The Capitalistic Exploitation of the Black Community Through National Fried Chicken Day: A Historical Analysis
1. Introduction
The essence of National Fried Chicken Day is the erasure of the black culture it is supposed to celebrate. The white aggressors in this narrative are the benevolent providers, those who allowed and even helped the black community to flourish, and are tolerated only in relation to the new hero of the story. It is public, as well as private, discussions of systemic racism and racial relations across the United States that would benefit from an exploration of the beginnings of these exploitative relationships in order to explain why these practices continue to exist and at least guide our efforts to bring them to an end.
These words are being written on the 6th of July, it's National Fried Chicken Day. What does this say about our society? Who benefits from the institution of National Fried Chicken Day? One could argue that it is a harmless day that gets people to eat delicious chicken, the lover of the day and the ultimate beneficiary of the meal might understandably think. However, when we look at the history of fried chicken in the United States, it becomes clear that the consumption of National Fried Chicken Day does anything but merely benefit the consumer. This small national "holiday" and its symbolic dish is capitalistic exploitation of the black community with far-reaching cultural implications; everything about it centers the oppressor as the victim, conveniently erasing these majority white aggressors, while also creating a consumerist identity for white people to adopt.
1.1. Overview of National Fried Chicken Day
The degree to which Native and African Americans perpetrated turning white Americans' "yardbirds" into a market-sold pejorative, not to mention whole-cloth market-certified stereotype, is open to question bearing in mind the banty. In 1983, Robert Wallace and Hachiche M'Bow make a performative argument about Black marketing and slavery extending into foodways. In 1990, Psyche Williams-Forson, just a week before Chief Justice's Hearing on "Ebonics," perceives racist undertones in Oprah Winfrey's then-recent home-cooked Southern "massa's food" spread editorial shoot largely because "'oul/southern/black' culinary powern't reflected in the stories behind the recipes or in the follow-up letters from readers." Hyper-intimizing fried chicken held the power to exploit the Black tradition-laden south for powerful newsstand coverage.
On July 6, 1980, a marketing event called National Fried Chicken Day was launched to sell the recent phenomenon of fast-food consumption of a meat that, up to that point, had only been seen as a rural vegan's "second best friend," as Playboy requested. In launching it, the April 3, 1980 edition of Orange, streets, decried turning "ethnic" foods into capitalist economic functions; in her words, "nobody profits but the producers of one bad," conjuring thoughts of Black poverty. In the inaugural paragraph of the first article to mention National Fried Chicken Day, the writer juxtaposes wheat's "bulk" function when accompanying fried chicken with his confusion about "how KFC expects the modern eater to stuff it down." This essay argues fast-food fried chicken, overtakeena in the U.S. prior to National Fried Chicken Day, was an overt political and cultural symbol denoting Blackness and indicating Capitalistic exploitation.
2. The History of Fried Chicken
The rise of fried chicken preceded the origins of slavery and even European colonization in the various parts of Africa to which slaves were taken. Chickens were first domesticated in the Indus Valley of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Eastern Afghanistan and were popularized across the Arab World in the 10th Century before making their way further eastward to Sub-Saharan Africa. The manner and seasonings with which enslaved people fry their chicken, as we might guess, drew inspiration from what they had known. Many of the African peoples who were enslaved were people who practiced Islam, a religion that does not allow consumption of pork. Instead, these people would consume cow, sheep, goat, chicken, and guinea fowl. Eager to expand their market and to connect with all of the populous on the eastern half of the United States, an Atlanta couple, S.R. Beckwith and his wife Chloe Speights, a New Orleans native, purchased the Central City-based eatery in the late 1910s. Over a century later, Popeye's had an annual revenue of $206 million in 2008 before being sold to AFC enterprises.
