Southern California has historically been ground zero for fast food brands. It's where many chains, from McDonald's and In & Out to Taco Bell and Jack In The Box, got their start. These success stories are often framed as shining examples of American opportunity and entrepreneurialism. But fast food franchises tend to be clustered in Black communities — and that isn't exactly ideal. In fact, their presence often deepens socioeconomic divides and leads to exploitation.
In White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, writer and interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Naa Oyo A. Kwate unpacks the relationship between fast food restaurants and Black communities.
Evan Kleiman: Tell us about your background and what drew you to this topic.
Naa Oyo Kwate: You wouldn't necessarily know from reading the book but I'm a psychologist by training. I went to grad school to study clinical psychology with every intention of coming out on the other side as a practicing clinician that would work with primarily African American children and their families, and also other other youth living in central cities.
Basically what happened was, as I was doing my training and having these clinical placements in large city hospitals, I was in New York City, the burden of chronic illness was really staggering. All of the children had asthma. The caregivers had any number of different chronic issues from heart disease, diabetes, and so on. I got really interested in trying to understand how people came to be ill in the first place and also expanding from solely mental illness, which is what I was being trained to treat, to overall health. So I became interested in understanding racial and socioeconomic inequalities and how those contributed to health.
One of the things that I began to study was fast food, in terms of the exposure that you could see in Black communities. In New York City, if you walk anywhere through any number of black neighborhoods, you can see the density of fast food. My colleagues and I did a study where we looked at the density of fast food across the five boroughs of New York City. We got a big list of hundreds of restaurants, plotted them out in space, and then what we could see was that when you looked at the relationship between census demographics, the percentage of Black residents was the biggest predictor by far of where fast food was, and it wasn't about income. People often assume that if fast food is more prevalent in black neighborhoods, it's because those neighborhoods tend to have lower incomes. But it wasn't income in our study at all. It was really being driven by race.
From that study, in addition to some other ones, but primarily that study, it led me to begin this project of trying to understand how those patterns came to pass. Why was fast food so dense in black neighborhoods? How did that happen when it started out as a very much white-focused enterprise?
Studying to be a clinical psychologist, Naa Oyo Kwate shifted her focus to explore chronic illnesses in African American families and children. Photo by Cobbina Frempong.
So interesting and horrifying. You dedicate a chapter to what you call first-generation fast food. What exactly is that? And what period of time does it refer to?
The first generation of fast food really starts in the early 1900s. The book is tracing this story from the early 1900s to the present and the birth of the first generation fell within what is termed the "nadir of race relations." The early part of that is from the end of the Civil War, really, and lasting to the 1930s. But the first generation of fast food really began in the early 1900s.
These were restaurants that included what I call the burger chateau, because many of them were fashioned after castles, White Castle being the main one in that group. It was White Castle and then other kinds of knockoffs, like White Tower and Little Tavern. They all started out serving a kind of working man population, and they were all in urban centers. They were on street corners, near transit stops and trams and so on. They were basic, simple food for the working man. And it really was the man, because they came late to trying to attract women as customers. It was just a simple meal. Come get a burger after work and keep it moving.
The first generation of fast food was different from the second generation, which emerged in the 1950s and instead of being in the center of cities, they were in the suburbs. That's where you get the McDonald's, the Burger Kings, the KFCs. They really started several decades after the first generation.
How did it morph from being simply a working man's quick meal solution for dinner to being more pervasive and embedded as a familial choice of going out to dinner?
It's an interesting transition because even when those restaurants began, hamburgers were not something that most people were necessarily inclined to eat because there were a lot of food safety concerns at this time. For example, Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle was published in 1906 and he's reporting on the dire conditions of the stockyards and the meat packing houses of Chicago. So there are a lot of food safety concerns. The Pure Food and Drug Act gets passed after the release of his book. The people who were starting these burger chains had a lot of work to do to convince customers that this was safe food, this was healthy, you weren't going to be poisoned or killed by eating this food.
