In the past year or so, three new hot chicken franchises have opened in our neighborhood, joining another hot chicken joint that was founded here in Oakland and that survived the pandemic — so many restaurants did not — and that's grown into a regional chain itself. These aren't the only places in the neighborhood that serve fried chicken — hot or not: there's a new Shake Shack on the corner, and a new burger pop-up a couple of blocks away. Developers and restauranteurs have done the research, I guess, and determined that this part of The Town will eat a lot of fried chicken. I've long marveled at this — I mean, that's a lot of hot chicken to sell to keep every business afloat — but hadn't thought too much about hot chicken in terms of the history of red-lining, gentrification, and dining-out. That is to say, I hadn't thought much about the very racist history of fast food.
Naa Oyo A. Kwate's White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation chronicles just that. It is an incredibly well-researched book that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the politics and history of food, urban space, and socioeconomic policy. It traces the foundations of "fast food" and these early restaurants performance of whiteness and cleanliness through the early twentieth century ("White Castle" anyone?) — the refusal of franchises to open in Black neighborhoods, to employ Black workers, or to feed Black customers — through to the 1960s, when the government and some civil rights leaders saw fast food franchises as a way to placate the Black community and encourage (a certain kind of) entrepreneurship, and on to our contemporary panic about obesity, one that blames Black people for choosing to eat fast food, which, thanks to all this history, is all too often the only food and certainly the cheapest food for sale in poor neighborhoods, as franchises and urban development have largely displaced locally-owned Black restaurants and grocery stores. (It’s “food apartheid,” not “food desert.”)
"Over the course of the twentieth century, fast food has always been racialized," Kwate writes, "shifting from Whiteness to Blackness, differentially allocating access to itself—as social resource for consumers, as material resources for franchisees — and to other resources. Each generation of the product has relied on and deployed racial schemas, always anti-Black though varying in form. In doing so, fast food made existing racial tropes part and parcel of its relationship to American consumers and communities, perpetuated racialized labor hierarchies within its organizations, and capitalized on and reproduced urban disinvestment."
This book reminds us that when the industry touts how American its way of eating is, we should nod along and say yes indeed, the racist history of fast food is very much the racist history of this country.
