How out of touch is the New York Times? Undoubtedly its editors and writers are as acquainted with Brahmin culture centered in major East and West Coast cities, but this is really no great achievement.  You don’t need to live in New York City for the Brahmin reverence to filter into your own culture stream. Here in flyover country, and yes I’ve heard that term uttered with the sincerest venom, it isn’t difficult to receive the impression that one does not go to the Midwest so much as one gets stuck in the Midwest. You only need contradict a SWPL’s vision of society, and let it be known that you don’t come from either of the Coasts, to quickly find that, whatever else might be said about equality, the City Folk utterly loathe the ignorant Country Folk.

It was of little surprised to find that the New York Times would, in putting together a list of traditional Thanksgiving sides particular to each state, completely flub the Minnesota entry. I first heard surprise from local radio hosts at both the Minnesota Public Radio’s alternative station and the contemporary Christian music station; Minnesotans are quite aghast to find that our traditional Thanksgiving side is not wild rice hotdish (hotdish, not casserole), pickled herring, lefse, bundt cake, jello salad, or even tater tot hotdish. No, we find that according to the New York Times the traditional side is grape salad, at least according to a “Minnesota-born heiress,” i.e. some stupid rich girl who probably spends more time vacationing in Europe than in Minneapolis. Even NPR has weighed in on the controversy in its typical missing-the-forest-for-the-trees style; the issue has spun off a thriving Twitter hashtag, #grapegate.

I may be Minnesotan born-and-raised, but I must admit a fair amount of schadenfreude in the affair. Minnesota is effectively the bluest Midwestern state, a Brahmin colony of Scandinavian and German farmers settled mostly in the late 19^th century. The state’s demographics are roughly 85% white, easily 90%+ outside the Twin Cities. Yet despite pledging the most earnest support of Progress, the Great White North seemed to completely escape the serious attention of the who’s whose of the Grey Lady, being thought not substantially different from the truly provincial red tribers you find in, God forbid, the Dakotas.

This is the New York Times, a bastion of the holy dogma of multiculturalism, and they can’t even understand the cultural nuances of their geographically removed fellow Brahmins. Let’s be clear about this; Minnesota is ruled by Brahmins. During the worst snow storm last winter, the snow and ice weren’t removed from the major highways for nearly a week. However, they did manage to clear the snow from the bike paths quite nimbly. Given that, it shouldn’t be surprising that Minneapolis has been considered the gayest city in America.

It is always fascinating to observe the illusion of a unified, continuous American culture be disrupted by cultural misunderstanding. Even the idea of the New York Times deciding for each individual state what it’s traditional Thanksgiving side dish is, in retrospect, seems flagrantly presumptuous. Did they think to, say, simply consult with local cultural authorities? Or, as is more likely, did the writers consult people they already knew, such as Minnesota-born heiresses who couldn’t be a less representative example of local Minnesota culture? And no, having once heard Garrison Keillor on the radio does not make you an expert on anything Minnesotan, unless you’re meaning to refer to Lutheran, by which I mean Brahmin, Minnesotans.

Multiculturalism is hard. It only seems to work provided one never actually tries to interact with someone from another culture in any significant way. Having difficulty getting your order understood by Mexican immigrants at McDonald’s is only the most superficial example of cultural miscommunication. It is only when someone presumes to speak for your culture, even when you didn’t previously perceive any cultural differentiation that it becomes noticeably irksome. The Twitter POC feminists are on to something in denouncing the presumption of white feminists to speak for them; whatever other disagreements about the inanities of Internet social justice you might have, they are on to a legitimate point. The New York Times could not successfully represent Minnesotan culture, but they obviously didn’t even consider a quick Google search.

The logic of identity politics is fundamentally unstable. A politician with the remotest connection to an identity will exploit it to the fullest they are able to. This isn’t a new development in American democratic politics. How many politicians of Irish background rode that into office, leveraging the Irish-American identity for power despite having not even the least pretense of actual identification with the working class Irish? Does anyone really believe that Obama genuinely sympathizes with blacks, or that Joe Biden identifies with the blue collar workers of Scranton, or that Hillary Clinton can speak for mothers, or that Bush II represents Christians, or that JFK was legitimately Catholic? Tumblr is not the foundation of identity politics, only its clearest manifestation. Identity has become something to leverage, only one more means of gaining access to power. Culture is consumed, not created or preserved, and anyone who rabbles about wanting to be left alone to form their own culture is automatically suspect. Culture formation and exposition is the right of your betters; listen and believe.