american studies

By Tressie McMillan Cottom

I have food on my mind. The few weeks between Thanksgiving and the end-of-year holidays are a time when eating becomes something more than a utilitarian need or even a personal pleasure. Now is the time of year when food’s cultural significance takes center stage in our overscheduled lives. We may eat standing at a desk most of the year, but during the holidays we are reconnected to food’s deeper meaning.

My grandmother died 10 years ago. The last Thanksgiving I had with her was also the last time I ate her sweet potato pudding. She made it just for me, once a year. I have no idea where the recipe came from or even if there was one. I have tried versions since she died. Online recipes have different names. Custard. Casserole. None of the recipes are quite right. Some add flour. I am sure that she did not. Others insist on coconut. She would never.

None of the recipes I have tried match the texture or depth of the dish my grandmother made: layers of buttery, grated sweet potato soaked in spices and baked until crispy on the outside and mushy in the center. I started thinking that maybe what didn’t work about these other dishes I tried was not the recipe but the ingredients.

My grandmother usually bought small sweet potatoes from a local grower. She had her favorite sources. A distant cousin, Eugene, grew some of the best sweet potatoes, by her standard. He put aside some for her over the holidays. If he was busy, there were other local suppliers: a roadside pickup truck and stand with fresh vegetables sold by the bucket, for example. In a pinch, she would go to a local “country food store” that sold food not fancy enough to be sold at the local chain grocery stores.

Something about my normal store-bought sweet potatoes does not measure up. They’re too big, too tough, too sweet or not sweet enough. The last time I ate my grandmother’s sweet potato pudding was the last time I tasted the culture that made that pudding possible. I wish I had known it was the last time.

This is how food has roots in culture, place, family and history. I recently talked with Prof. Psyche Williams-Forson about food memories. Williams-Forson is the chair of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a food studies expert who has written several books about race, gender, class, culture and foodways. “Foodways” is a popular academic term for the complex ways that we produce, consume and give food meaning. When a custard is not a pudding and when a sweet potato connects a North Carolina roadside vegetable store to the African diaspora, that’s an example of a complex foodway.

We talked about Williams-Forson’s new book, “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,” at a public event in Chapel Hill, N.C. It was moving to discuss her book, which connects ideas about moral value to the food that we cherish. It brings up a lot of feelings about migration, class, poverty and identity.

A member of the audience stood up during the Q. and A. to ask how his rural church could create healthier local foodways for its community. Like a lot of nonprofit organizations these days, his church wants to plant a community garden. But it doesn’t want to reproduce the classism of “clean eating” movements that label some food as clean and other food dirty. The people who eat clean food are good people. The people who eat dirty food — food associated with poor people or immigrants or formerly enslaved people — are bad.

Williams-Forson reminded us that the only difference between a back-porch garden in a low-income community and an organic garden in a high-income urban area is branding. She challenged the audience not just to think about utopian visions but also to figure out how people are supposed to eat “in the meantime.” The meantime is a space between the food systems of the near past and the food systems we will have to build in the near future. How can we support people not just to eat better but also to eat in ways that don’t limit how other people choose to eat and live in the meantime?

For this year’s annual Opinion giving guide, I encourage readers to support the organizations in your area that build capacity for localized food systems. You can always support national efforts like Farm Aid. I attended this year’s annual festival of music, food and agricultural education. The music stage is a big draw. But it is the exposition area, where I learned about how people produce food in this country, that raised my consciousness. I met advocates who educate people on how systemic racism and political polarization make it hard for farmers to pivot to more sustainable practices. In 2019, Vann R. Newkirk II did a great long-form piece on racism and U.S.D.A. policy. It is worth reading and thinking about how racism makes us more vulnerable to the ravages of climate change.

It is also worth supporting the Black Farmers Fund. The fund supports social impact investing in Black farmers, growers and agricultural businesses. Some people worry about losing family recipes. I am one of those. But I also worry about losing the foodways that made those recipes possible.