That's part of why you see all of these, these literally white restaurants, because they were trying to signify the purity of the food. You have white tile, everything's shiny and clean, and that was all supposed to be testament to the quality and safety of the food there. But it was also more than that because in having "white" in the name, white architecture, white design, everything, they're also holding out this pristine kind of unsullied social whiteness in the dining experience.
After a couple of decades of that, it now shifts as white residents from the city are fleeing the city and going to the suburbs, being funded by federal programs that made that possible. So as white residents are leaving central cities, a lot of retail and other businesses are going out there with them. As they do that, fast food is also transforming. It's now being pitched to not just working people but to families and the purity of the whiteness is really about white domestic space and the sanctity of the suburbs and a wholesome, happy kind of environment for white moms and their kids. Now second-generation food is not just about basic fuel to keep the body going, now it's really about fun and providing something entertaining for children and families.
Tell us how redlining played a role in where fast food brands chose to open or not. And perhaps you could explain redlining for anyone who doesn't already know what it is.
Redlining refers to the withholding of capital, of loans for residences and also for businesses. It could be for either a family or an individual trying to buy a home. It could also be for renovating a home that already exists. It could be for businesses that are trying to get lending. The Homeowners Loan Corporation created maps where they indicated the risk assessment for different kinds of communities. They used coloring to indicate what was the risk profile for each space. Green was the best community and red was given to communities that they saw as the highest risk or the worst. Invariably, those would be spaces with Black residents — and not only black people, it was also areas with high numbers of immigrants. They also used redlining for areas with high industrial use and other kinds of spaces. It wasn't only for Black residents but Black neighborhoods invariably were red.
That meant that those were areas where you couldn't get lending so you wouldn't be able to buy a home, you wouldn't be able to renovate your home, and so on. What ends up happening is that as redlining begins to curtail investment in central cities, and again, with residents and businesses moving out to the suburbs, that meant that the center city was becoming cheaper. It was obviously not a desirable place to be. So the first generation of fast food was harmed by this because that's where they were, right? They made their primary focus urban areas.
Eventually, as the second generation is born and they're arising in the suburbs, the first generation is left behind, like, wow, we're not really in the fashionable part of town anymore. Downtowns are failing. They were finding that their customer base was declining. This was furthered by slum clearance that razed a lot of buildings. That also meant that you lost the customer base in the area and so on. It caused a problem for first-generation, and again, in terms of the devaluation of real estate and so on in the urban core, that also meant that it was harder for other businesses.
Meanwhile, this is sort of getting ahead, but later on, after second-generation fast food is up and running, after a certain point, they actually start looking back to the city when they run into trouble in the suburbs because all of that disinvestment actually meant that that space was potentially more valuable than they had considered. You could get in cheaper, you had less community resistance from restaurants that were entering and so on. It was a weird dynamic, one thing fueling another.
We have to talk about Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was born in 1952 in Corbin, Kentucky, a notable sundown town. Tell us about the origins of the business — where the original recipe came from and how its growth mirrors the trends that you explore in your work.
Kentucky Fried Chicken is interesting because Colonel Sanders, which was a nickname, his real name is Harlan Sanders, as you say, he began the restaurant in 1952. A sundown town, for those that don't know, is a place where Black people were not allowed to remain in that town after sunset or after dark. That meant either you'd be arrested, you could be potentially killed, beaten, and some of them made that explicit. They put signs at the city limits. Others, it was more informal and just known. It was custom.
It's really interesting to think about the fact that when we think about Kentucky Fried Chicken today, or KFC, as it's known, and how tightly it's racialized around Blackness, it's really ironic when you think about the fact that it started in a place that didn't allow Black people in the town after dark. This is where Harlan Sanders begins the restaurant.
