My Stomach Is Not Racist

Commentary

I grew up in Ithaca, New York. Occasionally friends from home send me articles from The Ithaca Journal, especially ones that they know I will find outlandish. This morning I woke up to a headline announcing that lactose intolerance was somehow the product of racism, the U.S. government, and business interests.

I had to read the article, of course.

The piece, originally published by The Conversation, argues that lactose intolerance is actually the human norm and that scientists “invented” it as a condition in the 1960s after the government and dairy industry pushed surplus milk into school lunches, including in populations that had not traditionally consumed much fresh milk.

There is an important fact buried underneath the headline. Human bodies are different. Populations with long histories of dairying developed a greater ability to digest lactose into adulthood, including people in northern Europe and some pastoral groups in Africa and the Middle East. Many other people naturally produce less lactase after childhood.

That fact alone makes the racial framing fall apart. Some African pastoral peoples developed an equal or even greater ability to digest lactose than many Europeans, through different genetic mutations. The traditional Maasai diet centered overwhelmingly on milk and blood; cattle were generally slaughtered for meat only on special or ceremonial occasions. A separate lactase-persistence mutation became common among Arabian pastoralists, possibly in response to generations of camel-milk consumption.

Unless we are prepared to argue that African cattle herders and Arab camel herders were also agents of European white supremacy thousands of years before America’s dairy lobby existed, this is not fundamentally a racial story. Evolution followed the herds. It did not follow skin color. If the ability to digest milk is evidence of whiteness, someone forgot to tell the Maasai.

But the number used to support the article’s sweeping claim is misleading. The often-repeated statistic is that roughly 68 percent of the world has lactose malabsorption. That does not mean 68 percent of humanity becomes sick from eating dairy. The National Institutes of Health makes the distinction clearly: Malabsorption means that the small intestine does not digest all the lactose consumed. Lactose intolerance means that malabsorption produces symptoms. Many people with malabsorption have no symptoms, and most people with lactose intolerance can tolerate some amount of lactose.

Naming a group of symptoms did not invent the stomachache.

Ordinary store-bought milk gives me a stomachache, yet I can drink raw A2 milk from cows on our ranch. I cannot say whether the difference is A1 versus A2 protein, homogenization, heat, freshness, or microbiology. But my body’s response is real. It does not make pasteurization racist, my stomach oppressed, or our cows agents of white supremacy.

The dairy industry absolutely deserves examination. After World War II, producers had excess milk. They lobbied government, government bought the surplus, and milk became embedded in school meals and nutrition policy. Industry promoted the product it had to sell, and science too often treated the bodies it studied as representative of everyone.

That story contains corporate influence, government subsidy, scientific arrogance, and industrial standardization. Perhaps it contains greed. But an industry trying to sell more of its product is doing what industry does. If a policy is poorly suited to some people, we should change the policy. Calling the entire process racist does not make the analysis deeper.

I do not say that because I believe that racism is imaginary. I live in a biracial and bicultural family. My husband is Mexican, darker-skinned than I am, and 12 years younger than me. People have said unkind things directly to him and to our children because of their race. That is racism. I have no trouble naming it.

Almost every time our family enters a restaurant, the hostess asks how many are in my party. I say six. Then she looks at my husband and asks him. He says six. She turns to another employee: “We need two tables of six.”

One of us interrupts, saying: “No, we’re together. One table.”

They see an older white woman, a younger brown man, and children who do not all look exactly alike, and their minds divide us into two families. Maybe it is race. Maybe it is our age difference. Maybe it is both. Maybe we simply do not resemble the family they expected to walk through the door. It is awkward, and after all these years, it can even be funny. I do not need to declare the restaurant industry racist every time a hostess guesses wrong.

Yet we now seem determined to attach racism to every imperfect system. The Guardian asked whether charging extra for oat or almond milk was “a little bit racist,” although alternative milks can cost cafés considerably more. HuffPost declared body mass index “racist and useless,” when it is more accurately described as a crude population measurement often misused as an individual diagnosis.

Time magazine published “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise” because some promoters of the modern American fitness movement held eugenic beliefs. But exercise did not originate in 20th-century America. Ancient Greeks trained in gymnasia and competed in the Olympic Games. India, China, Africa, and Indigenous cultures all developed traditions of strength, movement, wrestling, running, and physical discipline. Exercise is nearly as old as humanity. A few ugly ideologues do not get retroactive ownership of the human body. Walking, lifting, and becoming stronger did not inherit their ideology.

What fascinates me is how selectively this guilt by association is applied. The 20th-century U.S. population-control movement had genuine ties to eugenics. More than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized under state programs, with poor, disabled, black, Indigenous, and Latina women among those targeted. Margaret Sanger used eugenics arguments while building the birth-control movement, and Planned Parenthood eventually removed her name from one of its clinics because of that association. Abortion itself is far older than the eugenics movement, but modern reproductive policy and eugenic population control undeniably crossed paths. Mention that history and suddenly we are told origins do not necessarily define what something is today. Exercise receives no such mercy. Milk, apparently, is beyond redemption.

Automatic soap dispensers that sometimes fail to detect dark skin have been called racist. That is poor optical engineering and inadequate product testing. Farmers markets have been described as white spaces and vehicles of environmental gentrification. Their real barriers are often price, location, vendor fees, and the enormous cost of producing food on a small scale. Air conditioning has been given a racist history because access to cooling follows inequalities in housing and income. But the machine cooling the air is not discriminating.

Older photographic film really was calibrated primarily around light skin and reproduced darker skin poorly. That harmed people and should have been corrected sooner. Companies prioritized certain customers and commercial demands, then ignored everyone else until enough money forced improvement. Corporate indifference and narrow testing explain the failure. Calling the camera racist may attract attention, but it does not engineer better film.

Words matter because causes matter. Deliberate racial hatred, unequal outcomes, poor design, class barriers, government favoritism, and corporate greed sometimes overlap. They are not interchangeable.

A family can be misunderstood without being hated. A body can process food differently without being defective. An industry can be greedy without being racist. If everything becomes racism, we do not become better at seeing racism. We become better at naming everything racism—and worse at confronting the real thing when it is standing directly in front of us.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.