Sounds About Right: Audiobooks to Help Us Understand the World

#22: Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America with Psyche Williams-Forson

September 18, 2022 Sounds About Right: Audiobooks to Help Us Understand the World Episode 22
Sounds About Right: Audiobooks to Help Us Understand the World
#22: Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America with Psyche Williams-Forson
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, I sat down with Psyche A. Williams-Forson,  she is Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland and author of the book Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America.

Some of topics in the episode we discussed includes:

  • How this book is about:  'worrying about yourself' and its purpose is also to give the reader/listener a window into thinking.
  • Why do African Americans food culture and eating habits elicit so much commentary from others and where does this stem from?
  • Linking the subject matter of the book with the occurrences of the Black Americans experience i.e. the killings of unarmed black men at the hands of the police and incident of a young man having the police called on him while waiting for his friend in a coffee shop
  • How easy it is to blur the truth by starting a story with 'secondly'  
  • How much has Sacralization  been used to justify the treatment of African Americans?
  • Why must we always consider context when it comes to debating whether fast food such as McDonalds is right or wrong?


The Book and Audiobook:  Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America  is out now.

As of now, my podcast is biweekly and prior to an episode I’ll let you know what book/audiobook I’ll be listening to before the next show so we can delve into it together!

Please don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you’re in the loop whenever a new episode comes out… and also connect with me on Instagram or email so we can keep the conversation going and share with each other fascinating content. 

www.instagram.com/SoundsAboutPod

I am now on goodreads!

www.goodreads.com/SoundsAboutPod 

Are you an author that will like to be  on the next episode of the podcast?

Listeners: Did I cover a book you read or listened to? Did I discuss the things which also stuck out to you? Or did I miss it out?..... get in touch, and let me know what your experience was or to give me audiobook recommendations: soundsaboutpod@gmail.com

ng (00:02.794)
Okay, so, Psyche, first and foremost, thank you for coming on the podcast.

pawilliamsforson (00:08.023)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

ng (00:10.434)
 Okay so the first thing I wanted to ask you was that in the book you mentioned that this is a book about worrying about yourself. Why was it important to lead with that specific statement at the beginning of the book?

pawilliamsforson (00:25.955)
That's a great question. You know, since black people have been in the colonies and then what is known as, you know, the United States, our lives have been constantly surveilled. You know, I was having this conversation earlier today with someone about we're always being watched, yeah? And so there's this...

ideology that black people, and I say black expansively, right, because once you come to the United States, no one asks you where you're from. You know, they see your skin color and they assume you're black. So there's this belief that we are somehow infantile and unable to care for ourselves or make solid decisions that are in our best and personal interest.

And so I started with that state, with that example, because it shows two things. It shows an African American or a black woman eating food. And it shows her in the act. So it shows the food, but it also shows her in the act of eating. And why is that important? Because in sometimes in the book, the food has center stage. I'm actually talking about black people's foods being shamed.

And then there are times in the book that I'm talking about Black people being shamed while eating. And there's both going on in that instance. And I think what she says to the person who's surveilling her is absolutely right. Worry about yourself. I don't need you to tell me what the rules are. I don't need you to tell me what I should and should not be doing, because you don't know the corpus of my life. And in this case, I thought it was a perfect metaphor, because that metro worker was aware

of laws and she was aware of the rules, whereas this person who was watching and policing her was not. And that's often the case. We know our lives best. So I don't need you to stand over my shoulder and tell me I should do this or I need to eat that or I need to be here or I need to be there. Let me worry about myself and you should do the same.

ng (02:48.678)
And I think she tweeted that as it's almost as if she wanted to embarrass the woman by doing that as well

pawilliamsforson (02:53.959)
Right, right. And I asked that question, right? What was the value add in the person who was, I think it's Natasha Taines, what was the value add of her tweeting this experience? What was the point of taking a picture of another human being engaged in their everyday life and then feeling the need to put that on social media? What were you trying to gain by that, right?

