Throughline - Bonus: Do The Golden Arches Bend Toward Justice?

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

This week we're featuring an episode from Code Switch, Do The Golden Arches Bend Toward Justice?. Calls for racial justice are met with a lot of different proposals, but one of the loudest and most en...during is to invest in Black businesses. But can "buying Black" actually do anything to mitigate racism? To find out, they taking a look at the surprising link between Black capitalism and McDonald's.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, Ramtin. Hey, Rand. So, another series in the books. Another day, another dollar.
Starting point is 00:00:26 How fitting for the end of our capitalism series, right? So, you know, last week we came out with a third and final installment of our series on capitalism. If you haven't heard it all, go check it out. And honestly, it feels like we could have done at least three more episodes, like maybe 30 more. I know. It's like we just scratched the surface. And it's definitely a topic we're going to return to since there's so much more to do. But because we can't get capitalism out of our system, like literally no joke, we want to share an episode that our fam over at Code Switch dropped a few months ago that goes really well with our series.
Starting point is 00:01:01 Yeah, this episode came out back in April. And it's not just about capitalism. It's about Black capitalism. And McDonald's. I don't even want to say any more about it. Don't want to spoil it. Just that it really adds an interesting perspective on how our economic system shapes our lives and the impact of capitalism on Black communities
Starting point is 00:01:21 seen through one iconic American business. This is a really great one from Code Switch, everyone. So please stick around. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. I'm Shireen Marisol Maragi. I'm Gene Demby. And this is Code Switch from NPR. Shireen, you remember these old commercials?
Starting point is 00:02:05 Isn't that Calvin? I haven't seen him for a while. Wonder where he's heading. I heard he got a job. Wonder where he's working. Welcome to McDonald's. May I help you? Oh my God, that is Calvin.
Starting point is 00:02:17 Yes. He is burned into my brain. Calvin is a part of my coming of age story. Okay, okay. Tell me what you remember about Calvin. Well, Calvin was the main character in a bunch of McDonald's commercials in the early 90s. He was from a neighborhood that had a lot of very cool brownstones.
Starting point is 00:02:37 So maybe he was living in Brooklyn or Harlem. And he got a job at McDonald's. And everyone in the neighborhood was weirdly obsessed with how Calvin's job was going. Yes, they were very impressed to know what was good with his job. Like, you live in Brooklyn in 1992 and that is the hottest tea for some reason. I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:02:58 But yes, the message in these commercials was this young brother right here was doing something with himself. He got a good job and a job with lots of room to grow. Yeah, he had this total Horatio Alger-esque character arc over a bunch of different commercials. And that McDonald's campaign lasted four years. He went from, you know, just a young dude on the block to a trusted employee at Mickey D's
Starting point is 00:03:22 and eventually into the junior management program. Meet the newest member of our management team, Calvin. Congratulations, Calvin. Management, dude. And then some of his boys, some of his boys are roasting him, you know, he's flipping burgers.
Starting point is 00:03:39 By the end of those commercials, they want to get put on too. Hey, yo, yo, Calvin. What's the word on that child thing? Come on, man. No, not for me. Or a friend of mine. Word. Word.
Starting point is 00:03:52 Calvin was a big part of the culture. Not always a celebrated part of the culture, but definitely a big part of the culture. I mean, two short references, Calvin and his 96 banger, Gettin' It. Dave Chappelle made fun of the Calvin commercials on his series of whack Arnold skits on The Chappelle Show. Hey, yo, I heard Calvin got a job. Man, I'm proud of him. Afternoon, ladies.
Starting point is 00:04:22 Ew, nigga, you smell like french fries. But, all right, Shereen, jokes aside, jokes aside. I think Calvin might actually reveal something really important about the way, you know, we as individuals, the way corporations, even the U.S. government, have long sidestepped calls for racial justice. You know, because people say, we want the police to stop beating us. We want better housing. We want better housing. We want better schools. Instead, if someone opens a McDonald's franchise, will you stop asking for things? It's about to get serious. Yes, it is. After the break. Stay with us. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming.
Starting point is 00:05:13 Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Shereen. Jane. Code switch. Oh, we switched it up on y'all. So Shereen, we're going to be talking about
Starting point is 00:05:29 some of the particular ways that calls for equality and capitalism have been tied up in each other. And one of the best ways to understand how that happened is to tell the story of McDonald's. When I was a teenager and had my own money from afterschool jobs, I would go to a McDonald's in When I was a teenager and had my own money from after-school jobs, I would go to a McDonald's in Chicago on Jackson and State Street after school. Whose voice is that?
