Color- Coded Dinner

From OxfordAmerican.org - 

This is an excerpt from a captivating article from a food critic on the lack of integration in most restaurants.

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Southern hospitality is more than what we call “etiquette.” It’s a sensibility. A way of being in the world. A philosophy. A spirit. You don’t just open your doors to a stranger; you lavish that stranger with kindness, attention, and care. Nor are you simply accepting someone you don’t know into your home. In the purest sense, you are accepting that stranger as an extension of yourself.

This is what is known as “welcome” in the South. And there is no thinking of it except in the purest sense. “Welcome” is an almost mythic conceit, one bound up with the very ways the region chooses to think of itself—sun-dappled land of kindness, grace, and mercy.

But if we choose to see the South as it really is, and as it once was—and if we are honest in admitting that in many ways what is is not so very different from what was—then we find ourselves with a messier, more authentic picture of welcome.

Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of restaurant desegregation, we celebrated a signifying moment in the long march toward full and equal citizenship for black Americans. But we delude ourselves if we don’t acknowledge that there is a difference between being admitted and being welcomed.

The court order that ended desegregation stipulated that every cafe, tavern, Waffle House, and roadside joint must open its doors to all. It did not, could not, stipulate that whites in the South must also open their hearts and minds to all. Welcome was, and is, the final barrier to racial parity.

We have witnessed remarkable progress over the past five decades, yes, and we should acknowledge this, too. What seemed fanciful, even utopian, a generation ago is now so commonplace as to not bear any comment at all. We have come to expect and accept black and white in the workplace, on the playing field, in politics, in the military, and we congratulate ourselves on our steady march to racial harmony. But our neighborhoods and our restaurants do not look much different today than they did fifty years ago. That Kingly vision of sitting down at the same table together and breaking bread is as smudgy as it’s ever been.

Ihave a day job in Washington, D.C., as a food critic. I’ve done it for ten years. During that time, the city has become bigger and more cosmopolitan, the restaurant scene has evolved from that of a steak & potatoes town to that of a vibrant metropolis, and people now talk excitedly about going out to eat. But what no one talks about is the almost total absence of black faces in that scene.

I count faces, I have to confess. It’s a habit. Something I began doing when I was teaching at Howard University, when I was made to see myself as white in the world—whiteness not as neutral, as baseline, but as an idea, a construct. I began to keep a tally, each night, of the non-whites in the room. I eat out, on average, ten times a week in restaurants that span the gamut from ambitious fine-dining to so-called ethnic mom & pops. So let’s do the math. That’s 40 restaurant visits a month for 4 months, or 160 restaurant visits. Only 8 times—8 times out of 160—did I see more than 10 black folks in the room during any one lunch or dinner. On more than 90 of those restaurant visits, I did not see any faces other than white faces.

We’re not talking about Provo, Utah. Or Johannesburg, South Africa. We’re talking about a town enshrined in song, four decades ago, as Chocolate City.

Yes, the black majority may be a thing of the past—the recent census shows that whites now make up a paper-thin majority—but blacks remain a force in local politics. They are heavily represented in both the government bureaucracy and the workplace. And Prince George’s County, where I live, is home to the largest black middle class in the country.

So why aren’t they coming to dinner? It’s a question I’ve been asking for almost as long as I’ve been a restaurant critic. And—not that I’m surprised—no one seems interested in answering it. Or even addressing it.

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The answer might surprise you.

Find the complete article at the link below:

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/548-coding-and-decoding-dinner