Few lists of Black cuisine are complete without an item about fried chicken, and a reverence towards fried chicken's relation to Black culture is ubiquitous across the United States. Even when the dish is redefined and reimagined as "artisanal" and "good for you" at restaurants, Black celebrities like Martha Stewart and Oprah tout the longstanding connection of the dish to the wider African American palate. With all of this cultural discussion, there has also been a litany list of Black men and women who have built their personal enterprises on the dish. Whether we are speaking in terms of personal or now corporate fortune, this is an enterprise that was built on the backs of the Black community and is still being exploited annually to this day. Based on the current commercial obsessed holiday narrative, one would think that July 21st, August 3rd, and August 6th would be some of the most important days on people's calendars. With "The 4th of July" as our starting point, as of our current understanding, stands by itself because of the limited physical need for fireworks as they are causes of great bodily burns and the price gouging of cherry bombs in this country.
2.1. Origins of Fried Chicken
However, where it became most synonymous with the racist stereotype of loose, uncontrollable "nigger" appetites was abroad. It taught foreigners much about southern racial vocabulary, colloquialisms, and caricatures. In the same way, it codified the African slave as barefoot, melanous, smiling, straw hat-and-overalls-wearing "Jim" of Jim Crow (white) perception. It was also known in early-Twentieth Century toy, film, and print as the interchangeable "Sambo" of Little Black Sambo and the commercially successful movies Birth of a Nation (1915's "Burrhead") and Gone with the Wind (1939's "Prissy" girl and 1935's "Pork" black "buck"). According to De Certeau, the food/race connection took root abroad via Latin America, which imported U.S. slavery-era racial hierarchy literature. This was supposedly to loudly "other" Black immigrants near whiteness and whites.
Fried chicken's start was in the antebellum South. It was eaten year-round aggressively by wealthy whites of the Southern aristocracy—easily digestible and requiring no utensils. It was also portable, so their ladyfolk could partake of it outside of the house too, especially after special celebrations, picnics, and luncheons. All phases of fried chicken production and preparation were rigidly segregated in the antebellum South. Only whites ate full-spectrum fried chicken—dark or "darky" meat, breast or drumstick, thigh or wing. They actively discouraged it as a staple of the enslaved diet, which it was, by referring to it as "nigger food," according to slave narratives.
3. Fried Chicken Stereotypes
As receiving welfare that is used to buy fried chicken and chitterlings at a Black Foodways Annual Association dinner, poor blacks have themselves been marked in the following popular cultural discourses as the main carriers of this tradition. For the real concern "cultural retentions" fosters is to discover the level of deviation in difference, a variance conveniently "measured" by the emotional involvement in a cuisine. With reference, of course, to Savagery. What elements from this triune "unholy trinity"—shea butter's association with homosexuality, urban garden incest supporters, or secular Christianity—might reveal these popular, "traditional," stereotypes of savagery? In contemporary American culture, the "guilt" of consuming food culture associated with poverty-stricken historical experiences would seem to belong to "white trash" unless poor blacks can be included as partners in the "crime."
In contemporary American culture, fried chicken, like chitterlings, has become racialized. Fried chicken houses, food stands, and fast food restaurants, especially Kentucky Fried Chicken, that were recently and are currently concentrated in mostly poor urban black neighborhoods and today also in the increasing numbers of poor southern suburban black neighborhoods, reflect this racialization. For white mainstream America, remembering a time when they could not afford to eat this delicacy, enjoying it today has become "a guilty pleasure" in two ways: one, as a living connection with a poverty-stricken past comprising that "great sucking sound" of cotton being removed from both black and white bolls that marked the end of the Third European Diaspora, an exile and alienation which is at the heart of the American national experience; and two, as proof that fried chicken, mark of an ancient "ritual" to maintain black ethnicity, was invented by their black "others," not "us," such that grooving to the beat of banjos, conjuring with devils, reciting a "toe-jam" poem, and popping a watermelon dice necklace confirm black "inferiority" (a synonym for "savagery"), which in turn "confirms" white "superiority."
3.1. Racial Stereotypes Associated with Fried Chicken
The goal of many studies may be to expose not the fried chicken industry, as this is a minor attack, but rather these fundamental racial stereotypes that have deluded the public's elitist hopes. These popular prejudices, it may be impossible to do away with. Local dining establishments, food producers, salespeople, and even chefs are all providing even more special fried chicken options.
One should consider financial profit. The labeled assertiveness of a people never completely serves to uplift them, but rather underscores their distance and their position of subjugation. Racial insults and misunderstandings that cling to these stereotypes assist in disregarding these communities, thus reproducing social thinking. Vanishing tolerance allows black exploitation to continue.
