Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Naa Oyo A. Kwate

Exposes and explores the prevalence of racist restaurant branding in the United States 

Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Race, American History

96 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2019

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burgers in Blackface explores racism and caricature in the United States through four horrible restaurants of the 20th century. Naa Oyo A. Kwate weaves together architecture shaped like Black people, old menus, recollections from local newspapers, and Yelp reviews from the two restaurants that still exist (why the hell do they still exist?!) into a discussion of how popular racism is used in commercial venues where Black people, servitude, and food are combined as nostalgic advertising, and sometimes the building itself is the advertising because it's shaped like a Black person. Kwate uses critical race theory to build her arguments, which is exciting because of this stupid, "Critical race theory is not taught to elementary school students" era that we live in, and I got to read a CRT text without resorting to that huge legal textbook that Raymond is reading. I keep buying Forerunners books because they are short and have interesting titles, and I'm glad that at least one of them is also good.

[audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great googly-moogly.

There is a lot to unpack here, mainly in the revelations that two of the four incredibly racist restaurants are still operating today, an indication of just how deeply America continues to be invested in anti-Black racism.

The four separate histories of the four restaurants are interesting reading by themselves, especially as Dr. Kwate pulls in the work of Drs Psyche A. Williams-Forson (Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power) and Angela Jill Cooley (To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South) as well as Yelp reviews.

(Is everyone else sleeping on the treasure trove of first-person accounts that are Yelp reviews? Genuine question. This is the first time I've seen them analyzed as part of research before.)

The restaurant histories themselves make for interesting reading, but the Conclusion, "The Spice of Racism", is an exceptional piece of superb critical insight.

Two of the restaurants profiled in this book (including the one still open in Natchez, MS) require patrons to enter the restaurant through a larger-than-life depiction of a Black body costumed in servitude.

That is fucked up.

Or, as Dr. Kwate puts it much more eloquently:

But perhaps by going inside the Black body, the White diner destroys it, as much as Neo destroys Agent Smith by diving inside him -- or at least appears to destroy Smith before Matrix Revolutions shows him to be altered rather than dead. Might then these restaurants set up the potential for the duality of being able to destroy the despised Black body at the same time as being fed? Or to express contempt for the servant who is metaphorically providing the food, by literally wiping one's feet on him or her?

Either way, the racial caricature people buildings make objects out of Black people.

A very interesting read that, at 80 scant pages, felt just right as a small bite (pun intended) of historical analysis, but also as if it could have been extended for many hundreds of pages in many directions.

[Rachael · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Spice of Racism describes so much. Short but potent book about racism in restaurant concept and design. I think the worst revelation from reading this is that two of the restaurants are still open and one just decided to change their name in 2020. Yeah, ridiculous but F6 folks love the spice of racism.
The last section of the book was the best because it delved into the why of that spice. The need to consume but also be consumed. The creation of spaces that purposely alienate, the hiding behind innocence and tradition (other terms for a lack of empathy and willful ignorance). This world is a mess. Anti-Blackness is worldwide.

[Gabriel H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise, engaging, deeply horrifying. One of the strongest parts of the book was its systematic unraveling of the dissembling white people do around obviously, incredibly racist things. Lots for me to think about, and some good further reading provided in the footnotes.

[Nicolas Lontel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une autre entrée intéressante dans la collection Forerunners: Ideas First de l'université du Minnesota où l'autrice analyse quatre cas de restaurants basant leur nom, leur design et leur menu sur des éléments de racisme anti-noir, que ce soit l'utilisation d'insultes ou de stéréotypes dans le nom du restaurant ou du menu, la présence de caricatures dans le design de restaurant ou l'imagerie.

Je pensais que l'essai aborderais plus largement la question du racisme dans la restauration, mais on se concentre vraiment juste sur quatre cas de restaurants (dont deux toujours en activité avec les mêmes problèmes) et on n'aborde pas vraiment d'autres enjeux (sinon que dans la conclusion qui fait vraiment "ouverture du sujet"). L'étude est toutefois précise, traçant en détail l'histoire du restaurant, la couverture médiatique, celle sur Internet (notamment sur Yelp), les justifications des restaurateurs, mais aussi expliquant en détail d'où viennent les éléments racistes, leurs histoires et pourquoi la déshumanisation des personnes Noires n'est pas "innocent, good-natured, and fun" et pourquoi ceux "who reject these images are seen as humorless at best and as mendacious, militant threats to the social order at worst" (p.17).

[Jennifer Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted more from this book, I think. It read much more like an essay than a well-researched book (though, to be fair, it did appear to be well-researched). It didn't flow well to me....and in the end there was a discussion that seemed to come out of left field a bit for me. But I read it specifically for the discussion of Sambo's- a restaurant my parents took me to in Bremerton sometimes on Sundays after church. I remember the child's menu had a cut-out mask you could put on..and i remember as a child thinking the story of Lil Black Sambo was great......a kid who made friends with a tiger....and someone gave him a pretty umbrella....and he walked around in the rain and talked to animals. In any case, the author spoke on Sambo's and a few other restaurants ...and about the concept of spaces where white people were "allowed" to openly consume black culture and put on black face as it were... Ugh...Children are so much better humans than adults are. Now every time i drive by that restaurant (now a Chinese restaurant), I cringe thinking my parents thought it was totally fine to take me there for a "treat".

[Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book that I think EVERYBODY should read.


It looks into the complicated histories of many food companies that Americans find themselves eating at. It does highlight some of the more well known places such as Denny’s but also talks about some that I was ignorant of. Many of these places have only one location that is being highlighted in this book. Whether it’s their origin of the restaurant, the name of the restaurant, or the building the restaurant operates in.

Once again I’d recommend this to everybody but especially black people should read this. I always feel people should be smart consumers and this book has helped me to become an even smarter consumer in what food chains I support and which ones I don’t.

[Sruthi Narayanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Aunt Jemima had already been successfully employed to sell pancake flour by suggesting that buyers could obtain the status of the plantation South (including Black labor) in a simple packaged mix; it was a slave in a box. ...Racist restaurants—their genesis and their persistence—constitute a racial project that normalizes racism by centering it in everyday consumption and making it a marketable good. By situating racism at the forefront of a space for children, families, and the pleasures of eating and sociability, racist restaurants seem to dare the citizenry to take up critique.”

Incisive and critical. The conclusion brings together so many necessary and multi-disciplinary threads from which to continue reckoning with this topic.

[Mikey · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is an unsettling history of America's restaurant industry capitalizing on the "spice of racism."

This short work focuses on four case studies:
- Sambo's
- Coon Chicken Inn
- Mammy's Cupboard
- Richard's Restaurant & Slave Market

These restaurants traded on depictions of black servitude in a variety of manners: naming, branding and even architecture. (One is located inside a 28-foot tally Mammy) However, the most unsettling aspect is that two of the restaurants are still in operation today!

[DW Rowlands · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, as you might imagine, an upsetting and depressing read. I am not sure which I was more horrified to discover: that the "Sambo's" restaurant chain existed in the first place, or that there's still a "Sambo's" restaurant in Santa Barbara and a "Mammy's Cupboard" restaurant in Natchez, Mississippi.