By Dot Armstrong
At the risk of sounding gauche, I’m about to drag the remnants of a lengthy Facebook screed into this column. The subject in question: a certain purveyor of Asian-inspired eats recently opened in downtown. You may have caught a whiff of controversy on social media shortly after Dumpling Darling secured a storefront on Iowa Avenue. All well and good. The Internet exists as a vector for discourse; dialogue is key to a functioning society. I am the last person to object when opinions are aired in the public sphere — if I couldn’t say that, I wouldn’t be published here. But after scrolling through a thicket of thorny rhetoric, my naïve enthusiasm for discussion was replaced by disgust.
Full disclosure: I worked for Dumpling Darling once at a festival. But this does not affect my general opinion of this matter. The complaint: Dumpling Darling, a restaurant started by well-traveled white folks, ought not to thrive. Such a culinary experiment is somewhat of an appropriative scandal that quashes and diminishes people of color, thus reinforcing white supremacist structures.
The rebuttal: Culture is inherently appropriative; demarcating boundaries of authenticity and inauthenticity is a futile exercise. Former slogans were altered (“Made by a Blonde in Iowa” became “Dumplings From Around the World”) to more accurately reflect the mission of the restaurant, which is to offer an exciting and accessible reimagining of many international cuisines.
I’m offering a charitable restaging of certain key points. If you’re interested in retracing the debate, I invite you to investigate it at its native site. My point lies elsewhere. I’m concerned with the way folks express their opinions rather than the opinions themselves, at least for the moment.
As you might imagine, discourse turned into discord. Both sides made valid observations. One side, however, proceeded to lose all semblances of civility in short order. The radically progressive arguments against Dumpling Darling grew vicious, personal, and messy as folks retreated into ossified ideas and ideologies. What irony.
Dialogue doesn’t happen when we stop listening to each other. When we cease to care what the counterpoint to our observation will be, we begin shouting into an echo chamber. We begin leading a sing-along with our sympathizers. We begin preaching to the proverbial choir.
Such futile exercises put the reputation of decent business owners in jeopardy, damning them to eternal renditions of hackneyed postcolonial discourses calculated to do more deconstruction than good. My objections are directed toward the myopic, misanthropic tenor of this criticism, the way certain theoretical lenses can be used to burn holes rather than magnify. This is tribalism; this is the stuff of right-wing demagoguery.
Do folks just need to rant, to rage, to pick on people? The offending slogan was altered; the owner herself waded into the hot mess of comments to offer an articulate apology complete with overtures for real dialogue — you know, face-to-face.
Which is, to be honest, where more of these discussions ought to take place. Facebook is too safe. Theories are too safe. The destruction wrought by so-called social-justice warriors and their ilk creates naught but toxic opposition in the weird non-space of the Internet. This is an impotent situation. Pick apart the world again, you critics, if you must — show me the rampant injustice, the inequality, the misrepresentation — but do be so kind as to put some of it back together before you log off.
