Franchise - Textual Relations July 2021 Reading

[Falselogic]

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain is a 2020 non-fiction book and 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner. That relates A nuanced account of the complicated role the fast-food industry plays in African-American communities, a portrait of race and capitalism that masterfully illustrates how the fight for civil rights has been intertwined with the fate of Black businesses.

From the Publisher:

An estimated one-third of all American adults eats something from at a fast-food restaurant every day. Millions start their mornings with paper-wrapped English muffin breakfast sandwiches, order burritos hastily secured in foil for lunch, and end their evenings with extravalue dinners consumed in cars. But while people of all ages and backgrounds enjoy and depend on fast food, it does not mean the same thing to each of us. For African Americans, as acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain reveals in Franchise, fast food is a source of both despair and power—and a battlefield on which the fight for racial justice has been waged since the 1960s.

On the one hand, we rightly blame fast food for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, and fast food restaurants are viewed as symbols of capitalism’s disastrous effects on our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Yet at the same time, Chatelain shows, fast food companies, and McDonald’s in particular, have represented a source of economic opportunity and political power. After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, many activists turned to entrepreneurship as the means to achieving equality. Civil rights leaders, fast food companies, black capitalists, celebrities, and federal bureaucrats began an unlikely collaboration, in the belief that the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their own neighborhoods, could improve the quality of black life.

Equipped with federal loans and utterly committed to the urban centers in which they would open their little sites of hope, black franchise pioneers achieved remarkable success, and by the late 2000s, black-franchised McDonald’s restaurants reported total sales exceeding $2 billion. Fast food represented an opportunity for strivers who had been shut out of many industries, denied promotions in those that would tolerate them, and discouraged, in numerous ways, from starting their own businesses, all because of the color of their skin. But a parallel story emerged, too—of wealth being extracted from black communities, of the ravages of fast food diets, of minumum wage jobs with little prospect for advancement.

Taking us from the first McDonald’s drive-in in San Bernardino in the 1940s to civil rights protests at franchises in the American South in the 1960s and the McDonald’s on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson in the summer 2014, Chatelain charts how the fight for racial justice is intertwined with the fate of black businesses. Deeply researched and brilliantly told, Franchise is an essential story of race and capitalism in America.

About the Author:

Marcia Chatelain is a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University, and is a leading public voice on the history of race, education, and food culture. The author of South Side Girls, Chatelain lives in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University. She has appeared on local and national television outlets including C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, BBC America, and PBS. She appeared in the 2019, Stanley Nelson documentary, “ Boss: The Black Experience in Business.” She has hosted "Office Hours: A Podcast," in which she talks to students about the issues most important to them. In 2017 she joined the team of "Undisclosed," a podcast featuring a 16-episode arc about the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015. She is also former host of the Slate podcast, “ The Waves,” a bi-weekly show that covers feminism, gender, and popular culture. She has won several teaching awards at Georgetown, where she also has served on its Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. During the 2017–2018 academic year she was on leave as a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow. She has also been awarded an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the New America Foundation. Most recently, she has been named a Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

 

[Egarwaen]

I’ve just finished the first chapter and it’s a captivating read. As with - I expect - most children of the 80s, fast food was an omnipresent fixture in my childhood, albeit an oddly constrained one due to my food allergies. And MLK was a frequent (if sanitized) topic of my schooling. The way Dr Chatelain ties the two together while pulling back the mythology and unearthing the details on both is fascinating.

 

[Egarwaen]

Finished chapter 3!

... Not much to say about chapter 2; it really feels like it was spending most of its time laying pipe for later chapters, and didn't really have anything interesting on its own.

Chapter 3, though, was very much "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Spoiler: Chapter 3

I love the amount of detail Dr. Chatelain gives to the OCU boycott and, in particular, why it was effective and why McDonalds found it to be such a threat. She did a good job of approaching some of the more questionable organizers with skepticism, while still showing sympathy towards the broader goals of the protest movement. She carefully considers how propaganda may have not only exaggerated the organizers' flaws, but pushed them into increasingly extreme positions. The post-boycott prosecution of David Hill, which portrayed protest and boycott as "blackmail" and "violence", was especially enlightening, since the same tactics are still rolled out against progressive organizers.