Black people in the United States are associated, both through historical practice and direct word of mouth, with the exceptionalism of fried chicken. Fried chicken is a staple in the black community, but the association is hardly flattering. Rather than pride, what would possession carry, shame?
Racial stereotypes have become deeply intertwined with fried chicken, and this leaves an unpleasant and bitter taste in the mouths of millions of victims of racial prejudice who have been deeply affected by this development. Not so long ago, a holiday was conceived to celebrate this deep and unnecessary industry. July 6 is officially recognized as National Fried Chicken Day in the United States. The national recognition of fried chicken in July is neither interesting nor accidental.
4. The Capitalistic Exploitation of the Black Community
Much of the early economic activity in the U.S. was conducted face-to-face. Business mostly took the form of small shops and general stores; customers knew the people with whom they did business. Butchers, for example, worked locally, selling their cuts of meat directly to patrons across the counter. No one group has had to fight harder and longer than the African American community to re-establish a sense of economic relevancy in 1960s America. By the 60s, "the bulk of the business that was provided by the franchiser went to the Creative Managers because of that person's ability to attract customers" (p. 1). His ability to attract African American customers was entirely part of what made a manager "creative". McDonald's "knew exactly what it was doing" when it placed restaurants in cities like Chicago and Detroit, and "what" was being done was building upon old racist views of African Americans to make a literal killing in profits. In driving it into just how ironic this is, one must yoke the former slave with the staple food of the slave-master, chicken. Make no mistake, in a commercial climate, this is all strictly business; the nose doesn't turn up unless someone on the bad end of it can make a profit. Every big franchise again and again used chicken in their advertising in the African American community; there is a rich history of using these tastes while simultaneously assuming desperation. For the franchise, the desperation is "good for business"; we must do our due diligence by delineating why.
As the economy has evolved in the United States, consumerism has become more and more central to American capitalism. In this light, it becomes easy to see how specific communities are targeted by advertisers. This has been evident in "the use of media" to mark different groups of people as potential easy markets (Ravva 33). In a much more racially exclusive time period, these demographics would be "demarcated" by race (Ercanbrack 53). The black community is one such example of this trend, for better or for worse – often, and sometimes simultaneously, it is for both – the same product can serve to reflect solidarity and tribal identity as well as depict stereotypical racist views (Bromley 576). This could not be more apparent than in the following historical analysis of the down and dirty world of American chicken consumption within the African American community.
4.1. Marketing Strategies Targeting the Black Community
Using national fried chicken day as a "BIG DAY" and conning the African American community to come and spend their money on cholesterol-ridden wickedness is morally and socially wrong. Fried chicken, beer, and grape soda are advertised to blacks without respect to the harmful addictions that may occur and then reinforced by the millions of dollars these large fast food chains donate to help cure the "addictions" that are caused by the eating establishments themselves. In addition, these advertisements further the negative stigma held against the African American community, many of whom are poverty-stricken. Many people who may be hired to work in these establishments are also being exploited. It is a sad reality to see how much the quest for capitalist permanence can crowd out common sense and personal integrity.
Over the centuries, many negative connotations have been associated with fried chicken as the dinner-table food for blacks. When the fried variety became abundant in the slave and post-slave kitchens, it became associated with these negative traits. Though it has been desired by ethnic groups in abundance, its addition to their diet would presumably honor this history more than the previous and indeed current advertisements honoring national "fried chicken day."
The marketing strategies that have been used to exploit the black community in relation to fried chicken are nothing less than manipulative and cruel. Fried chicken was first introduced in large numbers into the diet of the black society because it was an underestimated animal that flourished in an all-natural environment. It was easy to keep and one chicken could feed a large family. However, the slaughterhouse industry encompassing animals requiring high maintenance costs and the entire harrowing process of actually slaughtering the animal allowed for a transition from non-profit to a profitable meat animal, high in fat and capable of producing a large body of lard to sell pharmaceuticals. In about half a century, the status of chickens was altered to such a degree that their meat was now the "poorest of the meats" and was "unfit for consumption by white Americans."