The transit worker about whom I speak was absolutely minding her business. And she was doing her own thing. It was Natasha Tynes who felt the need to take a picture and then caption that picture and plaster it over social media. So to my way of thinking, that's a deliberate act of shaming.

because you wanted to call out what you thought was a perceived transgression, being done by someone who was breaking the rules. Because that's the other part of it. Black people's persons and bodies are always seen as transgressing, as breaking the rules, as criminals. And so it was a sort of gotcha moment that backfired tremendously. And again, I thought starting with that

perfect metaphor for this book because often those gotcha moments where you think you're getting me and most people, you know, I think I'm telling you something for your own good or what have you, are completely devoid of context, which is part of the reason why they're incorrect, right? Because you don't know the whole of someone else's life and what...

you know, they have negotiated or what have you, right? And so when we make these assumptions is what it really is, those tendencies can really backfire.

ng (04:59.266)
Thank you, Psyche. And what I wanted to also ask is why do African Americans' food culture and eating habits elicit so much commentary from others and where does it stem from?

pawilliamsforson (05:13.151)
That's a great question. And a colleague of mine, a Ghanaian colleague of mine, asked the same question. And I thought about this for a long time. And having studied this phenomenon, done this work for a fair number of decades now, I finally recently came to the conclusion that not only is the act of the gotcha moment sort of.

part of a larger narrative I feel of anti-black racism. But I really think it comes down to black liberation and joy. I don't want to see you ever happy in your own self, in your own space, in your own moment, in your own glory. So I'm gonna demonize your food, your hair, your clothing, your dance, your language. Literally, there's no part.

of African-American culture and by extension, the African diaspora that is not ridiculed, no part. I defy anyone to tell me what part is not. From our art, which is considered at times, simplistic or too complicated to be appreciated. To our dance forms.

I'll co-op them, but I won't give you any credit for them. And I'll ridicule them, but I won't give you any credit. You know, to our language, African-American vernacular English, right? We don't understand what you're saying. There's very few elements of our lives, and now here's food, that don't elicit some type of venomous response. And I've decided that it's really both a love-hate relationship for black culture

But it's also to my way of thinking about, I don't wanna see you happy, because if you are happy, you can liberate yourself in your joy. And if black folks get liberated, and I've been saying this on my book tour, if black people recognize our power and our liberation and in our joy, wow, we could shake the, talk about shaking the table, we could shake the universe, right? Because we recognize our power. But as long as I can keep you subjugated and a-

pawilliamsforson (07:36.019)
and always, always thinking that you're the victim and oh my God, nothing about your culture is appreciative or beautiful or anything. Now we have a problem, you know. You know, we've moved out of the 70s here in this country where we had a whole movement of black is beautiful into the 80s where, you know...

the advent of more technology and we began to say, hey, we don't wanna go back, we wanna go forward, so we're gonna forget those things of the past. But we can't forget those mantras of black is beautiful to be young, gifted and black. You know, as Nina Simone said, we can't forget those things. And as Lorraine Hansberry wrote about, poet and playwright, we can't forget that because the moment we forget that, we find ourselves.

in these situations where it's easy for us To turn on one another. That's why there's this phrase in the US about crabs in the bucket You know because crabs in the bucket are constantly pulling each other down, right? And so I don't care if it's social media or what-have-you We're like crabs in a bucket and as long as you can keep us clawing at each other

ng (08:35.182)
Hmm.

ng (08:39.65)
Mm-hmm.

pawilliamsforson (08:52.183)
then we don't have to focus or put our focus where the real problem lies, and that's on the oppressor.

ng (08:59.166)
Absolutely well said by the way. You mentioned other occurrences.

with the black Americans experience that's happened over the last couple of years, such as the guy who was waiting for his friend in a coffee shop and having the police called on him, as well as the killings of unarmed black men at the hands of police and even how black children in America are not perceived as children the same way children of other races are. I wanted to ask you how difficult or easy was it for you to link these two incidences,

with the subject matter of the book.

