A History of Racial Riots and Why Ferguson Matters Today

I wrote this in 2014. It’s worth a re-post. Here we are 6 years later. Still.

I was in Atlanta last weekend for the annual Southern Historical Association meetings, a city brimming with a rich historical past, from events of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, and, notably, the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. On Saturday afternoon, as I was heading to lunch with a high school friend I had not seen in years, I witnessed a scene that happens daily in every major metropolitan area of the country.  Two young black men were walking down the street talking when a police car drove by, then circled back, stopped, and apparently asked them for identification.

As we drove away, not knowing the circumstances surrounding this particular police stop, my thoughts went to Ferguson, where the grand jury was still deliberating the fate of Officer Darren Wilson.  In what was surely a poorly timed announcement late last night the country learned that Officer Wilson would not be indicted on any of the five accounts for the murder of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown.  The city of Ferguson quickly erupted into chaos as peaceful demonstrators took years of anger and frustration to the streets.

Incidents like this do not happen in a vacuum nor are they spontaneous acts of “thuggary” as the media would like us to think.  As we learned from the McCone Commission in 1965 charged with looking into the Watts Riot and, perhaps more importantly, the Kerner Commission in 1968, there are systemic causes behind the riots that still exist today – residential segregation, substandard housing, high unemployment, and distrust of police in predominantly black neighborhoods.  In 1965, when Marquette Frye was arrested during a “routine” traffic stop, more than 200 onlookers watched as a scuffle broke out between Frye and a white police officer leading to one of the most explosive and expensive riots in American history. In 1965 Watts, where the population density of blacks relative to the rest of Los Angeles was incredibly high, unemployment for black men stood at 34%.  Most notably, in an area of the city that was 98% black only five of the 205 police patrolling the neighborhood were black.

Similarly, in 1967, in Newark, New Jersey, routine police harassment and a lack of political power led to yet another costly riot.  As the Kerner Commission noted after the riots in Detroit and Newark, America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

According to Michelle Alexander’s New York Times bestselling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, we are still a racially divided nation, even more than four decades after the civil rights movement proper.  As recent studies have shown, blacks are more likely to be arrested in almost every city in America for every type of crime.  And as noted in last weeks USA Today investigative report, “Racial Gap in Arrest Rates: ‘Staggering disparity’,” in Clayton, Missouri, a town that is only 8% black, African Americans constitute 52% of those arrested.

As a political activist and a pacifist, I do not condone any type of violence, yet I understand that when marginalized groups of individuals feel dispossessed and without a voice, they have, historically, taken to the streets to bring attention to the problems that they face everyday; problems that most of America are either not aware of or turn a blind eye to.  As was apparent in President Obama’s prosaic address to the nation last night after the verdict was read, we do not, as a country like to talk about race.  But it is a conversation that needs to be had, despite the fact that we elected an African American man as our Commander in Chief.  What happened in Ferguson is an example of “the straw that broke the camels back.”  It is not indicative of the trope propagated by the media of a black community that is persistently violent in the wake of not getting their way.

As was the case in 1960s America, police-community conflict continues to be the underlying cause of much of the racial unrest in our urban communities.  Problems of inner city black America are real, economic dislocation among other problems are in dire need of immediate policy attention.  If we really want to address the issues that created Ferguson, we need to be honest with ourselves about the racial disparities that continue to exist in the United States.  Only then can we move towards a post-racial society.

 

 

On Chefs

On Chefs

I seem to have an affinity for the most dangerous, the most morally suspect, and the most wicked people, particularly when it comes to men. Men with foul mouths, tattoos, motorcycles, leather jackets. Men who smoke too much, drink too much, love too hard and too fast, and fuck like rock stars. I gravitate towards the ones who are the most problematic, to say the least and, completely unavailable, to state the obvious. Men who smell like booze and cigarettes, men who reek of decadence. Men who are both handsome and witty, salty and sexy. And for all of these reasons, with more than two decades in the restaurant business behind me, when I entered academia I left in my wake a trail of chefs. (It is also the reason that I have had a two-decade love affair in my head with Anthony Bourdain, the only man who has ever truly smashed my heart into pieces when he took his own life last year.)

