Daily Wire host: “Why exactly is it a negative stereotype that a lot of Black people like chicken and waffles?”
Published
Citation
From the February 9, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): So, it reinforces negative stereotypes. Why exactly is it a negative stereotype that a lot of Black people like chicken and waffles? Why is that negative? It's just -- is it inaccurate? Like, it is true that you tend to find chicken and waffle restaurants and those sorts of dishes in Black communities more than in, you know, white communities. So? Why is that a problem to notice?
...
I think it's accurate to say that it tends to be more popular and prevalent in the Black community. I'm not sure if historically it was, like, it was first designed or, you know, if the first person to come up with the chicken and waffles dish was a Black person. I don't know if that's the case. But who cares? Why is it automatically offensive? A negative stereotype? What's negative about it?
This is what we did - we have decided that every stereotype is automatically negative simply because it's a stereotype. But that's not the case. A stereotype is -- it's a generality made about groups. It's like, it's speaking in a kind of general term about a group. And that is not automatically -- now, there can be negative stereotypes. There are things you could say about groups that are not accurate, that are not true, that could be degrading or offensive. But not everything is. Just because you're making a general statement saying, you know, people in this group generally like this or do this or whatever -- it can be true. It's okay to notice it.
But this is the conditioning. It's the conditioning they want, where they're telling us that we're not allowed to notice things, or at least we need to ask permission. There are certain things we're allowed to notice and other things we're not allowed to notice and we need to get permission first. And the fact that the unacceptable things, the things that we're not allowed to notice, the fact that this is so arbitrarily determined, that's part of the game here. It's part of the, as I was talking about, this kind of societal game of Simon Says.
So, you are allowed to speak in general terms about Black people -- [INAUDIBLE] Black History Month is all about. You're allowed to talk about things like Black history. So there are -- and if you were to say, well, we're celebrating Black history, we're celebrating Black culture, that'd be an okay thing to say. You're allowed to say that. We're going to celebrate Black culture for Black History Month. Okay, you can do that. That's a serious -- you're speaking in general terms now. But then what is Black culture, exactly? We're allowed to celebrate it. But what -- what qualifies? Especially when you get into things like food. What are you allowed to say is part of that scene? That's when the rules become extremely arbitrary. And there's just no way -- as a reasonable, rational person, there's no way to know, well, am I allowed to notice that this food tends to be a part of that, but not this food? That food's wrong. We can't bring that up. It's completely ridiculous.