This is what happens when people start to use the word “racist” instead of “something I don’t particularly enjoy or find useful.” Now an effort by a very rich chef to sell overpriced restaurant meals is positioned as a fight against racism.
This is what McGuigan has termed “cool capitalism.” The idea is to get people to spend as much as possible by positioning the spending as part of a virtuous, cool, caring and progressive lifestyle. Help the suffering Mexicans by buying a $100 dinner! No? What are you, a racist?
Clarissa's Blog 
Racist is one of the most useless words going now, blanched of almost all meaning by hysterial overuse.
About 90% of the time now when I hear or read the word ‘racist’ I hear “I have severe emotional problems and am lashing out at whoever I can” that’s probably unfair, but there it is….
Of course there is still lots of real, retrograde and primitive anti-black or anti-semitic or anti-hispanic feeling out there but I think taking a non-intersectional approach and being as precise as possible would help clear up the rhetorical environment.
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How much can you really extricate capitalism from racism analysis, given we all live in a capitalistic system and theoretically most goods, services and factors of quality of life filter through some market mechanism? Everyone filters their isms through their job which is why this chef starts talking about the price points and Zagat ratings of different cuisines and why actors and models keep talking about casting decisions and scripts. And of course academics go on endlessly about tenure and how superstar academics are treated.
It’s an interesting tendency that everyone filters the discussion through what the elites are doing.
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“Everyone filters their isms through their job which is why this chef starts talking about the price points and Zagat ratings of different cuisines and why actors and models keep talking about casting decisions and scripts.”
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