Setting those matters aside, what struck me most in Wolf's overwrought account of an ultimately uneventful day in the city was her odd choice of words. Blue Bottle is mainly a grab-and-go chain; it has some eclectic seating, but it doesn't have a "lunch counter," words Wolf used three times. Her use of that anachronistic term was, quite obviously, designed to recall the bloody and courageous sit-ins at actual lunch counters in the early 1960s, most prominently at the Woolworths five-and-dime store in Greensboro, North Carolina, when four Black civil rights activists insisted on their right to be served despite the whites-only policy. … Jim Crow was indeed a tyrannical system designed to maintain Black people's status as second-class citizens. By invoking lunch counters, and referencing earlier moments in U.S. history with "forced separate accommodations" and "discriminatory rules," Wolf was brashly putting herself in the same league as the Greensboro Four, as well as Rosa Parks, who in 1955 famously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. … Later she would write that living in New York State during Covid had been "as if we were all living under Jim Crow laws."

XREF: Connects to arguments about aligning modern inconveniences with historical oppression, echoing critiques of inflation-flation language around fascism and slavery.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 821