r/AITAH • February 10, 2025 WokeBeans AITA for pretending to think beans in chili are “woke”, to prank my Cousin who is obsessed with being “anti woke” and who loves chili? My cousin is known for making chili. And he’s good at it. He makes his own chili flakes from his “secret combination” of various dried chilies, it has a very nice kick. It’s like the perfect amount of spice, it’s hot but not too hot. He also always adds kidney beans. Not canned beans either. Anyways for the past 2 or 3 years by Cousin has become obsessed with all this bullshit about what is or isn’t “woke” and how “woke” things are the end of the world. He’s always been a good dude so I don’t know what his bag is but he is completely obsessed. It’s annoying. So the other weekend I was at his place and he was making his famous chili. So I got the idea for a little prank. I was like “I’m surprised you still put beans in your chili.” He was like “What? Why?” I was like “Beans in chili are so woke. Everyone is saying so.” He was like “What do you mean?” And he was like genuinely concerned. As if this was something serious. I said something like “Yeah beans in chili are woke, the original conservative Texans who made chili only used meat and chili. San Francisco liberals started adding beans to chili in the 60’s because so many hippies were vegetarian. Now all the woke scientists are saying beans are a better protein source than meat.” He didn’t say anything to that. I kind of just assumed he’d know I was fucking with him and get the joke. We have always fucked around with each other and jokes about and all. But he was quiet all dinner. Just yesterday I was back again at his place and he was making his chili again. There were no beans. It was a totally different chili. This guy has been making his chili with beans for like 15 years. I was like, whats up? “Where’s the beans?” He was like “I don’t fuck with that woke shit.” I was like “What?” He was like “Beans in chili are woke. Even you know that.”
I realize this is funny. But there’s a dark risk to the mechanism of this type of social contagion.
Longman, T. (2020). Twenty Years after Leave None to Tell the Story, What Do We Now Know about the Genocide of the Tutsi In Rwanda?. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 2(2), 40-47. Retrieved Jan 2, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.7227/JHA.042
Subsequent research on the motivations of people who participated in the genocide has challenged the centrality of ideology as a key stimulus for violence. Two important texts in particular have suggested that most people did not kill out of hatred of the Tutsi but rather for a variety of other reasons. In Killing Neighbors, the late Lee Ann Fujii looked at the ways in which social networks drew individuals into participating in the killing in two local communities, one in Rwanda’s north, the other in the centre of the country. She argues that ethnic difference was not itself the cause of the violence but was a tool used by elites to divide the population and that local-level group dynamics influenced people to participate. She labels those who killed ‘joiners’, because they were motivated not primarily by a desire to kill Tutsi but by a desire to be fully part of the group that was taking part in the killing (Fujii, 2009).
(emphasis added)