Food is love. It’s why I love chefs. Talented chefs. Chefs who appreciate how food makes people feel; food that transports us to another time and place; food that conjures memories of times past. Chefs who are so passionate about food and what they cook that it reveals their souls. Food is sensual. Food is love. And because I love food, I love chefs.

Let me tell you about the relationship between bartenders and chefs. Bartenders are not like other “front of the house” staff. We operate in much the same vein as the back of the house staff do, albeit more visible than cooks, but equally as essential to how a restaurant operates. We are also as dangerous and morally suspect and wicked as those in the back. We drink while we work, much as chefs do; we seduce patrons with our concoctions, much as chefs do with food; we serve sex in a glass, rather than on a plate; and, like chefs, regular folks flock to us because we are somewhat of a mystery. Subsequently, you will find that chefs and bartenders are drawn to each other for the sheer fact that while we appear mysterious to the people who patronize our establishments, we are not a mystery to each other. We quietly and resolutely move in and out of each other’s realms in what can only be described as a seductive dance between the most important person in the back of the house, and the most important person in the front.

The first chef I fell in love with was my father. What I remember most about my father when I was child is that he always made us the most delicious food, on the grill, in the kitchen, with love and humility and skill; he still does to this day. I could feel his love through food. I would rather eat in my father’s house than at Le Bernadin or The French Laundry or at any place that doesn’t exude the love that his kitchen does. Food is love. Also, he made me a bartender when I was a small child and well, chefs and bartenders have a special relationship.

The second most important chef in my life is my brother. He went to culinary school at age 24, armed with a new GED and a sense of how important food was to who he had become. My brother is all of what I described above. He has a wry, dry sense of humor. He’s extremely well read and well informed about the world. He listens to the best music (we went to Grateful Dead shows together when we were younger) and loves to make food for people he loves and even, at times, people he would rather spit on than serve a well-done steak. But he does it, because he loves food and food is love.

And then, when I found myself back in Bowling Green after a failed attempt at life in Washington, D.C. (the first time) I met David. I found myself back at the sports bar where I had worked three years prior as an undergraduate student and David was best friends with one of my favorite bar backs, another David. David was sexy and young and had the body of Adonis. David played volleyball in the self-made sand volleyball pit he and his roommates had created in the house next door to where I was living. He had just graduated from college and had been accepted to the Culinary Institute of America, which made him ever the more appealing in my eyes. I knew what the CIA was and because I was a bartender I loved chefs. We spent a beautiful six months together in flat, boring Ohio talking about food and drinks and where we would travel and then a year apart while he studied at the CIA. I love to visit him in Hyde Park, breathing in the beautiful grounds of the campus and eating the best foods I had ever tasted and, of course, having the best sex of my life, because well, chefs and bartenders go together and we fuck like rock stars.

David had his choice of externships: Working for Alice Waters in California or working for Charlie Trotter in his new age kitchen in Chicago. David was a good chef. He was better than good; he was talented and his love for food made him stand out. He was an up and coming chef in the newly emerging Food Network world of cuisine and it showed in the fact that he had his pick of places where he could work in a kitchen for six months to hone his craft. Ultimately, he chose to work for Emeril, the newly famous “Bam” chef who had recently opened up a restaurant to rave reviews in New Orleans, the site of all food decadence. And so, after a slew of bartending gigs and lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., and trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life, I decided to go with David to New Orleans.

