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- [00:00]
Marcia Chatlin
Foreign.
- [00:12]
Slate Money Host
Welcome to Slate Money Food, which is another Slate Money miniseries, this one devoted to the economics of everything to do with food. And this week we're talking about race, we're talking about McDonald's, we're talking about food deserts, and we have the best possible person to talk about all of these things, Marcia Chatlin. Hi, Marcia.
- [00:36]
Marcia Chatlin
Hello.
- [00:37]
Slate Money Host
You are well known to Slate podcast listeners because you co host the Waves, but you also have a day job.
- [00:45]
Marcia Chatlin
Which is when I am not ranting about feminism and current events in popular culture. I teach African American history at Georgetown University.
- [00:55]
Slate Money Host
And when you're not doing that, you're writing books, the latest one of which.
- [00:58]
Marcia Chatlin
Is Franchise the Golden Arches in Black America.
- [01:02]
Slate Money Host
Wow, what a coincidence. You got. You've written a whole book about exactly what we wanted to talk to you about. How perfectly perfect. Yeah. We are going to talk to you about McDonald's, its role in black America, and more broadly about the franchise model, about food deserts and about whether capitalism is compatible with healthy eating. It's going to be a great discussion. So that is coming up on Slate Money Food. So let's start with McDonald's, because it's a subject we've covered on Slate Money in the past, but not in probably as much detail as we're about to go into right here. Big Picture, Final Verdict Marcia Good for black America or bad for black America?
- [01:53]
Marcia Chatlin
I don't know if I'm the one to say if it was good or bad, but you're the one who just.
- [01:57]
Slate Money Host
Wrote a whole book about it.
- [01:58]
Marcia Chatlin
But this is what I will say. McDonald's provides a prism for us to understand the relationship between racism and capitalism in America. So I think that McDonald's has been for black America what a lot of American institutions have been to black America, that it has provided limited entries of access and some success. But the weight of both race and economic inequality are always surrounding that relationship. And so for folks who were able to use franchising as a means of not only building their own personal wealth, but endowing organizations that are important to them, extending opportunity, I guess it was good for them. But I think that anytime we celebrate something, we have to weigh the cost. So maybe relationship status, it's complicated.
- [02:53]
Slate Money Host
Is it better than nothing? Or would black America have been better off if if McDonald's had just never even embraced them at all? Was it that just giant racist sucking sound where a bunch of black dollars wound up making their way to McDonald's shareholders in Zurich?
- [03:12]
Marcia Chatlin
Well, I think that the heart of that question is important, because anytime a Community is put in a position where it's a zero sum game, where it's all or nothing. It demonstrates the failures that have already preceded that decision. And so all I can say is that anytime African American community need is responded to within a frame of you get this or you get nothing, we see that there's very little to celebrate. And so had McDonald's not made the kind of consumer interventions into African American communities, we can assume that another franchise would. I think that my concern has always been what does it mean when a corporation has an outsize impact in the day to day life and the economic possibilities of a community? I don't think I'm comfortable with that.
- [04:09]
Slate Money Host
And The History of McDonald's in Black America basically goes back to what, like the late 60s, early 70s, around there?
- [04:17]
Marcia Chatlin
Yeah. So the introduction of McDonald's into black communities starts in 1968 after Martin Luther King's assassination. And the impulse to try to see if the McDonald's franchise model could work in black communities was a direct response to the fact that some white franchise owners didn't want to do business in black communities because they were afraid that they would be a target of future uprisings. They were also part of a wave of white owned businesses leaving African American communities. And at the moment where McDonald's is speculating about the possibilities, there are a number of federal programs and initiatives that are trying to restore, respond to some of the questions about racial equality through enhancing business opportunities.
- [05:08]
Slate Money Host
And it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong here, that those business opportunities that got enhanced for African American entrepreneurs who might want to start up a franchise tended to be often linked to big white owned corporations like McDonald's. And it was much easier to get those federally backed loans and that kind of thing if you, you were attaching yourself to a major corporation like McDonald's than it would have been too if you had just decided to start up a restaurant yourself and keep everything in the community.
- [05:45]
Marcia Chatlin
Absolutely. This is one of the things that I discovered in my research that I felt was very important to emphasize. When people think of the late 60s and early 1970s in the U.S. they think about the explosion of federal programs that were essentially pipelines into different industries. And with the rise of these programs and targeted affirmative action, there is often a misunderstanding that all of these doors opened. And the reality is that the doors that opened the widest were the ones that were linked to the strength of capital of major corporations. So people who sought minority business loans to do small scale businesses like bookstores or experimental Manufacturing operations in communities like Detroit or Watts, California. California. They were often rejected or they weren't funded at the levels that they needed to, because all of these programs didn't necessarily lessen the burden of getting loans from private banks, which had long been discriminatory. And so when the fast food industry was able to link up with these opportunities, they were safer investments because they had the capital strength of these major brands behind it.