Starting point is 00:05:51 That is Marcia Chatelain. She's a historian at Georgetown. And relevant to our conversation, Shereen, she is the author of a book called Franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. And she said growing up, she spent a lot of time hanging out with her friends at that McDonald's. And it was literally a Black history themed McDonald's where they would have prints of Black art.
Starting point is 00:06:14 They would have portraits of famous Black people. And for me, it's so strange. Like McDonald's, I knew wasn't a Black company, but McDonald's articulation in the places that I would be was always black. I wonder if we have to give props to Chicago black ad exec Tom Burrell for that. Remember, Sonari Glinton profiled him for our show a few years back. Tom was very instrumental in marketing the McDonald's brand to black American families. Yes, he was. And that marketing to Black American families was very, very successful.
Starting point is 00:06:48 Marsha kind of admitted that as a kid, she saw that one McDonald's store on Jackson and State Street as like a hub of Black culture. I'm so embarrassed to say, I shouldn't be embarrassed, this is life. I don't remember how many times I actually went to the DuSable Museum of Black History,
Starting point is 00:07:04 but I can tell you the number of times I saw stuff about like the Tuskegee Airmen and the great HBCUs at some Black-owned McDonald's or some event that had been sponsored by Black franchisees. Those Black franchisees saw their McDonald's stores as part of like this larger project of Black Uplift. Marsha says for McDonald's in particular, it was a big pivot because for a long time, Mickey D's very much viewed itself as a brand for the white people flocking to shiny new suburbs in the post-war years. It's about the highways. It's about bedroom communities. It's about a certain kind of middle class youth culture and middle class disposable income culture
Starting point is 00:07:49 that was very much tied into how white families understood themselves after 1945. Ronald McDonald. Now, where is that clown? Here I am, kids. Hey, isn't watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald's hamburgers. Ronald, you can't be on TV. So McDonald's, one of the most ubiquitous, iconic American brands, a brand for all Americans, was really just for white people? Sort of?
Starting point is 00:08:20 I mean, it kind of depended. So Marsha says McDonald's was never like officially segregated. But this is important. McDonald's corporate let the franchisees who own McDonald's stores conform to whatever the local racial norms were. So if we went to a McDonald's someplace in Birmingham back in the day, let's say, they might not serve us if we walked in together. But a McDonald's somewhere farther north might. Exactly. Exactly. Maybe.
Starting point is 00:08:45 Maybe, perhaps. But she said that all changed after 1968. Which, of course, is the height of the civil rights movement, and it's the year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. After King was killed, there were riots across the country. McDonald's was looking at what was happening, the demands that people were making for justice and equality in housing and employment and voting rights. 1968 was a critical turning point for McDonald's because they were aware of two things.
Starting point is 00:09:31 One, the changing racial demographics of some of the places in which their restaurants were located, neighborhoods that had been all white that became all black overnight, as well as the economic climate of 1968, where people were trying to respond to social unrest by opening up doors, opening up opportunities. Marsha's talking about white flight there. So this is when McDonald's starts to market to Black consumers and open up restaurants in Black neighborhoods. Yeah. And Marsha says this is when McDonald's started looking in earnest for its first Black franchise owners. The very first Black-owned McDonald's was in Chicago, not far from where Marsha's childhood Mickey D's would eventually be the one, you know, she said that doubled as her shrine to Black history.
Starting point is 00:10:17 So if I was going to hazard a guess here, a lot of those Black neighborhoods were probably food deserts. You know, even today, there's consistently not nearly as much access to groceries or affordable quality food options in black neighborhoods as there are in white neighborhoods. But there's often a lot of fast food. Not an accident. Hashtag housing segregation and everything. Marsha said that, you know, Ray Kroc, who was the man that a lot of people know as the person who made McDonald's, into this giant of fast food. He was not some racial liberal, you know, but he found out real quick that those new locations in Black neighborhoods were generating a lot of revenue. I bet. So you see this incredible shift in what McDonald's did in understanding that there was money to be made by going into Black communities.
Starting point is 00:11:03 That's a big deal, Jean. It's a moment when a lot of white companies realized that they were leaving millions and millions of Black dollars on the table. And that's also when they probably started to realize that, you know, this whole civil rights movement wasn't going to go away and they would eventually have to acknowledge it in some way. So they started making overtures. You know, some people might say surfacy, maybe cynical overtures, to this new Black consumer base. You know, we care about you.
