Starting in academia and moving to pop culture, there is the idea that milk can be a tool for racism and/or a symbol for racism. See ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ and food oppression first if needed.
In 2013, TheUC Irvine Law Review published The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA by assistant law professor Andrea Freeman (Vol. 3, p. 1251, 2013). Some say that it is racist to assert genetic differences because to think of race as real is racist (see race realism). Yet, professor Freeman writes (page 1253) as if race is real. She states that the USDA engages in food oppression. As explained in the abstract,
Food oppression is institutional, systemic, food-related action or policy that physically debilitates a socially marginalized group. This theory attributes racial/socioeconomic health disparities to policies and practices that appear neutral yet disproportionately harm vulnerable individuals, particularly those whose identities lie on multiple axes of oppression, including race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, and immigration status.
Notice the intersectionalism she expresses. She not only expresses views from critical race theory, she cites Derick Bell(page 1255) and “critical race theory” is included in the keyword list. She writes that the USDA had to reduce a surplus of milk in the USA and to do so, they…
added harmful amounts of saturated fats to the diets of communities who rely primarily on fast food for nutrition in urban centers. These populations consist mainly of low-income African Americans and Latinos.
Professor Freeman does not state that the government knew about these ethnic differences in lactose tolerance. Freeman would be cited in articles about a certain murky milk maleficence at Shia LeBeouf’s art installation in NY (see ‘He Will Not Divide Us’).
Milk, the longtime staple for growing children, is now the new, creamy symbol of white racial purity in President Donald Trump's America.
They include the following screenshot from the livestream. The man on the right, known as Jackie 4chan, is not white. The man in the black coat and black (Make America Great Again) hat, known as /pol/Blart, does not seem to be Aryan (See the HWNDU section).
The last time you saw a Nazi chugging down a glass of cool, white milk, it was likely Christoph Waltz's character in Inglourious Basterds. So how did milk become a symbol of white pride?
Milk has shown up as a trope across all sorts of media dealing with Nazis, but not as an explicit symbol of white pride.Universal Pictures
Some white supremacists think white ethnic identity has a geographic, historical correlation with the body's tolerance for milk — specifically, the production of the lactase enzyme that allows humans to break down lactose.
On 4chan, the internet's hate speech hit factory, one anonymous poster laid this thesis out using the following graphic from a study in Nature, showing hotspots of where certain populations have higher milk tolerances.…
There are numerous threads where white supremacy claims milk-drinking as a new staple of ethnic purity.4chan
Indy100reported on February 12, 2017 that since that diabolical display of dairy dispensation on the He Will Not Divide Us livestream,
On internet forums like 4Chan, Milk has rapidly become a symbol of white supremacy.
despite its wholesome reputation, milk has long had a sinister side, being bound up with the exploitation of the (human and nonhuman) bodies it comes from and being a symbol of and tool for white dominance and superiority. The word itself, in verb form, means “to exploit.” It is also a word at the center of a decades-old, multinational battle taking place in courthouses, the halls of congress, on social media, and in the streets.
shirtless neo-Nazi protesters danced outside Shia LaBeouf’s anti-Trump art installation, He Will Not Divide Us, chugging gallons of milk that dripped messily down their chins.
Later, they claimed this act symbolized their opposition to “the vegan agenda.”
Their headline is sprawled atop a hilarious photo captioned, “A photographer’s rendition of the neo-Nazi milk fetish. Milk has been a symbol for Nazis for decades. (Livonia Stronk/Imgur)”
In one of his satirical YouTube videos, alt-right commentator James Allsup suggests that what epitomises the anti-fascist, feminist, politically correct people he lambasts is that they drink soy instead of dairy milk.