He had tried a number of different kinds of restaurant concepts. He eventually started this fried chicken that he was selling from the restaurant, and he ended up getting a lot of customers. It was popular, and the recipe that he used, he says that he was taught by "an old darkie" from Kentucky, so he's basically appropriating, we assume, a Black woman's recipe for the chicken that he's cooking. He, then, is able to capitalize on that and turn that into this nationwide chain.
Now, he himself didn't actually launch the nationwide chain. The name is escaping me at the moment but somebody else, having come across Sander's chicken, convinced him to create this franchise from there.
KFC, because it's one of those second-generation chains and it's starting in the suburbs and not so much in the city, it was competing with the other second-generation [chains], the McDonalds, the Burger Kings. It was born in an era of very expansive and booming fast food concepts that everybody wanted to get in on, whether it was fried chicken or burgers or lots of other kinds of things. There were many different franchises selling almost anything you could think of. But fast food was really becoming a craze at that time.
"White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" unpacks the relationship between fast food restaurants and Black communities. Photo courtesy of University of Minnesota Press.
Let's fast forward to the present. What have we seen in the past couple of decades with fast food franchises? Where are they choosing to open? What are they serving? Who are they targeting? And how does this play out for Black Americans and Black communities today?
In the past couple of decades, I don't know that there are necessarily any big changes from what's essentially been the case. By the 1990s, fast food was thoroughly racialized as Black. The patterns that I found in my study, which we did in 2009, those had been in place for quite some time. Since then, I don't think there's necessarily much of a change in the standard, well-known brands and what they're doing.
Of course, we have seen the rise of, if we want to call it, third-generation fast food, which is the restaurants that are now, instead of targeting Black consumers really much more oriented towards white affluence. We see this in Shake Shack and some of these others, and they're actually harkening back to an earlier idea of the old, roadside stand and nostalgia around that.
I think mostly fast food has seemed to stay the course. They continue to offer new menu items as well as resurrecting those that they think are going to have, and apparently are quite successful, at getting nostalgic consumers, like the McRib and those kinds of things. But yeah, there's only so much you can do. You have to keep trying to sell more products, develop new ideas, and try and stay current.
Fast food is in this vexed moment. On the one hand, it still has this allure around what's the closest thing to an American national meal. But then on the other hand, we're in a time where local, organic, those kinds of things, are much more valued. So fast food is kind of anachronistic and it doesn't have at all the same kind of promise that it once had. I think much of what it does is around trying to maintain and get new customers where it can. But it doesn't seem like it's been doing anything especially new or innovative in the past couple of decades.
Now, when I look at that landscape, and I see what its natural competitors used to be — the supermarket and cooking for yourself as an inexpensive choice or an embedded neighborhood restaurant that was truly a part of the community — I mean, those things are going away.
Right. And I think fast food isn't actually that inexpensive, really.
Not anymore.
No, not anymore, but it might be in relation to a really expensive Michelin-starred restaurant or something. It's all relative. So it might be cheaper than some things but it's not really a cheap option. Speaking of the really fancy restaurants, there was that movie a few years back called The Menu, which was about the couple that goes to an elite, remote island where this exclusive restaurant is, and the chef is preparing this really lavish menu that comes out course by course and all that. It's a dark comedy.
The thing that was striking to me was in the midst of the course of all of those meals, there's a point where the woman in the couple, she ends up asking for a cheeseburger, so the chef prepares it. And we see that it has special significance, even for him. He prepares it with lots of tenderness. You can see him recalling his own child, as he does this, the idea being, this is the quintessential American pleasure. It's very simple. It keeps us happy, and that's even in the context of this, even though it was a parody of it, this very expensive foodie, kind of restaurant.
I think it's interesting the way fast food has these different valences. It's meaningful and touching and yet, it's castigated for its role in health problems and being gauche and environmentally unfriendly and so on. It's always moving between these different poles of value, or...
Yeah, value and meaning, I'd say.
Meaning, yeah.
Well, thank you so much, Naa Oyo. What a book. So much research, a lot of food for thought, as we say.
Yes, indeed. Thanks very much.