across their post without context. I think this sort of outrage is often mean-spirited and counterproductive.
But at the same time? I really wish print journalism took this level of scrutiny seriously. Like, I wish more professional editors put more thought into how something might be interpreted, misinterpreted, and then shared on social media before they published it.
I'm (still!) upset with the person who wrote this, but I'm even more upset with the editorial team that allowed her to walk onstage with toilet paper stuck to her shoe, you know?
Also! *bangs fist on table* I think it's stupid that print media and online magazines don't maintain design people on staff and instead of outsource everything to freelancers! This is why we can't have nice things!!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-25 08:18 pm (UTC)It pains me how journalism has taken a nosedive in quality all because of the internet. Then again, so has the quality of decent people on the internet. That's like, half of the reason why I left Facebook. So many people sharing random posts of questionable quality to just point and laugh. Yeesh, I'm done with it.
I'm also reminded of a conversation I had with my boss last month where he wanted me to fill out a print request in his absence and he was like, "Do I need to show you how to do this?" and I was like, "Dude, I used to be a graphic designer. I did this all the time." And then he proceeded to send me the Power Fucking Point files I shit you not that he wanted to have printed and if there was ever a time for the Kill Bill sirens to go off, it was then. But yeah. Nice things. We can't have them. Nope.