They also wrote,
After that night, milk quickly went viral, joining the ranks of Pepe the Frog and the “okay” emoji as symbols of 21st century, post-Obama white supremacy. Pro-Trump supporters began carrying cartons of it to rallies and Richard Spencer and other prominent figures of the “alt-right” movement added milk-bottle emojis to their Twitter profiles. The #SoyBoy hashtag followed a few months later, going viral in the spring of 2017 and remains popular today.
experts have argued that race has long played a role in milk's adoption in America—a history that's too easily overlooked now that polarizing groups have weighed in.
They also wrote,
After the stunt at the art museum, the milk memes spread to chat rooms and Twitter, where Richard Spencer's bio once boasted that he was "very tolerant ... lactose-tolerant."
research debunks white supremacists' claims about lactose intolerance…
Research shows the genetic mutation to process lactose is not unique to white people…
…studies suggest the mutation only took hold among Northern European dairy farmers some 3,000 years ago, most likely out of dire need, since the climate wasn't conducive to growing much else. However, cattle breeders in East Africa also developed this ability—a fact often ignored by white supremacists…
It is true that those Northern Europeans' descendants now overwhelmingly retain the ability to consume milk, and many others do not, including a majority of their Southern peers. While up to 90 percent of Asian Americans and 79 percent of African Americans lack the enzyme to process lactose, it is by no means a mark of inferiority. As historians have extensively shown, white culture is not the world's only dairy culture, nor has it always embraced milk. India, for one, currently produces and consumes more milk than any other country, while Americans increasingly don't meettheir federally recommended three cups a day.
But white supremacists' support for milk is grounded in symbolism as much as in (pseudo-)science. On this front, the argument has historical precedent. When milk first gained prominence in America, early dairy advocates extolled its virtues to the "Aryan" population,writes historian Melanie Dupuis. As President Herbert Hoover, giving a speech in 1923, told the World's Dairy Congress, "Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depends upon it the very growth and virility of the white races."
Milk's "whiteness" is just one aspect of this mythology. Since its debut on this continent, the drink has been hailed by nutritionists as a "perfect food"—the sliced bread of the federal dietary guidelines. After milk was first fortified with Vitamin D in the 1930s, the federal government's inaugural public-health nutrition campaign promoted it as a miracle cure, a rite of passage, and, later, a means to support the troops in World Wars I and II, as outlined in anthropologist Andrea Wiley's book Re-Imagining Milk. (Drink your milk and your vitamins: American efficiency in action.)
In fact, the mechanisms supporting milk have not always been so wholesome. Many of the same organizations oversee the production and sale of dairy today as in 1915, when the country's most powerful dairy lobbying group, the National Dairy Council, first partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture…
They cite professor Freeman (see food oppression) and reference the malefic milky mayhem at the He Will Not Divide Us installation in NY in the following passage.
…when news emerged about white supremacy's latest symbol, Freeman was not surprised. "If you said, 'you like milk because you like your white privilege,' they would laugh in your face," she says. "But it's nothing new. It's 100 years old." Online, however, this symbolism is still a recent development: After the stunt at the art museum, the milk memes spread to chat rooms and Twitter, where Richard Spencer's bio once boasted that he was "very tolerant ... lactose-tolerant."
In these displays, Freeman sees a visible expression of institutionalized racism. "With milk, we have the USDA policy disproportionately affecting students of color, public school students, poor students, and that underlies and condones the white supremacist co-option of milk as a symbol of whiteness," she says. "So it's operating on all levels. Some of them are blatant and look ridiculous, but all they're doing is reflecting the institutionalized reality."
As the research on poverty and nutrition shows, many people have little control over their food consumption, due to a host of societal factors. Between the white supremacists championing milk and the activists forgoing it, the debate around milk remains, for some, a false choice.
Following the protest in New York, depictions of milk alongside white nationalism went viral. Figures affiliated with the alt-right, including Richard Spencer and Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, added milk emojis to their Twitter display names and the hashtag “#MilkTwitter” was used as a dumping ground for racist trolls. Later in 2017, Lucian Wintrich, a former correspondent for the right-wing news blog Gateway Pundit who has appeared on a white nationalist podcast, drank from a glass of milk as protesters heckled him during a speech.
