The Perspectives Series Vol 4: In Conversation with Michael Twitty

Reclaiming Black Culinary Traditions and their Rightful Place as the Foundation of Modern America (Excerpt).

Originally published on September 3rd, 2020.

The following is an excerpt from the conversation between Michael Twitty and Will Dorman, the full version has been published in Issue #4 of the Preserve Journal. (Opens in a new window)

Michael W. Twitty (Opens in a new window) is the author of the blog Afroculinaria (Opens in a new window), a food writer, independent scholar, culinary historian and historical interpreter personally charged with preparing, preserving and promoting African American foodways and its parent traditions in Africa and her Diaspora and its legacy in the food culture of the American South. Michael is a Judaic studies teacher from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area and his interests include food culture, food history, Jewish cultural issues, African American history and cultural politics.

Will Dorman (Opens in a new window)is a chef, butcher, writer, and historian currently living and working in London. His areas of interest include regenerative agriculture, fermentation, food sovereignty, and intersectional climate justice. Currently, Will is working as a butcher at a Pasture for Life Association, a whole carcass animal butchery exclusively sourcing animals raised through regenerative land management practices.

 Will Dorman (WD): How do you interpret the cultural exchange that occurred as a result of chattel slavery? How does that inform our society today?

Michael W. Twitty (MT): We understand that certain dishes, practices and ideas didn’t exist prior to our ancestors being engaged with the outside world through exile. Enslaved Africans brought their seeds, traditions, and folk knowledge with them. It’s so many of these ingredients and food ways which contributed to or formed the basis for most of the dishes we call Southern food. All of this was despite the hardships they endured. They made a way out of no way. Unfortunately, their thought process has never really been investigated…

The fact is that I’m the one who has to spend thousands of dollars to find out where I come from. Other people can go look themselves up on ancestry.com no problem. That’s a lot of hard work and money from people who were denied a lot of money from their hard work. Only we have to do that. And it’s not just the money and the time- it’s the emotion. The feeling for me was, ‘Oh my god, these people had names! Oh my god that was my family’s name? Oh my god, we came from where? Oh my god, that person looks like my aunt, grandpa, grandma or me.’ And I would never have known this had I not done the work. That’s part of the scholarship unfortunately. Nobody talks about that. {…}. I remember when I got really slammed by the guy who was writing in Charleston, who called me a Nazi because of the DNA research. He was trying to say ‘we’re all related anyway.’ And I thought- the arrogance!

WD: Saying that is no different than when people say ‘all lives matter’.

MT: It’s all lives matter, yes. Because he wasn’t talking about the whole globe- he was talking about Europeans and didn’t even realize. Yes, I am related to a lot of Europeans, but how am I related to them? Oooooooh… See what happens the moment you ask that question? And the thing is that if you’re using Europeans as the basis to make an argument that Michael Twitty is full of nonsense because we’re all related anyway then you’re talking about Europeans who lived on the European continent. Most of them didn’t move 30-50 miles from the place they were born in their lifetime. From these ethnic and national identities in very small spaces you’re repeating eurocentrism by arguing that my arguments for diversity and inclusion of black history are bunk by saying ‘let’s go back to what we know’ well, ‘who is we?” And what do we know about ourselves?

That way of thinking totally denies the fact that there are African genes and African backgrounds in many white southerners. White southerners are some of the blackest white people in North America. 10-15% carry enough genes, that if we imposed the one drop rule there’s be a lot more official black people running around. Those that don’t have that genealogy have still grown up around us and lived around us and absorbed our culture for so long that if you took them to their fatherlands, England, France, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark and then took them to Nigeria, I promise you they’d feel more at home and more comfortable in Nigeria. That would scare the hell out of them because it would fly in the face of everything they’ve been taught about who they are, what they are, and where they come form. That’s the part of the work which is confrontational. I’m not trying to be a jerk. I’m just trying to show you a mirror. The mirror is a very powerful thing my friend.

Most white Americans do not look at the mirror and see some outside force staring back at them. Many, but not all, Black Americans do. Every time I look in the mirror I see straight hair coming out of my face. That didn’t come from West Africa. I’m 20% European. If you were to add up my DNA I would have one white grandparent. That’s all part of how we define race.

Race is an illusion; food is a reality. However, racism is not an illusion; racism is a pathology. It’s something that we have to deal with and interact with- a social illness, a disease. We have to deal with it and we have to figure out a way out of it. Everyday you get up and do the work by getting up and looking in the mirror. You have to see this person that is shaped by several hundred years of history. You can ignore it, and that’s fine. You’re okay to ignore it because no one is forcing you to deal with the complexity of how you got here. Sometimes for your own personal mental health, it’s not a road you should go down. However, if you want to go down that road, you have to tell the truth. More and more people are not confrontational about this, but I’m not going to kid myself, and I’m not going to kid you either. These changes in perception didn’t happen because they’re natural. They’ve happened because me and a lot of other people forced that conversation for a very long time.