- [07:02]
Slate Money Host
Does that also explain the food desert phenomenon of how it seems to have been incredibly difficult to open up grocery stores in these communities?
- [07:13]
Marcia Chatlin
Absolutely. So during this period of time, and I believe continues today, grocery stores were not considered small businesses for the purposes of the small Business administration. So there were really no incentives for grocery stores to open. Also because of the grocery store model, the margins are really, really thin. And so this idea of creating a place where there's all of this perishable content that people will just invest in, there weren't incentives for that. And a lot of grocery stores closed after major uprisings and never reopened. And so when we see the kind of inequality of grocery store access in poor communities of color today, a lot of the roots of that problem were seeded in the late 1960s with businesses closing and not returning and very few enticements to bring grocery stores into those communities.
- [08:08]
Slate Money Host
So walk me back. You've mentioned this twice in terms of first the white franchise owners in the inner city. As the inner city became black, they started worrying about uprisings. Then also the grocery store owners started worrying about uprisings. Like what was it about the death of Martin Luther King or the late 60s 60s. Were these fears well founded? And was there something just very economically dangerous about opening and running businesses in the inner city in, in the late 60s?
- [08:41]
Marcia Chatlin
Well, I think it becomes kind of a self perpetuating cycle where a lot of these businesses were profitable in these communities, an uprising occurs. And so rebuilding costs are therefore higher because then insurance costs are higher, because now the neighborhood is considered riskier to do business. But the reasons why these uprisings happen is largely because of police brutality. And people are deeply frustrated with the inequality within these communities. That's exacerbated sometimes by these business owners who were notorious for not hiring people within the communities for good jobs, who were also reliant on the police to intervene in situations that perhaps, perhaps a community minded model might have been able to mediate conflict. And these businesses, because they had a captive market, sometimes charged higher prices for lower quality goods. There was also an explosion during this time of consumer credit layaway programs that were Particularly predatory. So you have these businesses that are profiting in this unequal and predatory system that are exacerbating some of the problems in the community and then are targets of the community and then don't want to stay. And so you see these real tensions that arise between the fact that although these neighborhoods are poor because they have few consumer choices, they're also being exploited. And so people are getting more frustrated and angrier about it. So you see these real cycles, and that is part of why these communities really struggle with the ability to have businesses stay and really contribute to the quality of people's lives.
- [10:29]
Slate Money Host
And tell me about the black franchise owners. Certainly in immigrant communities, often opening up a fast food franchise is considered a very pretty well trodden path to the middle classes and path to wealth. And often those fast food franchises are in white suburban neighborhoods. It seems from reading your book that that path of like opening up a McDonald's in a white neighborhood was historically just basically not available to black entrepreneurs.
- [11:01]
Marcia Chatlin
So part of the logics of what happens when this opportunity opens up is that to put African Americans in this position to be black franchise owners, it's because they will have more connection, more goodwill, more trust with the surrounding community. And as a lot of these franchise owners become very successful in this model, they become wealthier. They may not live in the closest proximities to the communities in which they are working. They want opportunities outside, and they find it more difficult. And so it's this really good example of the ways that in the United States, a lot of economic opportunities are predicated on the hypersegregation that most people are living in. And so to be successful as a black business owner, you are often in a black neighborhood in which African American consumers want to buy from you because they think that buying black is a better way, way to reinvest in their communities. The challenge of that is, how do you then move beyond that model in a hyper segregated world where some people feel like there's questions as to whether white patrons will patronize a place run by people of color, particularly African Americans. And so how do you break that cycle? And so a lot of the fast food industry logics of putting people in different places was dependent on the segregation.
- [12:32]
Slate Money Host
So was there any evidence for that? I mean, was McDonald's right on some level that if black franchise owner opened up McDonald's in a white neighborhood, then those white folks would know that the owner was black and would be less likely to get their McNuggets or was that just bonkers?
- [12:52]
Marcia Chatlin
Well, there's some truth to that in the sense that there were a few cases early on of black franchise owners who tried to secure stores in predominantly white regions, and they experienced intimidation as a result, or they found themselves in a position where they were isolated from the other franchise owners. This is also something that we don't have a lot of clear information about, because still the majority of black franchise owners are working within majority black communities. And so I think the perception becomes the reality, and then the reality shapes future perceptions. While that's not uniformly true, what I did find anecdotally in researching the book was some black franchise owners say that they have more of a presence in the black communities they serve and less of a presence in predominantly white areas when they might have restaurants, because there was concern about whether or not if it was known that they are the franchise owner, if it would turn off white customers.
