The Hip-Hop Restaurant

White American kids are taught we can grow up to be anything we want. Very rarely are we told we can’t be Black.  

Consequently, a regrettable number of us try, and fail. Due to persistent segregation, the normative White lens of popular culture, and the socialization we receive from our White families, White kids may learn very little about actual Black people and their lives. Instead we see Blackness through the lens of stereotype and commercially marketed culture. Cultural Blackness and its signifiers are highly desirable commodities which, like other sought-after commodities, White people feel we must have, even as we call the cops incessantly on actual Black people for the ‘crime’ of existence in space.

Commodification of Black culture paired with violence against Black people is not a new trend. It goes back to the days when Europeans attached a monetary value to Africans we enslaved. Enslavement was, among other things, the attachment of a market value to Blackness – a sociolegal category which wealthy European colonialists created, and situated below its corollary, Whiteness, into which they placed themselves and ultimately all other Americans not of African or Indigenous descent. This was an economic strategy, intended to dampen interracial labor organizing between European indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

But it also served a moral purpose. If we pretended Africans were not human, then through enslavement and its horrors we could not dehumanize them. They were only commodities, interchangeable and replaceable, and their culture was ours to sell too.

//

Despite nearly five centuries of labor and cultural theft, no White person ever truly owned Blackness. We bought Black bodies and stole the labor they produced. But we never possessed the souls of Black people.

When people racialized as White decide to produce culture in a space which is specifically Black, we must think very carefully about what we are doing. Though we may produce in modes like hip-hop, jazz, and soul – invented by people racialized as Black - we must be careful to distinguish our status as appreciators of these cultures from creators of the culture itself.

To associate ourselves with means of Black cultural expression obligates us to recognize and respect them as specifically Black. This obligation entails accountability, engagement with actual Black people and a recognition of the historical and present conditions of Black existence in America, and an honest accounting of our relationship to them.

Whiteness in America is built on the theft and appropriation of labor, culture and resources from people racialized as Black and brown by people who need to believe that we are White. It may be argued that participation in this taking is a part of what makes us White, and the continued taking which maintains our status as nothing but. Whiteness is many things, but one is a lack of accountability to others on the basis of shared racialization for any purpose other than the reproduction of White supremacy. No more.

We have profited from jazz, rock & roll, funk and electronic, and now we’re working on rap, too. Hip-hop and rap are Black culture. Like the earlier Black musical forms, rap has roots in Black people’s experiences of brutality and injustice in a White supremacist nation. Whether the genre should be accessible to other non-Black people in America and across the world, who share with Black Americans aspects of this experience, is not for me to decide.

But White people should know that we don’t have to do this again. If we claim to respect Black humanity we must respect Black culture, and if we respect Black culture, the appropriation of it for our profit stops with us.

//

I don’t know you, Chef Todd Pulsinelli. But I am White, and based on your Instagram, so are you. You seem like a hardworking man. And you’ve opened Warbucks, a ‘hip-hop restaurant,’ on Magazine Street. It’s great that you express your love of cooking through raps you write. You may have come from modest means and you might relate your business success to the rags-to-riches tales of rappers.

But are you prepared to accept the implications that come with the identity you’ve created for yourself and your hip-hop restaurant?

Will you support the Black boys and girls whose culture you reference, who are viewed in this city as undeserving of a well-funded education, a well-paying job, respect, or self-determination?

Given your history at Besh Restaurant Group, a company alleged by multiple former female employees of overlooking sexual harassment in its restaurants and by its namesake celebrity chef, will you do what’s necessary to create a work environment in which women can thrive?

Will you hire these daughters and sons of the St. Thomas and Magnolia, vibrant centers of rap production once blocks from your restaurant’s site, destroyed because the stigma attached to their Blackness was deemed worthy of excision by the White power structure?

Will you pay the living wages necessary to keep Black people in historically Black neighborhoods amidst the threat of further displacement?

Will you employ Black designers, builders, artists and musicians to shape the aesthetic of your hip-hop space?

Will you recognize the systems of White privilege and power which got your business financed and opened, and work to broaden access to that capital among aspiring Black and brown chefs who want to articulate their own culture through cooking?

Black people, specifically Black women, have long been ‘cooks’ of comfort food like the dishes on your menu, but all too rarely ‘chefs’, and are rarely paid on par with other restaurant employees. This contributes to an immense racial wealth disparity which Chef Tunde Wey, another New Orleans restauranteur, has used his business to highlight. Will you join in to help change these conditions?

I cannot ask you to close your hip-hop restaurant. You seem to have put much time, energy and love into it. But I will ask: will you use your position of power, privilege and success to acknowledge the source of your inspiration? Will you hold yourself accountable to the community in whose mode of cultural expression you situate yourself? Or will you be just another White American kid who grew up to make a buck off Black culture?