Burgers in Blackface

Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

Naa Oyo A. KwateAuthor

Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding.

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About the Author
About the Author

Background: The Coon Chicken Inn, Seattle, Washington, ca. 1930. Source: Coon Chicken Inn Records and Graham Family Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

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Table of Contents

Metadata

  • edition
    1
  • publisher
    University of Minnesota Press
  • publisher place
    Minneapolis, MN
  • restrictions
    Please see the Creative Commons website for details about the restrictions associated with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
  • rights
    Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now by Naa Oyo A. Kwate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
  • rights holder
    Naa Oyo A. Kwate
  • rights territory
    World
  • series number
    33
  • series title
    Forerunners: Ideas First
  • version
    1.0
  • doi
    https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452964003