Food and Multiculture by Alex Rhys-Taylor

Author:Alex Rhys-Taylor [Rhys-Taylor, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Agriculture & Food, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000181739
Google: cEQHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-12T03:50:40+00:00

Race (Over There)

Increasingly, the fried chicken takeaway offers both London’s urban technocrats and its majoritarian public a shorthand reference to a problematic inner-city working-class culture. As we will see, inextricable from that set of associations, are the ways in which the polyglot working-class culture of Britain’s major cities is approached as a ‘problem’ of race and ethnicity. This, however, is far from the first time in the history of fried chicken that the dish has become entangled in an assemblage of disgust, oppression and racialized social stratification. Rather, as the next few paragraphs’ brief trip across the Atlantic demonstrate, fried chicken has, for at least a century, been one of the most potent symbols of race, racism and anti-racism in the United States.

Arriving in the Americas by way of either Scottish settlers of the Apalachians (Mariani 2013: 305-306), English ‘tidewater settlers’ of Virginia (Fischer 1989: 351; Randolph 2004) or West African slaves (Opie 2013: 11, 18), fried chicken is intimately associated with the unique culture of North America’s southern states. Regardless of who introduced the fried bird to the continent, what is clear is that for much of its early history it was probably African women and their descendants that would have been cooking and adapting the dish (McWilliams 2012: 88-89). It was certainly women descended from slaves that are first recorded as pioneering fried chicken as a purchasable, mobile meal. It is, in fact, one particular woman, in Gordonstown, Virginia, who is credited with first vending fried chicken – in the days before dining cars – to passengers through the open windows of trains (Woodson 1990: 119). Once dining cars were introduced, fried chicken, easy to transport and eat on the go, was also purportedly a favoured meal for black Americans otherwise banned from the dining car (Mitchell 2009: 18).

These early entrepreneurial efforts are no doubt part of what tethered fried chicken to African-American culture. Such practices, however, evolved in tandem with a compendium of myths and accusations that circulated Jim Crow south about black Americans’ inherent propensity to steal poultry from their white masters. Lynchings were, in fact, routinely justified by their perpetrators following allegations of chicken theft (Smith and Walton 1899: 32; Ginzburg 1962: 93; Harrison and Perry 2001: 32). Perhaps most significantly, fried chicken itself featured prominently in D. W. Griffith’s seminal ‘white power’ film, Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915). There, in a carefully staged shot, the camera pans over a city hall full of black Americans, laughing, with their bare feet lounging on the desks. Finally, the camera comes to rest on a one particular man who is standing and laughing while chewing on a drumstick of fried chicken clutched in his fist. Above all the other ugly tropes deployed in Griffith’s film, a black man eating chicken with his hands in a place of work offered a particularly effective shortcut to his intended viewer’s sense of propriety and ethnic protectiveness. The unpropitious consumption of fried chicken was integral to how race was constructed to be, more than a visibly self-evident category, felt in the pit of the stomach.

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