pawilliamsforson (09:38.271)
Yeah, you know, that's a great question. It was not very difficult, unfortunately. And it's black men, women, boys, and girls, right? I have a daughter who is often mentioned in the book because her experiences encapsulate so much of what I'm talking about. And unfortunately, this notion of

black innocence around children is a particularly problematic and insidious situation because I've seen it play out in my own life in terms of my daughter, right? Where she's perceived to be because she's verbose and she's learned from her mom and she self advocates. So therefore she somehow is a bad child, right? And I'm saying this,

her having her grow up in a predominantly black community of Prince George's County, Maryland, where the per capita income in this particular county in Maryland is perceived to be among the highest in the nation. But we have a huge class divide in our county. And you know, talk about the crabs in the barrel and the buying in of this ideology.

of what the right way it is to comport oneself as a young Black person. And when my daughter did not comport herself in that way, she became demonized. And so it was not a far stretch then for me to look at the ways in which Black children are perceived vis-a-vis or in relation to obesity, as I talk about the one young lady's story in the book.

And just the sheer, even as I was doing the analysis, just the many ways in which that young girl was put on full display and ridiculed really under the guise of you're obese and so you're gonna die. And no one, nowhere in that article did anyone ever say, she's in foster care, she has experienced googabs of trauma, of personal trauma or...

pawilliamsforson (12:03.931)
nor did they celebrate the fact that she had learned to cook, she had learned to sew, she had learned to understand and appreciate family in her caretaker, none of that. Because the purpose was to shine the microscope there on her transgression, which was eating good food, right? And so...

I thought about that as it related to my daughter. I thought about it as it related to the young lady who was having a mental health episode and was handcuffed and thrown in the back of the car and the police said to her, stop acting like a child. And she's like, I am a child, I'm eight years old. What is it about the society, right, that does not see young black girls and boys as the children they are? Well, we've never been seen that way because even at the age of tender ages,

we were brought to this country shackled and placed in swamps and fields to work from morning till night. And when your cycle began or when monarchy began for girls, that meant you could breed a slave owner's children. So our children have never, you know, and young boys weren't immune to this, right? Raped and beaten and maimed and.

and otherwise mistreated. So our children have never been able to be protected, right, or to feel the innocence of youth as long as they've been in this country.

ng (13:30.452)
Mm.

ng (13:38.034)
Absolutely, it's almost as if you've had to allow, you have to allow that well, children, you want children to remain as children, but at the same time, because of how the world perceives them or because of how the system treats them, you have to kind of get them up to speed with how they will be treated as well, isn't it?

pawilliamsforson (13:46.731)
Yeah.

pawilliamsforson (13:55.987)
Right, you're right, that's right. And you know, every since George Floyd, but even before that, with the incidents of Trayvon Martin and others, you know, throughout the news and on social media, very broadly defined, people have had to explain, as black parents have to explain about how they have to have the talk, right? And this isn't particular to the United States. We know this happens the world over, yeah?

where parents have to have the talk with their children about how you behave if you encounter law enforcement or how you need to behave when you are out after dark or you know what you should wear and again how you should comport yourselves And and when you transgress that when you decide I don't want to be to keep my body Controlled in that way nine times out of ten or eight times out of ten. There's some type of penalty

And we know this by virtue of the fact that our carceral system is filled with black and brown, not only men, but women, children alike.

ng (15:07.854)
Absolutely. I appreciated how you quoted authors and poets in the book to help drive the points you're making as well. And one which stuck out to me was how easy it is to blur the truth by starting a story from secondly. Would you mind elaborating on this?

pawilliamsforson (15:28.703)
Yeah, it's a concept that I appreciated from the scholar, or the author and writer, Chimamanda Adichie, right? Who has written some incredible work, a Nigerian author, and she has this wonderful TED Talk called The Danger of the Single Story, right? And she talks about