New Orleans changed the trajectory of my life. I will never question my decision, even as a raging feminist, to follow a man to a place that was unknown, the only time I ever made that decision and probably the only time I will ever do so. New Orleans is still, to this day, the only place that when I am entering airspace, when I can see the Mississippi and see the Superdome from the plane and can sense the humidity in my bones, I feel that I am home. New Orleans has been my home since I moved there with David in March of 1996. David, however, felt differently about New Orleans. Working for Emeril was difficult; the hours were long, the work was hard, and while he did, in fact, hone his craft, he unfortunately, ended up not appreciating the city and all of its nuances as much as I did. He ended up leaving and I ended up staying because I, as a bartender with much more time to take it all in, got what New Orleans was, and still is, all about. I embraced the culture with a bear hug-like jubilance. And it wasn’t just the food that I fell in love with. I let city’s history and love of music and all things beautiful flow through me; part of an appreciation for the arts that has always been part of my DNA. I soaked in idiosyncrasies that are an intimate part of everything New Orleans. I breathed in the night Jasmine that bloomed in the spring and the stench of Bourbon Street in the early hours of the day when I made my way to Café Du Monde for Beignets and Chicory coffee. Mostly, I loved the whole “laissez le bon temps roulez” (let the good times roll) spirit that enveloped the city and its people, with a ferocity that only rivals falling in love. I cherished the way laid-back New Orleanians moved around in a weary daze, slowly, but with intent because it’s humid every single day and if you live in New Orleans you are simply forced to take in the day as one takes in that sweet smell of night Jasmine. I was in love with it all.

I left New Orleans to attend a Ph.D. program in the northeast. I chose the farthest place from New Orleans I could possibly go. I needed to be grounded and serious and hunker down for what was sure to be a difficult three years of immersing myself in books and theory and pedagogy. New Orleans would always be my home, I told myself. New Orleans wasn’t leaving me, I was leaving it, like I had left the chefs, but this time it wouldn’t be permanent. It was only a layover while I became what I was ultimately supposed to become, a professional historian. Also, as someone who grew up in the Midwest, someone who had embraced the humidity the first year and enjoyed the wonder of what it was to live in hot weather for nine months, it started to wear on me. I wanted to be back on a college campus in the fall, experiencing the change of seasons, and cold, and the quiet that comes when winter settles in.

When I found myself back in Washington, D.C. in the winter of 2001, after attending graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, needing to be in the city so I had access to archives at the Library of Congress and Howard University, I went back to the “industry.” I started back working for the McCormick and Schmicks Company, an old-school steak house restaurant located in the central business district close to the halls of Congress where the politicians made secretive deals over three or four martini lunches. I was back working in a bar, but as a cocktail waitress where there were fifteen tables and booths and I was expected to work half the room while another waitress worked the other half. That’s seven tables apiece (we split the other one) in a busy, crowded, loud room that on any given day could be raucous yet manageable, or chaotic and completely unmanageable. When I accepted the position I agreed that I would work 3-4 days a week so that I could spend the majority of my time finishing my research and writing my dissertation. That schedule never happened as I found myself working at least five days a week, sometimes back to back or double shifts and even the dreaded “clo-pen,” closing the bar at midnight, getting home at one a.m. only to wake up and turn around to be back to open everything back up at 10am. Clo-pens are the worst, particularly when you’re trying to write a book.

So, about Chef #2. First, he was an asshole. The day I arrived in a new starched white shirt and ironed apron and new pens and an upbeat attitude he told me to ditch the hoop earring I had in my upper left ear. It wasn’t professional enough for a place like M&S Grill. I handed it to him and he promptly threw it in the trash. Yes chef. He constantly yelled at me for seemingly every little infraction. I couldn’t ring in orders to his liking. Yes chef. Customers don’t get special treatment, I don’t care if it is Newt Gingrich, because they want to substitute fries for mashed potatoes. Yes chef. Could I tell the bartender to make him a vodka, splash of tonic, immediately because this night was a goddamned shit show. Yes chef. Could I not come into the kitchen and ask him inane questions for fucks sake did I not know the menu by now and could I just answer the customer’s question without bothering him when he was in the weeds and didn’t have time for silly questions from the new girl. Yes chef. And then, one night, did I want to have a drink with him after work, after working a double-shift, dead tired and just wanted to go home and put my feet up and drink some wine. Yes chef.

