Was wondering when this was gonna get here.
There was a passage in the original article (and the alt-weekly that ran it has gotten in a
lot of recent trouble with the food & service industries for awhile now for their content) that featured the two women in question describing themselves as more or less shaking down the women in the small town they were visiting, and when they were denied more detailed recipes, they described peeking through the windows of these women as they made their tortillas to watch and take notes on what they were doing and how they were doing it.
That was the passage that had people essentially responding along the lines of "
what the fuck you were peeping in these old women's fucking windows and
you're bragging on it as a means to make your pop-up foodcart sound more authentic?"
From there the comments & facebooks started filling up with (mostly) peeved and miffed white men & women upset that people of color in the city thought that sort of behavior was suspect. (A senior editor at that alt-weekly was, at one point, all on his facebook page misunderstanding the term "drag" and trying to suggest that people were using it as a death threat by way of referencing Matthew Shepard)
Once the phrase "cultural appropriation" was broached and then dropped into the mix, it was more or less open season. The "fight" went from 0-to-"
Yeah well my people invented the printing press so your being able to communicate in text is cultural appropriation" in a fuckin' hurry.
In the midst of all this, the women, who basically got hung out to dry by the writer/editor of the alt-weekly, decided this attention wasn't worth their fledgling pop-up (it wasn't even their own foodcart, they were just guesting at someone elses for a little while) and closed up shop.
After they had closed, A Fox News affiliate discovered an op-ed for the paper
I work at, written by a black woman who went in
hard on our very white city's weird attitudes about race, especially as it pertains to Portland's very well known food scene, and once Fox found it, the Blaze found it, and once the Blaze found it, shit was off to the fuckin' races.
The best piece I've seen on this whole thing since was actually a roundtable discussion at Uproxx.
It's very long, but also very well thought out.