Sauce Wars: Racism or not racism?

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:23:34 GMT

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/scotlands-sauce-wars-charge-for-ketchup-in-edinburgh-leaves-customer-from-glasgow-with-chip-on-shoulder-8786768.html

Apparently Edinburgh normally eats chips with some sort of sauce, whereas Glasgow normally eats chips with ketchup.

A little while back, there was a fuss when an Edinburgh chip-shop proprietor had a bright idea to deliberately piss off Glaswegians by making fun of what they eat, and started charging a nominal amount for ketchup (but not sauce). Shortly, a peeved Glaswegian complained to the press that he felt racially persecuted.

Now, most people agreed this particular example didn't matter much either way. But that bothered me, because I thought it was very like many things that were unarguably illegal racial prejudice, and I thought it was important to try understand the difference, to be able to make such decisions more accurately when they _do_ matter.

So, why doesn't it matter?

"If it costs 25p more to make..."?

Yes, if. If it actually DOES cost more, then that's ok. But it's clear it doesn't, he just charged more because he wanted to make a humorous point.

"Glaswegian isn't a race"?

No. Discrimination against people because of their ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, or non-country region of origin or domicile is bad for exactly the same reasons as racism, whether or not you think it ought to have a different word.

"It's just Glasgow, it's not like they were discriminating against [foreign nationality]"?

Not this alone. Discriminating against people from a UK city is certainly less common and hence less of an overall problem than discriminating against people for a foreign nationality, but AFAIK the general moral and legal principle is that you shouldn't discriminate against any nationality, just in case.

After all, if someone were not hired because of which city they came from, that would be a plainly legitimate complaint.

"It's just 25p!"?

Again, not by itself. If someone charged women 25p more for the same meal, that wouldn't be ok, even if the actual hardship were only small.[1]

"OK, a combination of "against a normally non-marginalised group" and "only a very small inconvenience" "?

I think this is the only sensible conclusion. I've a feeling it probably is illegal, but as long as it's not causing widespread problem, it's probably sufficiently low down it's better just to ignore it. There are plenty of other cases where equality legislation probably should be used but isn't that should get first dibs.

[1] Come to think of it, how do clubs and dating sites get away with saying "women free entry"? It's not a big injustice, but I wonder why it's legal -- if there's a clause allowing discrimination in the non-prevailing direction, or if everyone just agrees not to make a fuss about it?

comments

jack

Sauce Wars: Racism or not racism?