- [14:00]
Slate Money Host
I always think of McDonald's in particular and franchise restaurants in general as being incredibly uniform places. And the whole point is that you have the same experience when you walk into any McDonald's anywhere. And it's hard on some level for me to understand how someone walking into a McDonald's restaurant would have any indication at all of the race of the owner. But one of the things you do talk about is the really quite extensive efforts that McDonald's goes to in terms of community outreach and trying to be some kind of a good corporate citizen. And I guess it's more visible in those situations.
- [14:40]
Marcia Chatlin
Yeah. So this is something that people often ask me about. They say, well, how would I know the race of the person who's a franchise owner? And I said, this is actually a really good example of how race is lived out in the consumer marketplace. All of the food at McDonald's is pretty standard. There's some regional variations for taste, but it's standard. But the presence of a franchise owner often is tethered to race, because in black communities, the person who franchises the restaurant is a person who's giving out scholarship checks at the weekend event, who's sponsoring the health screening, who you might hear on the local urban radio station encouraging people to register to vote or participate in the census. It's because McDonald's has that kind of presence in filling those social gaps in black communities that you would know who your franchise owner is. And that's the phenomenon that I thought was particularly compelling and interesting that led me to write this book.
- [15:41]
Slate Money Host
So where are we now? There's a lot of history in this. But what's the status of. Let's Just widen it out a bit to just talk about food in predominantly black neighborhoods. Are we still in this situation where it's much more likely to be unhealthy fast food, that you're likely to have much less access to grocery stores and fresh vegetables, and that progress on those fronts is frustratingly slow?
- [16:11]
Marcia Chatlin
I think we are in an age where people have a greater awareness of the consequences of these foods on the impact of their health. I think we have some really great experimental projects in which young black activists are trying to include food justice within the larger framework of racial justice. And we continue to have low wage work in the fast food sector. We continue to have communities that are isolated from grocery stores or communities that are experiencing gentrification in which longtime residents can still only afford to enjoy fast food even as the food options continue to expand.
- [16:55]
Slate Money Host
Let me ask you a little bit about some of the more, you know, upbeat and optimistic projects like, say, Eastern Market in Detroit or, you know, places where people are saying, like, there is a whole new potential model here of getting a bunch of great, fresh, affordable food into the heart of African American communities. Now that we're a few years into some of these experiments, how are they playing out in practice?
- [17:22]
Marcia Chatlin
Well, some of the best practices that I have found are programs like the one that I'm on the board of in D.C. called D.C. central Kitchen, that has been able to do things like a Healthy Corners program where fresh produce is put into corner stores and made available to people so there's no waiting for this great supermarket to be built. In the time being, you can get fresh food at corner stores that are saturating certain communities. There are attempts to help people use food assistance programs like SNAP at farmers markets. And in some parts of the country, if you are on a food assistance program, you can get double the produce with your benefits and teaching some of the vendors at these markets how to accept payment in those forms. I think that there have been some small scale projects that are reclaiming space so that people can grow their own produce. And there are people who are fighting for better wages and better access to health care, which also complement opportunities to introduce people to healthier foods. And so I think that the analysis, again in a framework of racial and economic justice, has been really, really helpful in creating better ways of solving some of our food problems.
- [18:41]
Slate Money Host
The through line there for me, of all of those different things that you just mentioned is that all of them seem designed in some way to counteract the natural tendencies of a capitalist system that, you know, the capitalists aren't going to be setting up nonprofits to put, you know, food into corner stores. Because nonprofit by definition is not very capitalist. Snap is again, it's a way of sort of trying to counteract the inequalities of capitalism. It seems that what you had in the McDonaldization of urban America was the logical endpoint of capitalism. And now people are trying basically saying, if we want to be healthy, we're going to have to be less capitalist on some level.
- [19:27]
Marcia Chatlin
Absolutely. That there's no issue that is in front of us that doesn't require a deep and rigorous and robust critique of capitalism. These are the problems that capitalism creates, even as it tries to convince us that some people are getting rich and some people are getting jobs, but some people are being left behind. And I think that this next generation of food activists, because of the time in which they're trying to tackle these problems of food inequality, are realizing that this is about capitalism and its spectacular.
- [20:04]
Slate Money Host
Failures, which I find quite depressing. I feel like my natural impulse here is to try and look around the world at some perfectly capitalist culture in Italy or New Zealand or something and say, well, look, there's a whole bunch of organic food and very healthy stuff and it's capitalist and it seems to be working quite well there. But you're saying like, no, especially in America, and especially given the sort of structural racism in America, the only way to really address these issues is, is to say like, capitalism has probably made things worse and is very unlikely to make things better. And if we're going to have healthy communities, then we're just going to have to roll back some of the capitalist tendencies.
