There are two kinds of posts on this website: the ones I labored over like they were going to be taught in a seminar someday, and the ones where I embed a strange little video with a title that looks like it was generated by a haunted search bar.
Guess which one Google decided it had opinions about.
In July, I posted a short video about the chocolate-covered marshmallow treats that have, in different places and at different times, been sold under names built out of racist caricatures. It was mostly a “huh, that is bleak” drive-by. Then it started showing up in the site’s search data next to queries like most racist snack, racist snack name, and the world’s most racist snack. Not huge numbers, exactly, but it is now one of the little site’s more persistent visitors. Apparently this is what the people need from taco ’bout it: snack-based colonial hangovers.
it’s a marshmallow, not an archival document
The treat itself is straightforward: a biscuit or wafer base, a whipped marshmallow-ish center, and a chocolate coating. Depending on where you are, a perfectly normal name exists for it: Schokokuss (“chocolate kiss”), Schaumkuss (“foam kiss”), or simply chocolate-coated marshmallow treat.
That is why the usual defense of “it’s just tradition” never quite works for me. Tradition is not a force of nature. It is a series of choices that people keep making because nobody has bothered to make a different one. We managed to put a marshmallow on a wafer and enrobe it in chocolate. Surely we can also call it a chocolate kiss without acting like someone has confiscated grandmother’s entire kitchen.
But the older names that linger in parts of Europe are where it gets ugly. Variants translated to “Moor’s head,” “Negro’s kiss,” and other terms that turn an actual racial category—or an old colonial fantasy of one—into a cute little product description. The point was not just “it’s brown because chocolate.” The imagery attached to those names did the rest: Blackness reduced to a cartoon head, a dark coating, a novelty.
the weird part is how small the fix is
No one is asking anyone to stop eating the thing. This is not a campaign against snacks, which would be both doomed and personally offensive to me. It is a request to stop using a name that makes a person’s identity into the punchline and then demanding everybody else treat the discomfort as an overreaction.
And the replacement names are not even bad. “Chocolate kiss” is kind of sweet. “Foam kiss” has the energy of a discontinued 1980s perfume, but it is still leagues better than making a confectionery aisle reenact colonial racism. The food is the same food. The recipe has not been silenced. Nothing has been erased except the part nobody needed.
There is a particular kind of nostalgia that mistakes familiarity for innocence. You grew up hearing a word, so it feels harmless; someone else hears the history packed into it, and suddenly the word is political. But it was already political. It just had the advantage of being old enough to pass as décor.
anyway, congratulations to the algorithm
So yes: the original video is a weirdly effective little piece of internet detritus. It points at something real, it has a title people are apparently compelled to type into a search engine, and now it has earned itself a follow-up post in which I get to say the obvious part out loud.
If you want the snack, have the snack. Just call it a snack. We are all capable of surviving a product rename, even if the internet’s search habits suggest we may never stop being fascinated by the phrase “racist marshmallow.”
Further reading: Swissinfo’s reporting on the Swiss debate and a 2019 study of media responses to the “Mohrenkopf” controversy.
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