Is Dry January racist now?

For a moment, it almost seemed like there was an outbreak of sense at the New York Times, with a column entitled “Dry January Is Driving Me to Drink.”

The piece, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, an NYT columnist for the past three years, “known for her incisive essays on social problems,” begins by insisting that she is “happy” for people doing Dry January, but she won’t be joining them. Why? Because she likes a drink? Or because it’s performative? 

No,  because Dry January is in fact racist. She writes: 

Consumer-driven health campaigns that get this kind of traction do not happen in a vacuum. A broader modern temperance movement promoting “clean” living traffics in moral superiority and old racist ideas.

Without explaining, the piece moves on, arguing that “Cutesy individual solutions cannot solve big social problems, like alcoholism or cancer.”

Yup, you fool — why aren’t you curing cancer, like you said you would when you’d do Dry January!

The piece then returns again to racism. You see, the cult of “clean” living means, according to McMillan Cottom, that “someone somewhere is carrying the burden of being ‘dirty’… the idea of clean is not apolitical because ours is not a fair society.” (Parklife!)

“The clean anti-drinking influencers look very homogenous,” she writes, giving no examples and no evidence. “They are often white, able-bodied and conform to Western standards of beauty.”

It must be exhausting being Tressie McMillan Cottom

Is that true? The most influential fitness influencer in Britain at the moment is a black man: “Uncle” Eddie Abbew, who tells his four million followers to “wake the fuck up” and to “stop eating shit.”

McMillan Cottom — the author of Thick: And Other Essays — argues that the language of Dry January is problematic: “clean” and “natural” are morally “binary” words. She writes: “We have the power to circulate millions of aesthetically pleasing images about clean living that just so happen to promote white, upper-class ideals as the antidote to unhealthy cultural invaders.” That helped Trump get elected, apparently. 

It must be exhausting being Tressie McMillan Cottom. She finishes: “I reject the cultural politics of being clean and sober when I have never been dirty and I have never been an addict. If you push me on this, I am likely to drink a martini in protest.”

And that’s exactly what Cockburn needed upon finishing her column.