Foothills blasted on Twitter for Sexual Chocolate beer

This is true on a few levels. Divide and conquer right? However I think the puppet master controls the strings to both sides.

 

You two single minded morons are the perfect example of why threads like these get shut down, and, on a larger scale, why this country cant get its shit together.

 

Well I was speaking of racism specifically, which is but one ornament on the prejudicial tree.
As to the anger a hazy IPA might prompt, judging people's character based on their taste preferences seems like an effect of American culture having been a consumer culture for the past century. We'll always find a new way to be star-bellied.

 

Not taking sides. Freedom of speech Is guaranteed, but there can and will always be repurcutions. Whether it's mlk or Kennedy, they're will always be

i don’t know about iconic. Personally I don’t like Foothills labeling across the board, but I do support their right to choose said label. It’s tasteful and appropriate to the beer. Imo they just look cheap. I’d change the labels to upscale it a bit, not because one guy on Twitter was offended.

 

HIV by state

Southern states accounted for approximately 46% of all people with HIV at the end of 2015. States reporting the highest rates of people with HIV are predominantly in the South and the Northeast. An estimated 86% (960,351) of people were aware of their infection at the end of 2015.

Nov 27, 2018

 

You mean like
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/24444/65582/ Snow Bunny Blonde | Thr3e Wise Men
or
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16533/54931/ Hub City Snowbunny Ale | Hub City Brewing Company

 

Hmm, one is discontinued, and the other doesn't seem to have a label...

Apparently, there isn't just one definition of "snow bunny": one definition is an attractive woman who skis. The one I had in mind, more common among urban black men, is a white woman who hangs around or is attracted to them. Looks like at least one of them was referring to the first definition.

 

This was a very well put and polite way of explaining that. Now I’ll be rude and say that it’s sad that it needed to be explained to a forum that is presumably populated by adults.

 

Knowing the Foothills people pretty well, I would suggest the new name might be Mutual Chocolate......

I'm not so sure I agree with @Tamarack completely, but your approach is unbecoming, sir!

 

Rather than going quote-by-quote, I’m just going to address one long post to the arguments and behavior you’ve presented in this thread in general.

To start, the slippery slope argument is not only baseless, but it’s largely nonsense. The idea that, because people have expressed mild criticism of a beer label because of how it objectifies black women, they are gearing up to enact wholesale restrictions to basic freedom of expression is a fucking paranoid fantasy.

No one is talking about censorship or even exacting economic pressure on Foothills. For the most part, the opinions expressing criticism have been more in the vein of “oh, yeah, that’s kind of problematic because [reasons]. Maybe they should think about changing it.” When you interpret that kind of expression of opinion as a precursor to censorship and “sweeping control over people’s freedom to express themselves”, you are disingenuously shutting down the debate by presenting a hilariously beefed up straw man that has no place in the discussion in the first place. You have signaled to everyone else that you don’t care about alternate perspectives. You just care about shutting the discussion down. It's like how some gun advocates treat any discussion of gun laws as a precursor to an all-out ban.

And building upon that way you have presented yourself, you have chosen to defensively disregard any attempts to explain why this label might be considered problematic and instead engage in a back and forth with the person who fits into your preconceived notion about what so-called “Social Justice Warriors” ARE. It’s like you don’t care to learn anything new or be enlightened to a new or different perspective, instead being content in your confirmation bias that progressives are hypocritical, overly-sensitive snowflakes who just want to change things for some nebulous notion of “power” and shut down freedom of expression. This behavior doesn’t make the emotional and hostile responses you elicit any more constructive or helpful, but it does suggest that you have a key role to play in this absurd dance.

And so it’s with reluctance that I will attempt to explain why Foothills lack of people of color at their brewery makes it worse when they use iconography that reduces people of color to nothing more than a skin tone (Chocolate is brown! People of color are brown! The marketing copy practically writes itself! /sarcasm). But before you can understand why Foothills having no people of color on staff is *more* problematic, you have to first understand why the name and label are troubling in the first place, regardless of who is on their staff. And so far, any non-inflammatory attempts to do that have been met with stubborn resistance.