His name was Rob. He was 6’2 with piercing blue eyes that looked like ice. His hair was prematurely grey for someone soon to be only 40 years old. He swore a lot, particularly in the kitchen and, notably at me, often. He drank, a lot, almost as much as me. He had tattoos. He wore a leather jacket. He chain-smoked. He was an asshole. He fucked like a rock star. He was intoxicating in his bad boy chef way. I fell for him. Yes chef.

There were rules about the chef dating the wait staff. Of course, we ignored them and for six glorious months had what can only be described as a mutual love affair with food and booze and cigarettes and coffee and sex. When I got incredibly sick one evening he made me the most delicious friend chicken and mashed potato dinner, comfort food, to ease my soul and my fever. He bought me a silver hoop earring to replace the one he so casually tossed into the trash my first day at work and bought himself a matching one to seal the deal. He still yelled at me at work, to keep up the pretense that we were not a couple even when everyone in the restaurant knew we were having carnal relations on the regular. When my bag got stolen out of the staff locker room, he bought me a new phone and a new Coach purse and anything else I needed that I couldn’t afford on a poor graduate student/cocktail waitress salary. And then, after I had quit M&S Grill and went to work as a bartender/manager for a friend with a much more reasonable four day a week schedule walking distance from my apartment, he left. No explanation. No conversation about what wasn’t working. No “this is how we end a relationship as adults” conversation. Yes chef.

With Chef number two in my rearview mirror I vowed to never, ever, under any circumstances, with a newly minted Ph.D. in hand and a visiting assistant professorship in the waiting, to date a chef. I slept with a chef or two here and there, because well, they fuck like rock stars, but no more love affairs with chefs. So, I dated a bar manager instead. Not a chef. We spent five years together probably not in love, but perhaps a mutual understanding that we were part of a tribe, since I never felt quite like I fit into academia. We drank and smoked and had sex, sometimes, and then I left because being part of the “industry” tribe wasn’t enough and I knew I wasn’t in love.

Chef #3. So, I had successfully avoided chefs for more than twenty years. Out of the “industry” means it’s easy enough to see them through the kitchen window, admire them from afar, pay your bill, and casually walk to another bar to end the evening leaving that chef behind. But then one showed up at my local haunt, the bar that I have frequented for years here in Bethlehem. The bar that is my Cheers, that has become my family. The bar that I call home on any given day and that welcomes me with open arms. I walked in on a dreary January day for happy hour to see friends I hadn’t seen in weeks as I had been spending the holidays with my best friend who lost her husband earlier that year, a man I loved and also considered my best friend.

“Who’s the new guy?” I asked.

“Joe,” was the response as we call everyone who works in the kitchen at Joe’s “Joe” since they seem to come and go casually and so frequently.

The new “Joe” was cute, bearded, goofy and smiling all the time, and as I would soon come to discover tattooed. Abort. He smoked a vape and interacted casually with the regulars, drinking with my friends at the end of the night, long after happy hour ended and I had gone home. Abort.

A few weeks later I arrived at Joe’s on a Friday at 4pm as I do when I am meeting the “guys” for “thank god it’s the weekend and let’s start it early” drinks. I sat with Shelly at the end of the bar and we caught up on the week.

“So, what’s his story?” I asked.

And then Shelly proceeded to tell me all of the things that once again reminded me why I should never, ever ask about the cook. Abort.

He went to the Culinary Institute of America. Two degrees. Abort. He worked in Boston for nine years. He had a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard and then moved to Philadelphia and then back to Bethlehem where he’s lived for the last seven years. Abort. “He’s smart and interesting, albeit quiet,” she said as I looked at him with fresh eyes and the impending sense of danger that creeps up in me when my gut is telling me not to think the things I know full well I shouldn’t be thinking in the back of my mind.

Chefs are bad news Shannon. Abort.

But then I went out back to smoke a cigarette as Joe’s had recently become a non-smoking establishment and I found myself asking about his time in New England and telling him about my time in New England and thus began a friendship, once again, between a bartender/now writer/historian and a chef.