When you have a story and you started from this place of say, victimhood, you get an entirely different picture. And one example she gives in her TED Talk has to do with her family being middle-class and of memes back home and that they hired, often they would hire.

young children and so forth from the village. And so when this young man came to work for them, their mother used to say, you know, Phile's family is poor. And so you need to make sure you eat your food and whatever we would like to give away, we give it to Phile and his family. And so one day she says that they went to his actual village, right? And when they went to the village, Phile's mother,

showed them a piece of art that Philae's brother had created. And it was beautiful. She said it was astoundingly beautiful. And she said, it never occurred to me that this family could produce such riches and richness because the story we had always heard was that they were poor. So if you start the story always, right?

with that particular narrative, then you're going to have that level of that kind of problem. And Adichie borrows this term from the Palestinian poet and author, Mourid Bougari, whose name I'm sure I butchered. But in his memoir, I just want to share in his memoir, may I share this piece? In his memoir, he writes, it's easy to blur the truth with a single linguistic trick.

ng (17:46.45)
Absolutely.

pawilliamsforson (17:52.667)
start your story from secondly. He says neglect to speak of what happened first. Start your story with secondly and the world will be turned upside down. Start your story with secondly and the arrows of the red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victims. It is enough to start with secondly for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous, right? So when we don't...

tell the actual story, but we're like, oh, you know, and we blur that truth, then you end up with this narrative that is completely untrue or not complete is what I think Adichie says. She says it's not the problem with stereotypes, it's not that they're not true, they're incomplete. Right, and so by painting the picture a particular way, we see this young woman who I talk about in the book as only obese.

We don't get the story of the trauma that could be adding to the horrors of her life, which are causing her, through stress, et cetera, to carry excess weight. And so when you start these stories of secondly, if you don't understand that we were agriculturalists before we came to this country, that we had knowledges that were valuable to the building of the new Americas, that we were agriculturalists. We were...

carpenters, we were, you know, builders, right? We had our own wealth. If you don't tell that story and you simply start with us as enslaved and not even enslaved as slaves, now you have created a different narrative which paints us as forever and always in a position of less than, right? As opposed to recognizing.

that we actually have histories and we have pasts and we are storytellers and we are creators and fixers and we are people of knowledge. But as long as you start that story and you deny us the history, which we know is happening right now all over again in the United States where, oh, we're not gonna tell this story because it may make people feel bad. It's what happened. They should feel bad. And if that's the byproduct of the truth, then so be it.

pawilliamsforson (20:15.211)
But as long as we keep that story and that narrative quiet, you see, then we can keep people subjugated and oppressed and repressed and depressed. And that is, after all, the point, because this country was not built for us, though it was built by us.

ng (20:33.054)
Exactly that part in the book where you did bring that in, starting with secondly, it was one of those mm moments when I heard that I was like, whoa, you know, so it was really good. Thank you for elaborating on it. Honestly, I really appreciate it. So how much has sacralization been used to justify the treatment of African Americans and what actions could be taken to redefine and push back against this?

pawilliamsforson (20:44.535)
Thank you.

Thank you.

pawilliamsforson (21:00.779)
Yeah, so psychologization, as I talk about it in the book, which I got from a pastor who I frequently listen to here in the Maryland, DC area, pastor John Wesley, is a concept that he took from another man, of another theologian by the name of,

pawilliamsforson (21:31.251)
Kane Hopefelder. So pastor Howard John Wesley, Dr. Howard John Wesley talks about this notion of sacralization. He says it's when you find a way to support what you want by tying it to Scripture so you can then justify it as the will of God, right? And I love what he says there, right? Because he's absolutely on point. We grew up believing, a lot of people grew up believing, oh my God, where the cursed black people are the cursed people of

ng (21:59.327)
Yep.

pawilliamsforson (21:59.479)
Well, if you understand what the real scripture says, if you read it for yourself, then you would understand that actually Ham never cursed, God never cursed Ham. He cursed Ham's grandson. So by virtue of that, it wasn't Ham himself who was cursed. It was several generations beyond. So it's not really applicable to black people at all. And so again, if you would indulge me, I just would say,