WD: That’s such an important point. So much of the change we’re seeing now is the result of grassroots organizing and people like you telling the truth about the Black experience in America even when there has been so much pushback and confrontation.

WD: You mentioned that race is an illusion, food is a reality. How does this relate to the purpose of the work you’re doing?

MT: I don’t like when people say, ‘oh it doesn’t matter what race you are’ or even right now during the current situation they talk about, ‘racial disparities.’ You know this isn’t a thing right? We’ve already had this conversation but people cling to that language. Race is really what we’d call genotype, phenotype, ethnotype and sociotype. Those four parts. What I like to do is use my manner of inquiry and say ‘you’re saying race but what you really mean is socio-cultural and economic status’. What you really mean when you say that is the social status someone is given that makes them either adorable or ugly, smart or dumb, talented or not based on social myths and perceptions i.e. stereotypes. Another misconception is that race is your color. Your color is your phenotype- it is how you look. It’s the gamble of genes that makes you look a certain way. Ethnotype is what we make of it. Ethnicities are born every minute and we don’t even realize it. New social understandings in groupings arise and then they die out too. Take that back to food and black people. It’s not just us, it’s the people of Colombia, it’s the people of the Pacific coast, the Atlantic coast, the Venezuelans, and the Bahamians, and the people in the north of the Amazon. It’s hundreds of stories that the simplistic word ‘race’ cannot encapsulate. We need to start seeing people as ethnic and unique.

When I really started to do this work I had a lot of ambivalence about being African American and what it meant to be African American because I was consistently told that we weren’t really nice people, weren’t good people, and that if we were accomplished, our accomplishment was impressing white people as opposed to just being ourselves. Then as a result of this project I discovered that we had a massive hand in freeing ourselves, did stuff on our own terms, and brought this culture over and had to work out for ourselves passing that culture down. I think if there’s any exceptionalism in America it’s the Black woman and the Black man- despite the odds.

You and I both know that everybody comes from slaves. Everybody has ancestors that were enslaved- that wore the shoe of the servant and of the oppressed at one point or another. But how is it that the enslaved Africans, when all that was taken from them, still managed to transform the culture for the people around them?

 
WD: You talk a lot about the idea of culinary injustice. How would you define it? How is culinary justice related to environmentalism and climate change?

MT: Culinary injustice is the act of denying people ownership and agency over their culinary productions and industry. I say that’s different from food justice. Food justice circles around food as a human right, particularly food that’s nutritious and sustaining and enables positive growth in humankind and human communities. Cuisine is a part of culture. It’s intellectual and cultural property. A lot of times we forget that part of the selling of culinary culture is based on who has the mouthpiece. Who is marketing? Part of selling food is selling a story, selling a narrative, and it’s bound up with access to land, who grows the food, and who gets to label the histories behind the food…

The word whitewashing is too cliché- it’s a constant erasure. How does that trickle down? People will say ‘you black kids, you’re lazy, you don’t wanna go to work’, ‘y’all don’t wanna do nothin’. First of all, in order to be in the food game you have to have property, land, access to places you can grow food, and clean water. Then all the environmental stuff you talked about before is down the tube- because when you live in Cancer Alley and food deserts it’s hard. It’s not easy to reclaim your culinary heritage- whatever it is. Then you tell our kids they’re lazy, they don’t want to do anything. If they would only get good grades and become Obama then we could ridicule you on the national stage. You can’t win. Then awful people say things like ‘half-rican American’ and qualify your blackness as a joke in front of the world. It’s gross.

Let’s go back- you tell my kids that they don’t have any heritage and they don’t have any land. Well, the land’s been taken away, stripped down from black people in this country to almost nothing whereas one hundred years ago we had a ton of land despite having to earn it. They put in twice the work, the kind of work that European settlers coming into the Midwest never had to do. We had this culture, this intense beautiful interaction where we were either the inventors, the creators, or the go-betweens who catalyzed mixing cultures. We get no credit for it. We’re locked out the story and the value that the cache of that story gives you. You know why people love New Orleans’ food? Because they taste Africa, but they hear France. They’ve always been told that New Orleans was this cultural capsule of French culture with absolutely no understanding of what fucking French food is about….

I get very upset when people write me letters like this woman who said ‘you’re trying to erase me as a white southerner.’ I’m not trying to erase you - I’m trying to show you your African ancestors!