Some of us are losing them faster than others. I have not lost my grandmother’s recipe as much as I have lost a link to home. It may be too late for my sweet potato pudding. But it is not too late to become the people who caretake foodways that help local food cultures thrive, equitably and without shame.

By Cat Sandoval 
Experts say the trope of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and treated as "others" continues today with dangerous consequences.

There aren't many headlines or news coverage of anti-Asian hate crimes now, compared to what was shown during the height of the pandemic — but attacks and insults are still happening in various parts of the country.

The national coalition Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate tracked 11,500 hate incidents from March 2020 to March 2022. At the start of the pandemic, Asians were scapegoated and wrongfully blamed for COVID-19. It is true that the Chinese government silenced their doctors and kept the outbreak a secret from the rest of the world.  

John C. Yang, is the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

"We should be calling out that government. But in doing so, we absolutely need to be clear that it's a government that we are concerned about and not the people," said Yang. 

Politicians like former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China and continued to use radicalized terms like "Wuhan virus" and "China virus," terms the World Health Organization warned could lead to racial profiling and stigma. Trump's first "Chinese virus" tweet was followed by an increase in anti-Asian hashtags. But activists say anti-Asian hate didn't start with the pandemic.  

Stewart Khow, co-founded the Asian American Education Project.

"There was a political party built, the Workingmen's party that was established in California. That main point was to get rid of the Chinese. So there was violence," said Khow. 

Khow is referring to an American Labor Organization founded in San Francisco in 1877. Five years later, anti-Asian sentiments led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. That was the first and only federal law that banned immigration of a specific nationality.  

Experts say the trope of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and treated as "others" continues today with dangerous consequences.  

"Regardless of how long we've been in the United States, whether we were born here or not, that we are seen as a foreigner," said Yang.

During WWII, Japanese Americans, men, women and children were rounded up and placed in detention camps. They were incarcerated for three years, their property and personal items taken.   

"Not one Japanese American was ever convicted for spying for Japan," said Khow. 

Then, when the Twin Towers fell in 2001, South Asians and Muslim Americans were targeted. It didn't matter if they were born here.   

"Hundreds of South Asians and Muslim Americans were singled out, brutalized, and some were killed in a wave of Islamophobia after 9/11," said Khow. 

Janelle Wong, is a professor of American studies, at the University of Maryland.

"This is a cyclical kind of trope that is always kind of beneath the surface, but arises in times where the U.S. feels under threat," said Wong.  

And now, during the pandemic, experts say one way to combat hate is through education.

"You prevent that from making sure people understand that Asian Americans are American, are part of the fabric of our history," said Yang. 

The Asian American Education Project aims to train teachers and teach this history in every public school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Currently, five states have passed a mandatory Asian American history requirement.    

"Asian American history, is American history. Let me say it again. Asian American history, is American history. You don't understand big parts of American history — unless you understand Asian American history," said Khow. 

The surge in anti-Asian hate has led to a reemergence and groundswell of Asian American activism. In the 80s there was no justice for Vincent Chin, who was killed in a brutal racial attack in Detroit over rising tensions over Japanese auto imports. 

Compare that to the reaction after the 2021 mass killing of eight people — mostly Asian women, at massage parlors in metro Atlanta. 

"The fact that President Biden went down to Atlanta, along with the vice president, almost immediately after the Atlanta murders, and that there was legislation passed within a within a couple of months addressing hate crimes against Asian Americans —  power to Black people, power to Asian people," said Yang.  

"One of the most exciting kinds of activism to emerge from the last two years is Asian-American young people's interest in telling their own stories," said Wang. 

Chicago held its first ever Blasian March, a coalition of stop anti-Asian hate and Black Lives Matter activists.   

Rohan, is the founder of Blasian March. 

"I think being Blasian and being a Black Asian is incredibly powerful because, you know, so often society is trying to divide us and separate us. But you can't separate me. You know, I am living proof that we can coexist," said Rohan. 

"We can unite as a community from the Black and Asian and Asian communities to come together and just understand our differences and also just celebrate our intersectionality and our history together," said Kate Ventrina, the Chicago Blasian March organizer.