For Coffee and DIE

My morning routine is fairly stable.

Wake up. Sort of. Perform whatever biological function seems most urgent. Stagger downstairs and attempt to get the coffee pod in the machine the right way round.

A splash of double cream (which is, more or less, heavy cream in US speak) and a very careful walk to the computer, cup in hand.

After the 17th attempt to type the password in correctly I’m good to go, and settle down to enjoy the coffee and to see what crazy the world has saved up for me in the last 24 hours.

Consciousness and thought begin to kick in as the caffeine does its job. And by the time I’m heading to the kitchen for cup number 2, I’m starting to resemble something more human than zombie.

I really need the coffee when looking at my Twitter feed. It’s a daily ordeal of trying to figure out whether the stuff I’m reading about is actually real or just some grotesque parody.

This morning was no exception.

Has to be a fake headline, right? I mean, even without coffee it looks decidedly suspicious. Another send up of the woketards.

It’s real - and written by an organisation called AFRU. I read the ‘about’ section on the website and my takeaway was that they were doing activism of some sort by promoting fashion. Something like that.

It’s a fascinating article and well worth a read - if only for the deep belly laughs. It’s the usual deranged concoction of over-interpreted and skewed history mixed in with a heavy splash of double woke with steamed CRT.

We are told in a quote from Urnex (a manufacturer of coffee equipment apparently) that

White supremacy is built into the foundation of the coffee industry. The global coffee economy was created through colonialism, the white supremacist system under which European countries invaded, subjugated, and exploited the countries of Black and Brown people. After Dutch spies stole coffee from Africa, Europeans forced Black and Indigenous people into slavery to grow it on colonized land.

I now have this image of a bunch of black-clad 17th century Dutch special forces on a daring raid to steal the secret of coffee as they attempt to penetrate the highly fortified and secure coffee farms of Africa.

Two members of this crack squad of Dutch operatives meet for breakfast

Hans : what are you drinking with your stroopwafel?
Evert : it’s either water or Rochefort Triple
Hans : go with the water - the last time you had the Rochefort this early in the day you stabbed the CO in the foot
Evert : I know. I just wish there was some hot, bitter, drink that woke me up in the morning
Hans : Funny you should mention that. Our spy just got back from Africa.

The article mentions how coffee was “viciously” stolen.

Every facet of the coffee industry, in fact, is rooted in racism. From the moment the whites viciously stole coffee from Black and Brown People to the present-day Karen sipping her morning cup of white supremacy, whites have been able to drink the fruits of our labor and our culture with impunity.

Is the crime of vicious stealing worse than merely stealing, I wonder?

It was all the rage, apparently.

Us hapless whiteys were just fed up existing on bread and gruel and so we colonized the world to find something tasty to eat.

It’s a well-known fact that whites would be eating bland food, like plain bread and gruel, if it weren’t for their theft of culinary secrets from people of color, and especially Black folks. That’s precisely why when the whites found out about coffee, it became one of the reasons they decided to victimize and appropriate Black civilization wholesale.

The reason for colonization, then, wasn’t racism. No, it was because, at the time, there were no Michelin starred restaurants in the whole of Europe. They were mostly in places like Africa where culinary, and tasty, delights were routinely served.

The exploitation of the world by the evil whitey wasn’t about racism. It was about diet.

Unfortunately the innate genius of blackness could not match the rabid ferocity of the witless whiteys as they invaded and took over places they had no business being.

There’s nothing more important to Black folks than learning more about their rich history and embracing the unequalled creativity and genius of their Blackness.

Wakanda, at the time, was still maintaining its separatist, hidden, status and did not come to the aid of other black nations and tribes as their culinary secrets were ruthlessly stolen.

. . . coffee was an important, almost religious, part of Black culture going as far back as the 1400s in Ethiopia. After the whites got the first sip of the Black delicacy, they brutally enslaved people of color to keep up with demand, turning a ritualistic drink into another consumer product in the colonial capitalist machine

We just can’t help trying to make a buck (or a Starbuck or two). Bloody capitalists.

If you take the basic ‘product’ and use it as a springboard for creativity and inspiration by, say, making “speciality coffee” - you’re still guilty as charged

If you think coffee culture can find refuge in specialty coffee, think again. This might be obvious to some, but I’ll spell it out for the folks in the back: the bourgeois notion of “specialty coffee” is explicitly rooted in classism, which is directly linked to racism

There’s just no diversity in coffee - it has to be drunk one way and one way only. Drinking it any other way is just racist. Drinking it at all is also racist (if you’re one of those nasty whiteys).

Just when you think it’s all over, and your stomach cramps from laughing at this absurd woke screed are beginning to subside, they hit you with the sucker punch

Unfortunately, coffee is not the only racist drink on the market. Milk also became racist after white supremacists began using the white drink as a symbol of their skin. Yes, racist roots in the coffee industry are certainly much deeper, but the whiteness of milk and milk’s devastating effects on the beautiful Black body makes it almost as bad as coffee for some Black people.

Stick to bread, gruel and water you nasty whitey - it’s all you deserve.

There’s much more in the article - almost every paragraph is a comedic gem that, surely, must have been lifted from the Babylon Bee.

So I was wrong. I though the noble POAH’s (persons of alternative hue) were colonized and enslaved to impose the white supremacist sex binary on the world.

Turns out it was just because our diet was shit.