By ROMINA PALOMEQUE
Over the course of time, milk has been made to symbolize evil ideals. If this sounds stupid, that’s because it is. But because of its “unique” color, milk has symbolised whiteness and racial “purity.” In reality, milk is just another example of how colonizers embed their messed-up ideology into the roots of American history. It has been weaponized against minorities, from colonizers to random white guys with a Twitter account. The hatred rooted in this country is there regardless of what time period we look at.
The symbolism of milk started with European colonization. Colonizers promoted milk as a staple in civilization and often displaced and altered indigenous food and diets. This resulted in not only the erasure of food identity but also paved the way for the racial hierarchy milk represents, and the white supremacist symbolism of milk, as colonizers considered their dairy intake to make them pure and therefore better than the uncivilized indigenous people of the land. As a result, milk was established as a symbol of whiteness and purity.
Considering lactose-intolerant people to be the weaker link also has ties to the racial hierarchy milk often represents. As previously mentioned, colonizers forced the consumption of milk on indigenous people. This carried on to the assimilation era, when Native American kids were sent to boarding schools. In such cases, they would be forced to drink milk through institutionalized programs, as these school systems believed it would cleanse and purify them, despite milk often causing them to become sick.
Furthermore, during the 1920s, groups such as the KKK fed into this imagery of milk. They advertised milk in order to portray whiteness and their genetic superiority, and supported assimilation programs. They elevated the idea of milk as an unspoken symbol of racial superiority. However, in the Jim Crow era, the way milk was enforced upon children of color changed. While milk was often advertised as a household staple, and ads featured healthy nuclear families, Black kids were completely excluded from the national milk school programs. This reinforced the ideas present during the colonization and assimilation eras; it prioritized a white-centered model of nutrition and ignored the needs of anyone who was not white.
The evil interpretations of milk have been carried on by modern-day white supremacists, who chug milk, and sometimes, grossly enough, raw milk, to prove they’re genetically superior to the lactose intolerant. The underlying message is that only white people are strong enough to handle dairy intake. The thing is, because this is comedic to them, it is at times hard to be able to call out the system that taught them this was supposed to be funny. Hiding behind their humor allows white supremacists to take something inconsequential and transform it into a symbol of belonging.
So yes, milk actually isn’t actually evil itself. It didn’t actually do any of the damage, people did that. The real evil does not come from what is in the glass, but what people decided to pour into it: racism, purity, and an absurd amount of hidden insecurity.
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’28
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