- [20:44]
Marcia Chatlin
I think the examples you give of these other nations, they also have incredibly well funded social systems where people are not getting employment so that they can have health care, where elderly people are not left behind, where the unemployed don't have access to their basic needs. And so the point that I'm trying to make in Franchise is that we can't solve the problems created by capitalism by infusing capitalism into the framework. So the calls for racial justice are calls to end the ways that racism and capitalism collude in order to oppress people. So the answer can't be, well, we'll just call it black capitalism and make a few black millionaires. It doesn't work that way. And so I don't know if I'll ever see the complete upending of capitalism in the United States. But at the very least, I think.
- [21:37]
Slate Money Host
Yeah, don't hold your breath on that one.
- [21:40]
Marcia Chatlin
But I think at the Very least, we can use our imaginations to think of a world in which people are not so stuck.
- [21:47]
Slate Money Host
And to what degree can the travails, for lack of a better word, of African American neighborhoods, reflected also in poor white neighborhoods who equally have, or not equally, but similarly similarly have really kind of nasty health outcomes.
- [22:04]
Marcia Chatlin
Yeah. I think that the major distinction along those racial lines is that some of the resources that are in a McDonald's restaurant are also used in those communities. So, for instance, in some rural communities or poor white communities, using the McDonald's for Internet access, using it as a place where you can have a consistent source of air conditioning when it's too hot. The role of the franchise owner in those communities, I think, is different because business and charity and philanthropy aren't necessarily only found in black communities. But what I do see is that the role that the business owner has to play in covering a lot of the gaps in black communities. I think that burden and that expectation and that responsibility is higher because of the ways historically that black businesses had to fill in those gaps caused by racism. And so I think there are a lot of communities that are highly dependent on McDonald's. McDonald's as a gathering space, as a site for the only jobs available to young people, as a place where there is a playground, where there isn't a park. But the ways that black communities are starved of the very, very most basic needs, I think a lot of that gap is filled by McDonald's.
- [23:24]
Slate Money Host
Wow. McDonald's is like in the business, on some level, of providing social services, which is. Is really kind of not what it.
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Marcia Chatlin
Was designed to do, not what it's designed to do.
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Slate Money Host
Let's finish with this then. What's the future of fast food? Assuming that we're not going to have an anti capitalist revolution, is McDonald's going to disproportionately dominate the diet of African Americans in the way that it has done until now? Or is the era of fast food in African American communities like, like slowly dissipating?
- [23:58]
Marcia Chatlin
I think what we're going to see is with the emergence of the fast casual category, that people who have the means to spend a few dollars more for slightly higher quality food are going to continue to do that and that we'll see the kind of big fast food companies really be the choice of the working poor and the hyper poor. But I do think that with gentrification, the role and capacity of black franchise owners to have such an impact in their community will change because their consumer base will change. And I'm also curious to see the impact of gentrification in some of these locations that go back to the 60s and 70s in black communities, because essentially, McDonald's is one of the largest real estate holders in the country, and they often own the land on which their companies are built. And so I think that these new economic shifts, as well as just the infusion of more types of food in the marketplace, makes me wonder then who will be the consumer base for the future? And as a lot of black communities are now brown communities, I think you might see a second wave of recruitment of the Latino community into franchising. So I think that the story will continue. The race of the actors may change, but I think the fundamental ways that it can teach us about race and capitalism will unfortunately continue.
- [25:28]
Slate Money Host
I'm glad you brought up real estate, because that's an important part of this story. And one of McDonald's great competitive advantages has been the fact that it's the parent company that owns the land. Right? It's not the franchisee 100%. And so in neighborhoods which have gentrified, if there's a McDonald's and then the parent company turns around and thinks to itself, well, like, it's a perfectly successful McDonald's, we could make more money just by leasing out that land to a condo development or, you know, an office block or something like that, then did they just basically allow the franchise to expire and gentrify that way?
- [26:06]
Marcia Chatlin
I'm sure there are terms that allow it to either take back the store, convert it into a corporate owned store, or do something else with that land. So they're a smart bunch over there. So I'm sure there are ways that they can ensure their highest profit by making these different moves with land. So I think that's also part of what will happen where black franchise owners may shift from city locations, and we see them more in suburbs that are becoming more racially diverse and are becoming the places where people end up when they're priced out of cities.
- [26:45]
Slate Money Host
Marcia Chatlin, thank you very much. This has been most illuminating.
- [26:49]
Marcia Chatlin
Thank you so much.