Then in the book, Pastor Wesley says, so with sacralization, you can kill a million Jews in the Holocaust and say it's the will of God because the Jews killed Jesus. Through sacralization, you can convince yourself that it's all right to eradicate Native Americans and their tribes and put them in reservations and call it manifest destiny, right? Because you liken yourself to Israel and America is your promised land. Through sacralization, you can oppress LGBTQIA plus.

because you got a distorted understanding of the word abomination. And through sacralization, you can endorse the enslavement, torture, lynching, and killing of African people and support the apartheid system because you believe in the curse of Ham. So again, I mean, it's just a brilliant, I think, statement that he makes in analysis. And it's right there about how you can desecrate people.

and say it's okay because it's your manifest destiny. And in America, we have to learn about manifest destiny. That's the story, right? That's the second thing. What we don't learn about is the desecration of native peoples and indigenous peoples in this country who very much were, had all kinds of illnesses and diseases weaponized against them for the clearing them of.

clearing them out. So, you know, there are all these ways in which we, I tried to bring out in the book and people will say, well, those things aren't directly related to Shami. Absolutely they are because they formed the Genesis, right? And they undergird and they're the underpinning of how we end up.

pawilliamsforson (24:12.799)
with this top layer of the iceberg. Because you know, when you see the iceberg, you don't really realize how deep it is in the water. You just think it's just the top of the iceberg. But what I'm trying to show is that there are layers to that iceberg and they go very deep. And so what may simply be to you, and not to you personally, but to someone as, I'm just saying this person should eat healthier.

ng (24:18.406)
Deep it goes, yeah.

pawilliamsforson (24:38.707)
I'm trying to unpack that all the way down to where does that come from that you feel that you should somehow tell me what healthy eating is for me, for my culture, especially if you're not a physician. And then that's a conversation I should be having with my physician about the various ways that I can maintain my integrity, my cultural heritage, and sustain who I am and help me thrive.

ng (24:53.43)
Absolutely.

pawilliamsforson (25:07.219)
and come up with some different alternatives or different ways of producing the satiation that will make me feel whole. Because sometimes for people of color, for black people, brown people, native people, food may be all we have. After a day of dealing with all kinds of aggressions, if I can go home and have soup and fufu, or I can go home and have mac and cheese and what have you, or I can go home and have

beans and rice, that may be all I had to sustain and help my day and help me feel whole in my day, that a salad just won't do.

ng (25:50.706)
Absolutely and since you've mentioned that I wanted to ask as well why must we always consider context when it comes to debating if fast food such as McDonald's is right or wrong?

pawilliamsforson (26:03.423)
Yeah, well, because, you know, again, the other thing I try to point out in the book very early on is that food is a material artifact, right? It's not like food is devoid of that context. Food is as much of an artifact as the books on our shelves, the clothes in our closet, the phones we use, the cars we drive. Food is an artifact.

And so our relationship to things is very intensely personal. There's a whole body of scholarship out there about how our relationship to our things, right? From our, again, our hair, our clothing, our accessories, whatever, you name it, it's a thing. If it's changeable, it's a thing. It's the landscape, our homes, our gardens, our driveways, our patios, whatever the case may be, our pets.