Starting point is 00:11:32 We share your values. And back to those early Black franchisees, a lot of them did quite well for themselves. And it wasn't just McDonald's. Like, other fast food chains saw what was happening, and they wanted in too. Famous Black folks looked at McDonald's, making people rich, and saw an opportunity. Muhammad Ali lent his name to a chain called Champ Burger. Mahalia Jackson, the gospel legend, licensed her name to a fried chicken chain.
Starting point is 00:11:56 Mahalia Jackson had a series of restaurants called Mahalia's Glory Fried Chicken. Glory Fried Chicken. I actually, I really like that. Yes. Chicken for the body and the spirit. I bet she was probably good too. For so many of these folks though, franchising was the key to something bigger. Because they tried to imagine these as vehicles for like church groups or community foundations or publicvate partnerships to get together to franchise these things, create job training programs for the young people, and then reinvest the profits in the community. Those early Black McDonald's franchisees would do things like hold voter registration drives
Starting point is 00:12:36 and job fairs in their stores. This new cohort of Black fast food entrepreneurs saw themselves as job creators. Calvin Callback. Heard he got a job. As examples of black success and black self-sufficiency and as actors in the broader civil rights movement. So they believe they weren't just black burger barons and businessmen, but also benefactors who framed their French fries and franchising
Starting point is 00:13:03 as one facet in the fight for freedom. That was pretty good, Shereen. That's why they pay me the big bucks. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Marsh's book is about McDonald's, right? It's about fast food more broadly. But really is kind of a history of this other thing, this idea that black businesses and black entrepreneurship could,
Starting point is 00:13:27 okay, if not liberate, then at least offset the racism and resource deprivation of black communities. Like we said before, this is a story about capitalism, but specifically, it's about black capitalism. Black capitalism is an ideology that suggests that in the absence of full Black citizenship rights, that the strategy that Black people should pursue is one of economic power and that that collective economic power will eventually lead to the possibility of full citizenship. So if Black people have enough money, if they have enough wealth, they can demand better treatment in American society. Right, or they can make their own treatment.
Starting point is 00:14:11 And it's an idea that's way, way older than Black McDonald's. It has its roots in the 19th century, and it has inspired a number of activities on the part of Black leaders to encourage people to buy property, to encourage people to open their own businesses. And the strategy really is not only about power, but it's also the thought that you can deflect humiliation and you can protect yourself from the harm of engaging in market activities that make you susceptible to white racism and segregation. Yeah. Basically, if you're rich enough, if your community is self-sufficient enough,
Starting point is 00:14:55 racism will not touch you in the same way. And, you know, this idea keeps coming up. I'm thinking of that Marcus Garvey episode we did not that long ago from ThruLine about his Black Star line and that kind of capitalism. Yeah, that's a perfect example, right? And that's more of a nationalist incline sort of Black capitalism, but that's just one strand of it, right? Like another more annoying strand to me anyway, doesn't even require that we go that far back, right? Like the denizens of LLC Twitter right now getting on everybody's nerves talking about grinding and generating passive income and how they built different and how they would go get lunch with Jay-Z and personal economic freedom.
Starting point is 00:15:31 That's black capitalism, too. So there are various styles and ways to push for entrepreneurship, property ownership, you know, making big money deals. And that can all be different facets of Black capitalism. As an aside, Gene, there is a very interesting conversation happening on social media right now on Twitter about BLM founder Patrice Cullors and her newfound wealth. And one of the questions being asked around this is, is Patrice benefiting from a broken system that she says she wants to transform? So, yeah, this is, I don't want to take up the whole episode with this, but I've been thinking a lot about it, and it's definitely something we should follow up on. It is very complicated, yes, as you would say. But agreed. Anyway, here's Marsha again.
Starting point is 00:16:19 And I think that every generation has a version of Black capitalism that operates and that sets the tone for the conversation of what black people should and shouldn't be doing. It's like, don't buy Jordans, invest in Bitcoin. And at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, you know, this moment when the civil rights movement is kind of fraying, black capitalism is kind of ascendant because of black folks to spend their money at black owned businesses and to save and invest their money with black banks in order to help create black wealth. You know, this is the era when Black Enterprise magazine was launched by Johnson Publications in Chicago. Chicago is like at the epicenter of a lot of this. Oh, yeah. Shout out to Oprah. Even black folks who had radically different ideas about like what might constitute black liberation found themselves working alongside and sometimes even defending black capitalists.
