(2019) and editor of The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality.
Kwate applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, White Burgers, Black Cash Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, and reported the following:
We find page 99 at the beginning of the 5th chapter, the last one in Part I of the book. This page begins to delve into an important turning point in fast food’s period of Black exclusion. We’re in the late 1960s, which means second generation fast food (e.g., McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken) had been around for more than a decade. These outlets were ensconced in White suburban communities, and were intended to be wholesome sites where families could eat out together. But, as the text recounts, rowdy teenagers soon became a problem:Visit the White Burgers, Black Cash website and follow Naa Oyo A. Kwate on Twitter.Individual restaurant owners saw White families as necessary for a generative business but continued to wrestle with teenagers sporting profane language and squealing cars. By the late 1960s, the tenor had changed among restaurant owners about how to deal with youth, as they took a much harder line on juvenile delinquents than in the 1950s. Restaurant owners turned to police officers to discipline young customers, but the stamp of authority created a tense climate that could scare away the very families owners meant to assuage. Restaurateurs were deeply invested in tamping down any kind of perceived disorder, regardless of the source.Someone who is browsing the book and happens to open to page 99 would not get a good idea of the whole work. They would definitely learn something important—but in the grand scheme of things, it would be misleading. Part I of the book is titled, “White Utopias”. This first section of the book describes the genesis of fast food from the first generation in the early 1900s, through the second in the 1950s, and closes at the end of this chapter in the 1960s. Part II (Racial Turnover) covers the tumultuous 1960s, which includes everything from Black franchisees and franchisors to the federal financing of fast food; and Part III (Black Catastrophe) picks up in the 1970s, showing how fast food became endemic in Black urban communities. So page 99 would probably lead the reader to think the book is only about how fast food has functioned in White suburbia, which is not at all the case.
Since the page talks about how unruly teens led White suburban residents to become concerned about having fast food outlets as neighbors, it might also lead readers to think that these kinds of concerns were the most serious disruptions taking place on restaurant grounds. But later in the chapter, they will learn that Black patrons faced something much worse—racial violence. Black folks who dared try to dine at restaurants in White, and often changing neighborhoods, faced attacks from White customers and area residents, and received no assistance from employees or police. Fast food was clearly considered by certain White individuals as “theirs,” and they were willing to defend that notion with violence. It was something I hadn’t known about or anticipated when I began researching the book, and I think it says a lot about the importance of fast food’s symbolic meanings.
--Marshal Zeringue
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