These and other incidents have been described as evidence that some white supremacists are co-opting cow’s milk as a symbol of their belief that white people are wholesome and pure.
Right-wing news sites like Breitbart have mocked that suggestion. Those who noted milk’s popularity with white supremacists have been taunted as fools who fell for what was just a prank that was not meant to be taken seriously.
But whether or not the alt-right was indulging in a trolling exercise, some academics say these events are part of a murky history involving cow’s milk.
noted the dairy industry has long marketed milk as universally healthy, even though roughly 65 percent of the world’s population has a reduced ability after infancy to digest lactose found in unprocessed milk.
Lactose intolerance is complex and very difficult to measure, but several studies, including a 2010 report produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have found that people of color are more likely to report symptoms of lactose intolerance.
A USDA spokesperson said the Special Milk Program allows substitutions to be made for children who cannot consume milk if a parent or guardian submits a request in writing. And the National Dairy Council (NDC), a lobbying group for the dairy industry, echoed that, saying that under the federal programs, schools will provide non-dairy milk substitutes to children who report trouble digesting milk.
However, the NDC spokesperson also suggested that more people can drink milk than some critics argue. “In American culture today, limited lactose digestion is common but variable among people of African-American, Hispanic, Asian and Native American descent, but not always a reason to avoid dairy foods,” the spokesperson told HuffPost.
The dairy industry has been pushing the idea of milk as an integral part of a healthy diet for a long time. In her book Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink, sociologist Melanie Dupuis cites an NDC publication distributed in the 1920s that quotes a nutritionist saying, “People who have an appreciation for art, literature and music, who are progressive in science and every activity of human intellect are the people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products.”
Dupuis’ book describes how the white beverage was symbolically linked in the early 20th century to white-skinned people, who were better able to digest it due to a genetic mutation known as lactase persistence. “By declaring milk perfect,” she wrote, “white northern Europeans announced their own perfection.”
The NDC declined to comment on industry marketing materials cited in the various studies. “Milk drinking is not just a practice of Western culture,” the spokesperson told HuffPost, “but a shared part of human existence around the world.”
Gambert stressed that her research should not be construed to insinuate that people who drink dairy milk are in any way racist or that milk itself is inherently bigoted. But the issues in milk’s history, she said, make its co-option as a symbol of white nationalism, whether ironic or not, all the more significant.
“Milk is different than other things, which may be more randomly chosen. There is the reality that milk has historical ties to being used in racist practices,” she said.
“There are those who find it funny to use milk as a symbol of white nationalism and tweet offensive content under the hashtag #milktwitter to provoke people,” said Gambert. “But saying it’s all a prank doesn’t mean that milk isn’t being used to support racist beliefs.”
‘A casual look at the races of people seems to show that those using much milk are the strongest physically and mentally, and the most enduring of the people of the world,’ wrote Hedrick, a botanist. ‘Of all races, the Aryans seem to have been the heaviest drinkers of milk and the greatest users of butter and cheese, a fact that may in part account for the quick and high development of this division of human beings.’
White supremacists have recently taken to celebrating this milk-based theory of eugenics as a means to mock the races they deem to be ‘inferior’. (Ah, yes, an inability to digest lactose – the truest sign of inferiority!) Two years ago, a few neo-Nazis shot a viral video of themselves chugging milk in front of He Will Not Divide Us (2017), an anti-Trump installation made by actor Shia LaBeouf with artists Luke Turner and Nastja Rönkkö. Later that year, the internet-infamous white supremacists Richard Spencer and Anthime ‘Baked Alaska’ Gionet put milk emojis in their Twitter profiles.
Did they realize how outlandish it is to predicate a supposed racial dominance on an enzyme? Probably not. But even so, throwing milkshakes onto far-right politicians has helped to invert these strange beliefs.
They are referring here to the cases of milkshaking at that time period.
