White Burgers, Black Cash

Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation

Naa Oyo A. Kwate

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781452968780
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community

• James Beard Foundation: James Beard Media Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship — Winner
• Urban Affairs Association Best Book in Urban Affairs — Winner
• Association for Humanist Sociology Betty and McClung Lee Book Award — Winner
• Black Caucus of the American Library Association — Honor, Nonfiction category
• Museum of African American History Stone Book Award — Shortlist
• Business History Conference: Hagley Prize — Finalist
• Association for the Study of Food and Society: ASFS Book Award — Winner
• Society for the Study of Social Problems: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award — Winner
• Foreword: INDIES — Silver winner, History category

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through trgeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.

Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Deeply researched, compellingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in America’s popular national food tradition.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Time Line of American Fast Food Restaurants
• Introduction: How Did Fast Food Become Black?
• Part I: White Utopias
• Chapter 1. A Fortress of Whiteness: First-Generation Fast Food in the Early Twentieth Century
• Chapter 2. Inharmonious Food Groups: Burger Chateaux, Chicken Shacks, and Urban Renewal’s Attack on the Existential Threat of Blackness
• Chapter 3. Suburbs and Sundown Towns: The Rise of Second-Generation Fast Food
• Chapter 4. Freedom from Panic: American Myth and the Untenability of Black Space
• Chapter 5. Delinquents, Disorder, and Death: Racial Violence and Fast Food’s Growing Disrepute at Midcentury
• Part II: Racial Turnover
• Chapter 6. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: (Mis)Managing Racial Change and the Advent of Black Operators
• Chapter 7. To Banish, Boycott, or Bash?: Moderates and Militants Clash in Cleveland
• Chapter 8. Government Burgers: Federal Financing of Fast Food in the Ghetto
• Chapter 9. You’ve Got to Be In: Black Franchisors and Black Economic Power
• Part III: Black Catastrophe
• Chapter 10. Blaxploitation: Fast Food Stokes a New Urban Logic
• Chapter 11. PUSH and Pull: Black Advertising and Racial Covenants Fuel Fast Food Growth
• Chapter 12. Ghetto Wars: Fast Food Tussles for Profits amid Sufferation
• Chapter 13. Criminal Chicken: Perceptions of Deviant Black Consumption
• Chapter 14. 365 Black: A Racial Transformation Complete
• Conclusion: The Racial Costs
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author