Starting point is 00:17:11 So Ralph Abernathy gave a speech after Martin Luther King's death about how we don't need black capitalism, we need black socialism. And then he goes to a black owned McDonald's and picks up a donation check for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. You know, in his mind, was he betraying his critique of capitalism? No. But, you know, aligning yourself with a Black franchise owner, I think, during that period of time, and I think people still think of it this way, well, yes, he's with McDonald's, but you know how they do us. And there were sometimes, you know, these new Black fast food entrepreneurs found themselves in tension, you know, with some of the other players in the Black freedom movement, right? Like Marsha talks about this one really intense, sometimes violent confrontation between a Black franchisee in Portland, Oregon, of all places, and the local Black Panthers who wanted him to contribute to the free food program. So McDonald's franchises or Burger King or whoever else became these flashpoints for big questions over how Black neighborhoods should look and even the kinds of obligations that people in those neighborhoods had to each other. Yeah, that's right. And Shereen, one of Black capitalism's biggest proponents, one of his loudest cheerleaders in those heady post Martin Luther King years was your boy, Richard M. Nixon.
Starting point is 00:18:30 Oh, my gosh. President Nixon loved black capitalism. We've talked on the show about how Nixon's do for self and uplift through capitalism messaging really appealed to certain people of color. Latino Republicans were very down with his whole entrepreneurship messaging, actually. At one point, Richard Nixon even gave a speech to a Black audience in which he called Black capitalism the real Black power. Here's Marsha again. President Nixon was like the ultimate and the evil genius because he knew what he had to do to get on the other side. So he could continue to get some black faithfuls to the Republican Party, even though they had essentially, you know, all gone away after 1964. But there were still some loyals. But what he
Starting point is 00:19:17 also had were black celebrities. He had Wilt Chamberlain, he had James Brown. And so what Nixon understood was you have to say something to pretend that you don't have an all-out hatred towards Black people and civil rights and progress, but you're not going to carry the banner of the civil rights struggle. And Marcia said another practical policy reason Nixon caught into this idea that private Black business could provide Black neighborhoods with all these things that they were lacking is that loan guarantees and grants and tax incentives, things like that, they don't require billions of dollars of federal investment and direct intervention into these big controversial issues that the riots and the unrest and the protests of the 60s have brought attention to. You don't have to really touch the issue of school integration.
Starting point is 00:20:05 You don't really have to touch the issue of fair housing because all of these ideas presuppose all Black neighborhoods and all Black communities. And as long as those continue, you can say Black-owned business and you can mean segregation under the terms that work for people who don't like the idea of integration. That is a very eye-opening way of looking at all of this. Also, how does owning a Mickey D's franchise or, dare I say, a McDowell's,
Starting point is 00:20:35 solve the problem of these communities' loss of attack space after white flight? The fact that many of these neighborhoods were ravaged by civil unrest and riots and that so many of these places remained blighted until like now many of them yeah like here in dc like a lot of the major places destroyed by the riots of 68 the king riots like did not bounce back until like the 21 the 21st century. And to that point, like, it made the entities that did invest in those blighted places, like fast food spots, outsize players and their local economies. And if you look at some of McDonald's print ads aimed at Black people from, like, the 1970s lingerie right now on my computer screen that reads, at which $8 billion corporation do Black executives help call the shots? And there's a Black hand in the ad with what looks like a gold McDonald's ring. That McDonald's ring is wild. It really is. McDrip Deluxe. McBling. There's also another print ad here that reads, who is the largest employer of black youth in America? And then you see a picture of a black teen putting on a McDonald's hat.
Starting point is 00:21:56 Yes. So McDonald's was really leaning into this idea that supporting McDonald's meant supporting Black economic empowerment. Yeah. And that is how we eventually end up with... Your boy. Yes. Calvin. I'm part of the management team now, mama. Oh, baby, I'm so proud of you. It's only afternoons, but still, it's a promotion. You know, now that I think about it, one very telling thing about those Calvin ads, when you look back at them, is that there is not any food in those ads.
Starting point is 00:22:30 Yes. There are no fries anywhere. None. There are no cheeseburgers. I guess that is because the food was really beside the point. Yes, exactly. Calvin, you know, was supposed to represent a better way for Black youth. A way up, a way out.
