Tag Archives: Black wealth

An Evening with Marcia Chatelain, Author of Franchise

Debbie says:

photo of Marcia Chatelain

Earlier this week, a friend and I went to hear Dr. Marcia Chatelain live at the JCCSF in San Francisco. Dr. Chatelain was there to talk about her new book … but that’s not why I wanted to hear her. I’m a regular listener to Undisclosed, a podcast about wrongful convictions. About two years ago, they did a very deep dive into the story of Freddie Gray, a young Black man who died in police custody in Baltimore in 2015.  I admired everything about this series, and came away wanting to know more about just about all of the people who created it: and Dr. Chatelain provided the historian’s perspective, offering much-needed context.

So when I saw she was speaking in San Francisco, I was delighted. But I didn’t think I was going to be especially interested in her topic, which was described loosely as something like “fast food in the Black community.”

When we got there, we saw the book–Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America—which already sounded more interesting. When Dr. Chatelain took the stage, accompanied by her friend and interviewer Dr. Brandi Thompson Summers, we soon learned that she specifically didn’t frame the book around fast food, but around the history of McDonald’s in the Black communities. I haven’t yet read the book, but here’s some of what I took away. Most of the rest of this is me paraphrasing some high points from the evening:

As Naomi Klein examines in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, large corporations are extremely adept at making money out of social chaos. In the wake of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, McDonald’s found its way into Black communities across America, offering franchise-owner opportunities to community members. While this was certainly a way out of poverty for some, Dr. Chatelain sees it also as a push away from beloved community, and toward individual entrepreneurship. One way you can tell that it worked is that McDonald’s franchise owners make up the single biggest group of Black millionaires in the United States.

Franchising is neither easy nor inexpensive. Franchise owners are responsible for most if not all of the costs of the franchise, plus fees to McDonald’s over and above the cost of the franchise itself. One audience member asked why these people didn’t quit and start their own franchising companies: because without the corporate name behind them, they can’t get the loans they need, or break the megacorp’s market share. As Dr. Chatelain said several times, McDonald’s is a real estate company–burgers and fries are a secondary income source. (Apparently, they are also the largest toy distributor in the world, because of Happy Meal prizes.)  And — no surprise here — somehow when the Black franchise owners wanted to add stores in White neighborhoods, somehow none were available, or affordable, or whatever the excuse was.

It’s the same old story: in an attempt to milk everything it could out of the Black community, McDonald’s positioned itself as a friend to that community: a job creator, an opportunity-builder, with well-tuned advertising and some sensitivity to the “market segment,” if none to the beloved community.

In the 21st century, business is rougher and times are hard for franchisees, who have higher costs and fewer options. Dr. Chatelain was a powerful voice first for the ability of people (especially Black people) to take creative paths through hardship, and second for a return to valuing community, family, activism, and resilience at least as highly as monetary reward for a few: not transmuting civil rights into “silver rights.”

The interview will air sometime in the future on Binah at radio station KALW in San Francisco, Thursdays at noon. Watch for it. Follow me on Twitter.

Black History Myths for Black History Month

Black people demonstrating against Jim Crow laws

Debbie says:

So much of the Black History Month flood of information is about specific people — heroes in various arenas — and as much as they deserve acclaim, this coverage can also focus attention on individual achievement and away from the pattern of racist ideas.

Jessica Machado and Karen Turner, writing at Vox, invited six Black scholars and historians to select and debunk myths about Black history, invoking Nikole Hanna-Jones’ groundbreaking 1619 Project and the necessity of hearing stories of Black Americans as told by Black people. The results are — at least to me — surprising.

Here are all six:

  • Shennette Garrett-Scott focuses on the myth that no slaves had money.
  • LaGarrett King corrects the misconception of “Black Patriots” during the American Revolutionary War (and in doing so, works with one of the more controversial positions of the 1619 Project–how much slavery affected and directed the course of that war).
  • Sowande Mustakeem reminds us that the subjects of the shameful Tuskegee experiments were not actually infected with syphilis by the white scientists.  Of course, Mustakeem does this without prettifying the horror of those experiments. “Both [the infected men and the control group] were withheld from treatment of any kind for the 40 years they were observed. The men were subjected to humiliating and often painfully invasive tests and experiments including spinal taps.”
  • Douglas J. Flowe wants us to understand that Black Americans did fight back against early Jim Crow America
  • Jason Allen reminds us that crack cocaine in the ghetto was by no means the largest drug crisis of the 1980s, regardless of how it is often described.
  • Dale Allender calls out the fact that not all Black Americans were slaves before emancipation, linking back to Dr. Garrett-Scott’s first myth.

I like the way these span over 200 years of American history and vary from being about small groups of people to widespread social phenomena. With the awareness that I’m adding a White voice to an intentionally Black article, here are a couple of additional thoughts:

Dr. Allender’s concern that many people think all Blacks were enslaved until Abraham Lincoln freed (only) the slaves in the seceded states says a lot about how simplistic our concept of slavery is. He says “In reality, free Black and Black-white biracial communities existed in states such as Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio well before abolition. ” He doesn’t mention the phrase “free people of color”: especially in Louisiana (and some of the West Indies), thriving societies lived under this name. New Orleans even has a museum devoted to them.

Like Dr. Allender, Dr. Flowe is pushing against simplistic notions of history.

For New Negroes, the comparatively tame efforts of groups like the NAACP were not urgent enough. Most notably, they defended themselves fiercely nationwide during the bloodshed of the Red Summer of 1919 when whites attacked African Americans in multiple cities across the country. Whites may have initiated most race riots in the early Jim Crow era, but some also happened as Black people rejected the limitations placed on their life, leisure, and labor, and when they refused to fold under the weight of white supremacy. The magnitude of racial and state violence often came down upon Black people who defended themselves from police and citizens, but that did not stop some from sparking personal and collective insurrections.

My only complaint about the Vox article is that each segment is too short. I wish each of these historians had the space to write a full article about the myth they chose to explode, and I would also love to see what six — or 60 — more Black thinkers selected as other myths to undercut.