Every time I walked into the bar he beamed. He found reasons to be in the bar, not the kitchen, to converse or to be present. He told terrible jokes and I told him so. He fucked with the regulars and became integrated into the Joe’s groove. He stayed and we started calling him Pete and not “Joe.” We continued our outside smoking conversations, drawing the minutes out longer and longer each time, quietly and resolutely becoming more than simply friendly patron and chef. He began asking me if I was going to miss him every time I left through the back door to leave for the evening. And then one night, as I was walking out the back door, he told me that he was off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays with his wry smile and it was then I knew that I was falling back into chef mode and that he had won me over. I wrote my phone number on one of my business cards, holding onto it for a week fighting the urge to let another chef have full access to my life and, quite possibly, my heart.

Joe’s St. Patrick’s Day is epic. It begins at 9am and there’s breakfast and Guinness and Bloody Mary’s and Mimosa’s and revelry. We regulars gather to watch the parade (which was non-existent this year in the age of Covid-19) and spend the day wandering the streets of Bethlehem, always ending back at Joe’s, our home base. This year was sure to be our last hurrah as the threat of quarantine loomed over us. I sat with Shelly at the end of the bar, mild day, doors open, talking, watching Pete watch me from the kitchen down the long bar, watching Pete walk to the end of the bar where we sat to ask Shelly questions periodically, questions she later told me were unnecessary given what he had already knew and questions, which we know now, were simply a pretense to come to the end of the bar and talk to me. And when I left that evening, after drinking all day, and multiple Irish Car Bombs (which I admit I am too old to drink at this point), I pulled the trigger and gave him the card with my number on it. And then I said, “Tell me a story.”

So, this is the story, at least this is my story. We spent a glorious, love-full, intoxicating, couldn’t-get-enough-of-each-other month together. He told me he loved me the first week. He insisted on it even when I emphatically stated that great sex isn’t love. He insisted. He bought me a purple orchid because my favorite color is purple and I should have something beautiful living in my house, aside from me. (That orchid has since died; a metaphor perhaps?) He asked me to wear his necklace, his favorite necklace, a piece of meteorite on a chain, meteorite that had survived thousands of years, as our love would, and then he ordered another one for himself, sealing the deal. We discussed how neither of us had ever wanted to get married, and then all of a sudden we were planning a wedding in Vegas, getting married by “The King” himself, followed by a party at Joe’s where we met to celebrate our new love. We were going to buy a houseboat because both of us had dreamed at one time of living on a houseboat a la “Quincy.” We watched Money Heist and called each other Tokyo and Rio because like them, nothing would ever tear our love apart (spoiler alert, they split in Season 4). We drank and smoked and talked about future travel plans where we would eat and drink and have rock star sex in exotic places and experience the world together. When I finally relented and said I loved him too, I asked him to promise me he wouldn’t break my heart and he asked me not to break his and we pinky swore we would never hurt each other. We had rock star sex because chefs and bartenders are part of a tribe and this is what they do when they have found each other after all these years. I succumbed to something and someone that I promised myself I would never do again. I succumbed to a chef. And, this time, I believed that it was real and true and forever.

One month. And then he left, well not so much left as quietly stopped communicating. No explanation, even when I repeatedly asked for one. Nothing. I asked him not to break my heart and well, pinky swears never really held up when we were kids, so why should I expect them to as adults? One month. He broke my heart in one month. It was impressive. And that’s the story, at least my story because I don’t know his and maybe I never will. One month. I opened my heart for the first time in almost twenty years and convinced myself that chefs could be safe and could love and that this one could be different. Love in the age of coronavirus and all that shit.

Most days I’m not sorry. Most days I am enormously grateful that I could feel my heart again. For one month my heart was wide open and welcoming. I decided that to try and love again was a risk but it was a risk well worth it. I decided he was worth it. When a chef tells you that the stars aligned when you met, believe them, because maybe they did. But! And there’s always a but. Be cautious. The stars may have aligned, but sometimes stars fall and hearts fall with them. Love is hard and it’s risky and mostly worth it. Just don’t fall for a chef. They’ll make the stars fall every time.