Starting point is 00:22:48 Thanks to the largest employer of Black youth in America. Mm-hmm. You know, I like to think that had the McDonald's cinematic universe continued to unfold... So, like,
Starting point is 00:22:59 the Calvin and the Winter Soldier. Ah, that Calvin would have gone on to own his very own McDonald's, then several McDonald's. He would be offering scholarships to HBCU students. Also probably like lamenting the evils of sagging pants, you know. But interestingly enough, Marcia says, a funny thing would have happened on the way the Calvins blow up, right? Because in real life, by the time Calvin came onto the scene in the 1990s,
Starting point is 00:23:25 when we were kids, the odds of getting rich through owning McDonald's in a black neighborhood were basically gone, right? Like it was a long shot because for one, every hood in America was flooded with fast food options by then. So there was too much competition. The margins were already thin to begin with. And at that point, you needed so much more of your own startup capital to get into the game, to buy a franchise. Right. Startup capital that Black people don't have because, you know,
Starting point is 00:23:53 this thing called the racial wealth gap. The fact that Black people have a much harder time creating household wealth. Absolutely. So the fortunes that some of those early, early black franchisees made, or at least like the upper middle class lives that they managed to attain, they were mostly like out of reach. And obviously for the workers at those places, fast food was never going to be an avenue to wealth
Starting point is 00:24:16 or even, you know, livability in a lot of cases. There may have been more of those jobs in black neighborhoods than there were before the civil rights movement, but these were still, you know, close to minimum wage jobs with very few protections. Right. Black capitalism is still capitalism. Yes. And in a lot of places, those were the only jobs in town.
Starting point is 00:24:35 And that's where we get to like all the other like broader consequences of fast food, right? On community health, on climate. Marsha said that, you know, in a real way, Calvin represented this ethos, you know, shared by many of those franchisees, that them creating jobs was a kind of civic duty that they felt. But he was also kind of meant as a response to the idea of the McJob, right? That these jobs were just dead-end gigs, that they weren't cool places to work. But even now, Marsha says, the ideas about Black Uplift that Calvin represented are still with us. So remember, way back in 1968, when Black people were organizing and marching and there was unrest across the country, people were making very clear asks. We want the police to stop beating us. We want decent housing. We want good schools for our children. We want jobs that pay living
Starting point is 00:25:25 wages. We want public spaces in which to gather and create and grow. And Marsha said what Black neighborhoods got instead was, you know, small business loans, tax breaks, so-called empowerment zones. The people in those neighborhoods got to participate a little more in the consumer economy. The answer was, if someone opens a bookstore, if someone opens a McDonald's franchise, will you stop asking for things? And that was always the kind of issue that perplexed me. What did I just ask you? America might not have had the stomach for anything bolder or more transformative, like things that would have put a dent in these inequalities that we're always talking about. What it did have an appetite for, though, was, well, quarter pounders. Gene, you first talked to Marsha about her book last year.
Starting point is 00:26:23 But since then, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by the police. And in fact, right before we recorded this, another Black man named Dante Wright was also killed by the police in Minneapolis. This is at the same time that the trial for Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with George Floyd's murder, is going on. And lots of people took to the streets to call attention to these huge problems in American society after George Floyd's death. A lot of them are the very same problems people were calling attention to in the 1960s. That's absolutely right. Marsha said that many of the asks then and now have been similar,
Starting point is 00:27:07 but so has a big part of the response. Like, instead of grappling with these hard questions around these issues, like how and whether we should reimagine how our society is arranged or thinking about what people need,
Starting point is 00:27:20 the reaction that has been most sustained and the loudest has generally been more like. Target commits to spending more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025. At Tiffany & Company, we want to use the privilege of our platform to make a difference. Robinhood stands in solidarity with everyone fighting systemic racism. We want you to know that we hear you and we care about your experiences on TikTok. Uber stands in solidarity with the Black community and with peaceful protests against the injustice.
Starting point is 00:27:49 This is the work of anti-racism. And the journey for Peloton begins now. And that has been the treatment of Black people for more than five decades. And so, you know, after George Floyd's death, when I kept on hearing, buy black businesses, support black creators, I had just moved into a house and I was buying furniture. And all these furniture companies were like, we pledged to have 15% of our furniture designers to be black. I'm like, okay, let's go back to the central reason why George Floyd's life did not matter that day. What in the world will these businesses do? And I think that the danger of all of these bad ideas is that to suggest that
Starting point is 00:28:32 then black businesses can actually support the weight of massive state failure. All right, y'all. That's our show. Please follow us on Twitter. We're at NPR Code Switch. You can follow Shereen at Radio Mirage and me at GEDE215. We want to hear from you. Our email is codeswitch at NPR.org and subscribe to the podcast on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Leah Dinella and Jess Kong. It was edited by Leah Dinella. And of course, we got to shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massive. That's Kumari Devarajan, Karen Grigsby-Bates,
Starting point is 00:29:28 L.A. Johnson, Natalie Escobar, Alyssa Jung-Perry, and Steve Drummond. Our intern is Samar Thumar. He's Jean Demby. And you are Shereen Marisol Maragi. Be easy, y'all.
Starting point is 00:29:39 Peace. Thank you. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.