When you recognize that, then you have to understand that the choices we make around food are intensely personal and they are as meaningful and as filled with different levels of meaning as the cars we drive and the things that we buy, right? It's, it's, we're making these choices every day about things and food is one of the constellation of things that we're deciding.

ng (27:19.268)
Hmm.

pawilliamsforson (27:31.075)
How many people am I feeding? Who am I feeding? Where am I gonna get the best food? Where am I gonna, so many. How do I get food? Do I have enough money to get food? The questions that go through a person's mind around food, though they don't share them with the average other being, are many. And because women tend to be the primary procurers of food, those decisions are also very gendered.

understanding that when you're in the same gender loving household, it may be different, but somebody in that household is making those decisions, right? And so understanding that context means you really should appreciate that somebody is making a lot of very serious decisions every day, once a week, once a month, whatever the case may be, when food is gathered. As much as.

ng (27:56.014)
Hmm.

pawilliamsforson (28:23.915)
you know, what am I going to wear tomorrow for work? You know, or what am I going to do tomorrow when I get up? It's the same thing, but we have this way of separating food out because it's so everyday. We all eat if we can. Most of, you know, many, most of us have access to something. Of course, we know that there's food insecurity throughout the world, which becomes its own question. How am I going to get food? Those are very serious.

ng (28:47.126)
Hmm.

pawilliamsforson (28:53.699)
questions that we often, especially those people who have access, especially people who have access to a lot of different choices, those are questions that we don't think twice about. And so when we don't think twice about them, we forget that people are operating within a context, including the person who's doing the forgetting. Because their context may be full of resources, they have the luxury to forget.

ng (29:05.418)
Hmm.

ng (29:23.126)
Mm-hmm. I know.

pawilliamsforson (29:24.199)
Yeah, so people who aren't in that position, right? Ray Tannehill, who's a historian long ago said, the ability to throw away food and make mistakes with food is really a luxury of the privileged. Because when you're hungry and you don't have the option of throwing or just discarding food, you're gonna think very differently about your relationship to it.

ng (29:38.094)
Thanks for watching!

pawilliamsforson (29:53.123)
Generally, those may be the people who tend to have a bit more experience with context. So if we circle back to how we began, the metro worker knew perhaps she had a very limited amount of time to get from point A to point B. I don't know where she acquired her food. I don't know how much time she had to eat it. But she knew all of that. And she also knew that the rules had been changed.

The person devoid of that context is the person with the privilege to be able to take a picture of this person and put it on social media. So context is very important, as important for food as any other material object in our lives.

ng (30:39.218)
Absolutely. And so lastly, Saiki, I wanted to ask you, well, I wanted to mention that you advised that you would like the book to give the people a window into thinking. What would you like the reader or listener to take away or do as a result from reading the book?

pawilliamsforson (30:57.687)
Good, thank you. First of all, I want us to open up the conversations around food. Most of our conversations tend to be either or. It has to be this way or that way. And I want to encourage us to be a lot more expansive and to be a lot more willing to entertain that there are multiple points of view and multiple approaches to the same understanding of this particular phenomena. For example, mine is just one reading around shaming. They're gonna be others.

ng (31:23.228)
Hmm.

pawilliamsforson (31:26.803)
And that's fine. I just want to open up the conversation. So much of the food studies conversation is about, again, food access or food security, food insecurity or gardening or what have you. I'm like, there's so many different aspects of food that we have to talk about. It's not just heritage. It's a number. Okay, so there's that piece. The other thing I want us to do is to recognize how anti-black racism permeates our everyday lives.

It's part of the structure of our lives. It's part of the ideology of our lives. This isn't about black people seeing themselves as victims. This is about non-black people not recognizing our humanity. And I need for us to recognize that even in food, conversations of humanity exist, especially in food, if you will, because they're so laden with everything, right? Our gender, our...

our race, our ethnicity, our region, our migration, our immigration, our migration, our age, sexuality, everything is informed when you start talking about food. And mostly what I want us to do is to stop moralizing around food. Just because you have this particular way of eating and these particular thoughts about eating, recognize my humanity, I come back to that word again, and that

give me the respect, the courtesy, the understanding that I actually can probably make some really good decisions about my own life. And people's failure to take this into consideration means I think you're failing to see my liberation, my joy, the things that make me whole, the things that make me who I am. And when you start denying people their liberation and joy, now you're denying exactly who they are as people moving about this world.

ng (33:24.034)
Brilliant, thank you

pawilliamsforson (33:26.079)
You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me.