Eating Anti-Racist Candy

I was making myself a cozy drink — peach black tea — at National Review’s Virginia office when I noticed our kitchen had been restocked with new snacks. I immediately recognized one of the colorful boxes: Gushers.

I hadn’t eaten Gushers in years, maybe not since fourth grade. A black market operated in the school cafeteria, where kids bartered for Gushers. I participated in this illicit trade because my mother rarely bought candy, and she obstinately refused to buy anything with food coloring. (“Ah! It has blue,” my mom would say as she read the ingredient label when my brother and I nudged her to buy some unhealthy snack at the grocery store. She would place the box back on the shelves, mumbling something like “It’s just chemicals.” She wasn’t wrong, but children are always frustrated when they are denied the opportunity to eat poisonous treats.)

Preteen Abigail imagined that, once she was grown up, she would buy buckets of candy with her “adult money.” But that prediction was incorrect. At some point in high school or college, I naturally outgrew my sweet tooth. Weirdly enough, I’ve actually developed some sort of disgust reflex to sugary delights. Sometimes I read a dessert menu or see an image of some monstrous confection — like the Black Tap milkshakes that are covered in cookies and candy — and I just think, “Dear God, that seems awfully sweet.” On the rare occasions that I’m invited to parties, I tend to have just two or three bites of whatever cake is served, then put down my fork. The mere idea of eating a dessert that is slightly larger than a square of chocolate makes me feel heavy and ill.

But when I stared into the kitchen cabinets in NR’s office, I knew I had to have the Gushers — especially the blue ones, which children unanimously agree is the best flavor gummy in those flimsy little packets. Even though I could almost hear my mother scolding me for such a depraved indulgence, I wanted to see if they still tasted as delightful as I remembered them.

I got back to my desk, where I bit into the not-so-gushy gems, expecting some wave of euphoric nostalgia. But I was repulsed. They didn’t taste good at all. It was like eating a chewy sauce, entirely lacking in fruity fun. I wondered, “How could younger me have ever actually enjoyed this?”

Then, I had an uneasy feeling — and it wasn’t from the corn syrup or dye. I suddenly thought, “Wait, didn’t Gushers do something super woke a few years ago?” I started googling, and my hazy memory was confirmed. In June 2020, Gushers posted the following statement on social media:

Black Lives Matter. And so do Black voices.

We are devastated by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others who have been killed. We stand with those fighting for justice.

It’s important that our words match our actions. More to come.

We all have a long way to go in the fight against racism for systemic change.

The caption for the image with the statement said, “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voices. We’re working with [Fruit by the Foot] on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you.”

In retrospect, it’s a bit hilarious that a candy company committed itself to “the fight against racism” and claimed that its product was reliant on the “Black community.” However, revisiting this proclamation was also a sobering reminder of the absolute hysteria that dominated the West just a few years ago. Of course, I do know that virtually every institution was ideologically captured by ridiculous “antiracist” activism in 2020 (and for some time after), yet I have essentially blocked those miserable years out of my mind. Maybe that’s because the pandemic experience was somewhat traumatizing. Or maybe it is because I have difficulty really accepting that so many people were so delusional — even though I lived through it and saw it and heard it. I suffer from doublethink: Relics of the pandemic period are too absurd to be true, and yet I remember them.

As I ate the sickening candy and stared at the old Gushers social media post, I wished I had compiled some sort of document in the throes of the pandemic to record all the instances where businesses, institutions, and reputable figures endorsed the mania. Had I done so, the resulting archive would be an invaluable resource today, since many of those examples have been flushed down the whirring memory hole, while the people who caved to the Volunteer Stasi  — and condemned us for not yielding— now pretend they never did so.

We might prefer to forget the pandemic because it was such a depressing episode in each of our lives, but we should force ourselves to revisit what actually happened and have a reckoning. I think that, until there’s a real apology from the people who promulgated injurious policies and insidious ideas during the Great Awokening, the dissenters from that era will retain a deep resentment that precludes any sort of national reconciliation. Those of us who were demonized in 2020, sometimes at a great cost to our livelihoods, are (rather understandably) unwilling to just “move on and forget” what happened. The unexpected reminder that a manufacturer of sugary junk snacks submitted to the puritanical mob is proof that the DEI derangement was so culturally entrenched that virtually nothing — save a handful of expressly conservative institutions — was free from the ideological nonsense. We might want to console ourselves by saying “Maybe the pandemic wasn’t that bad.” But perhaps now there’s been enough time for recovery that we can admit, “Actually, it was worse than words can describe.”