 

[Violentvixen]

I read Fast Food Nation back when it came out but I'm really excited for the perspective this sounds like it will have. Have a couple other books to finish up first so I'll probably be hopping into this one later in the month.

 

[Egarwaen]

Almost done chapter 4 and it's doing a fantastic job of taking a balanced, skeptical look at both radical and establishment positions.

 

[Egarwaen]

That... Was a lot of information.

 

[Violentvixen]

Finally started this today. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

However, I have a dumb informal poll for everyone: Do you consider burritos fast food? Because when it was listed as part of fast food it gave my pause. But I think I mainly get them from small shops that aren't fast food, I kind of needed the book to remind me Taco Bell existed...

 

[Egarwaen]

They’re definitely among the foodstuffs that have been assumed into the fast food repertoire; Chipotle and Taco Bell at least. I can’t eat much fast food due to allergies so my familiarity is mostly secondhand.

I don’t think they’re that different in that regard from burgers, where you’ve got the Whopper or Big Mac, much nicer fare from midrange grills, and even upscale gourmet burgers… But if you say “burger” and are talking about restaurants without qualification, most people will assume you’re talking about fast food.

 

[Falselogic]

The burritos I pick up from taquerias and those I pick up from Del Taco, Taco Bell, or Chipotle while similar in ingredients and form are two entirely different categories in my head.

 

[Violentvixen]

I don’t think they’re that different in that regard from burgers, where you’ve got the Whopper or Big Mac, much nicer fare from midrange grills, and even upscale gourmet burgers… But if you say “burger” and are talking about restaurants without qualification, most people will assume you’re talking about fast food.

Yeah, I think that's what was making this get stuck in my head. "Burger" generally makes me think of fast food while "burrito" isn't an obvious one for me.

 

[Violentvixen]

... Not much to say about chapter 2; it really feels like it was spending most of its time laying pipe for later chapters, and didn't really have anything interesting on its own.

Chapter 3, though, was very much "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Spoiler: Chapter 3

I love the amount of detail Dr. Chatelain gives to the OCU boycott and, in particular, why it was effective and why McDonalds found it to be such a threat. She did a good job of approaching some of the more questionable organizers with skepticism, while still showing sympathy towards the broader goals of the protest movement. She carefully considers how propaganda may have not only exaggerated the organizers' flaws, but pushed them into increasingly extreme positions. The post-boycott prosecution of David Hill, which portrayed protest and boycott as "blackmail" and "violence", was especially enlightening, since the same tactics are still rolled out against progressive organizers.

I just hit this mark too and agree on all counts. Two was honestly a slog, but as you said a lot of the things covered feel like they'll be relevant.

Economics has never ever been my thing, I really struggle with some of the most general concepts and find it really hard to pay attention to and follow. I thought the general ideas of the Black Capitalism movement were interesting but even after reading chapters two and three I still don't know how well I could explain it to anyone.

At this point I kind of wish there was a magazine-article length version of this book. There's just a LOT of detail and information and I get lost a lot. I think that is just me and my trouble with economics-based information, but this book is a struggle for me.

 

[Egarwaen]

I think the most interesting element of the book was the contrast between the direct action in Cleveland and Portland. The Cleveland boycott was far more effective, and as a result the organizer - who may or may not have been running several side hustles - was demonized and criminalized. The establishment figures that could’ve steered the boycott in a productive direction for the community instead got theirs and got out.

In Portland, on the other hand, the boycott… Was mostly effective despite someone (possibly the cops) blowing up one of the outlets. The organizers didn’t tone down their demands, but also weren’t undermined by local authorities and were willing to accept compromises.

Today boycotts mostly don’t matter. Part of that is that companies have gotten much more effective at dismantling them, but I think there’s also an element of self-sabotage. I can’t think of the last boycott I heard of that had clearly articulated and achievable demands.