Is milk racist?

I was tired when I went to see Milk at the Wellcome Collection, having been up for much of the night feeding my baby. In European and Christian imagery, one sign said, ‘a lactating woman often represents fertility, charity and abundance’, but I was not feeling full of the milk of human kindness. Nor was I in the mood to be lectured about the evils of feeding children milk.

As it turned out, this wasn’t really a show about milky motherhood. Cows and women produce milk but it’s unfashionable to dwell too much on that detail. The exhibition has a few sculptures of women; mostly they are headless. A massive black udder greets visitors as they arrive, but the focus of the show is on milk as a ‘highly politicised liquid’. It quickly becomes a talking-to on the naughty step about why we must wean ourselves off capitalism’s teat.

Milk is pure, white and strength-giving, so, as the exhibition spells out at every possible opportunity: milk is pure white power. There’s a video of a group of thick, white, Trump-supporting neo-Nazis downing flagons of milk to help make the point. What’s more, motherhood being symbolic of innocence and goodness is, we are told, a European concept, and a racist one at that. Never mind that women from all races and cultures produce milk and nurture their young with it.

For a supposedly scientific show about milk, there is startlingly little explanation as to why milk (both human and dairy) might have been so crucial to human development. Which it clearly is, or why else would bodybuilders still be obsessed with getting hold of the good stuff? More on that shortly.

Instead, the show points out that two thirds of the world’s population struggle to digest milk and western power is built on the ability of white Europeans and Americans to do so.