Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. And if you’ve been paying attention you have heard this one before. My LU colleague Joe Newby wrote about it in 2012 and referred to it in passing again this past September. In fact, this is the same identical story, back for some reason for a second helping of outrage.
According to Harvey Scott School Principal Dr. Verenice Gutierrez, eating PB, with or without J, is racist. Likewise for sending the kiddies to school with this noxious food in their lunchbox.
When leading a talk about race with her staff, Gutierrez explained that peanut butter sandwiches were part of the subtle language of racism.
Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.
‘What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?’ says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
‘Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.’
Whatever happened to the claim that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter? He didn’t — peanut butter was made and eaten by the Incas almost 3000 years ago — but suppose Carver had had a hand in it. Would that make him a racist?
Howard Portnoy contributed to this report.
