Eating While Black - by Psyche A Williams-Forson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food"--

Book Synopsis

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food.

Sustainable culture--what keeps a community alive and thriving--is essential to Black peoples' fight for access and equity, and food is central to this fight. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity--as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels.

Review Quotes

"Eating While Black invites us all to examine how racial, class, and other anxieties often drive institutions and individuals to consciously or unconsciously inflict harm on Black people (and everyone else). Psyche Williams-Forson's analysis calls for a deeper understanding of the ways in which expressions of 'concern' over how we grow food, cook, and eat are often more about policing our behavior and patrolling the boundaries of race and class."--Bryant Terry, James Beard Award- and NAACP Image Award-winning author of Black Food and editor in chief of 4 Color Books

"Eating While Black looks at Black food culture along the broader tablecloth of structural and systemic racism, violence, degradation, socioeconomics, and exploitation. . . . The stories, anecdotes, and analyses are illuminating . . . insightful."--INDY Week

"Everybody eats, so what's political about eating? After reading Eating While Black, the answer is clear: everything."--LIBER: A Feminist Review

"From cooking lessons that urge 'healthier' ways to prepare a pot of collard greens to policies that suggest Black people have the worst health records because of what they eat, in her latest examination of food and culture, Williams-Forson says such food shaming is anti-Black racism. Denigrating Blacks for enjoying foods that represent their cultural and spiritual roots deprives Black Americans their identity. Combining personal experience with insights from popular culture, Williams-Forson describes how even in their consumption of food, Black people are often perceived as transgressing, misbehaving, and in need of 'gastronomic' surveillance."--Civil Eats

"In this sobering yet enticing book, Psyche Williams-Forson offers a road map for moving forward from the racially biased ways in which African American food choices are commonly ridiculed and judged, to a landscape unsullied by stereotype and ignorance. I respect the enormity of what she has revealed, and I loved this book."--Patricia A. Turner, author of Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Racism in the Twenty-First Century

"Provocative and incisively argued, sometimes humorous and always deeply engaging, Eating While Black is Psyche Williams-Forson's meditation on how and why narratives of misrepresentation about Black culinary lives find purchase and pervasively circulate in the media, society, and American households of all types. It reveals how confusions (willful and otherwise) about how Black people eat have produced a profoundly distorted image of Black people--a reality that permeates so much of what it is to be Black in this country."--Naa Oyo A. Kwate, author of Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

"Psyche Williams-Forson adds a major building block to the developing canon of food scholarship. In this well-considered work, she deftly shepherds readers through the minefields of culinary practices, racial assumptions, and more, revealing the tangled complexity of the relationships that African Americans are presumed to have, now and in the past, with food in the United States."--Jessica B. Harris, author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

"Unearthing places of real power, agency, and resilience, Psyche A. Williams-Forson spares no one in her demand that we understand the complex history of Black foodways. Eating While Black has a message for us all: when we fail to address the reality that this food system, by design, has been and is a failure, we prevent ourselves from doing what needs to be done for the health and well-being of us all."--Monica M. White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

"Unpacking the ugly history of racist stereotypes, exclusionary agricultural policies, and the cultural assumption that Black people's lives need monitoring, this is a book that celebrates the diversity of Black American food culture across the United States. . . . Eating While Black is a thoughtful text with insights into how much unwelcome extra tension and 'heaviness' lands on Black Americans' plates."--Foreword Reviews

About the Author

Psyche A. Williams-Forson, the author of Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, is professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.