As I previously noted, white people—and especially white males—enjoy privilege within our society because, for the bulk of Western history, white people have controlled the means of power and, as a result, the perspective of white males has been the valid perspective by default. White males made our laws. White males exercise power across society disproportional to their size within our culture.

Now, privilege doesn’t mean that all white people are better off than all people of color. Privilege doesn’t mean immunity from being disadvantaged. I’m not going to write a treatise on the topic because if you are interested in learning about it, there are many resources out there that can help explain it.

But the reason I mention it is because Foothills, on balance, has that privilege. The black woman they have decided to (probably unintentionally) objectify doesn’t. And the real mindfuck comes in when you think about the fact that their decision to sidestep the humanity of that black woman in favor of some marketing copy, their label perpetuates that privilege.

And here’s where we come full-circle back to the earlier idea of censorship: as someone who thinks the label is problematic, I don't want them to be forced to change their label. Because coercing them to change the label misses the point. Forcing a change doesn't increase anyone's understanding. The ideal outcome is for Foothills to think about the issue that has been presented to them and say “yeah, we didn’t realize it, but now that it’s been called out, we agree with the point being made and we think it’s best to change the label. And for beer geeks on sites like this to understand why they came to that conclusion.

Because ultimately, we’re not talking about hate speech or violence or prejudicial behavior towards people of color. We’re talking about a tone-deaf label. It's okay to apply mild pressure rather than force a change.

I can appreciate your perspective here, but I can’t help myself from pointing out that there are people in this thread attempting to talk about the issue in a civilized manner. Frustratingly, attempts at nuanced explanations haven’t really served to reduce the defensive objections from those who think this is a “non issue”.

It seems silly to e to get into a pissing match over which of these two terms is “worse”, but to deny that there is anything problematic—given the multiple explanations provided in this thread—about the name Sexual Chocolate accompanied by a “sexy” black woman exhibits that you either aren’t reading the thread or are unable or unwilling to internalize a perspective other than your own.

Well, fuck. I wish I had seen this comment before I wasted all that time writing my other comments. Well said.

 

Wow I was done with this thread but after reading this, wow. You need some help.

 

At this point, this thread needs to be locked or deleted. Some of you on here are absolutely ridiculous!

 

I kept telling myself to not read this thread but I did and now I'm just filled with anger towards myself. I often find as someone here pointed out, people really don't want equality(not all) but total control thinly veiled as righteousness

 

Very good point, about us being so quick to entrench ourselves in binary positions. However, apologies are in danger of becoming meaningless, especially if it is a panacea. Maybe a better approach would be to recognize the objections of some, clearly state the intent of the brewers, and make a change. To me this would be a respectful response to the issue.

 

Or perhaps I have read the various responses, considered them, and am not persuaded.

Actually that's it, right there, in one short sentence.

 

They will be hiding behind their gates.

 

Can you imagine wasting so much time running one of those dog whistling twitter accounts, must be some real sad, small people in this country.

 

I'm not sure what's so difficult about accepting the universal truth that we all have different life experiences and that those life experiences are influenced by the world around us. This leads to a wide range of events depending upon both individual and environmental/social factors. I've lived a life in this country that's likely vastly different from yours. I can't speak for you just like you can't speak for me.

 

A few important things regarding this silliness:

1) Every brewery should carefully consider their naming and branding

2) If you keep Point 1 in mind, you can tell everyone who is offended by it to fuck off. There probably won't be many.

3) If you don't keep Point 1 in mind, you can tell everyone who is offended by it to fuck off, but you're going to look bad doing so

 

Or they're trying their best to be sensitive to the feelings of historically oppressed groups.

The level of false equivalence in this thread is insane.