You Want #Resist With That? Wash Po’s ‘Food’ Section Serves Social Justice

March 2nd, 2018 4:49 PM

It’s hard -- nay, impossible -- to have anything but contempt for The Washington Post. Whether it’s the dishonest arrogance of the “news analysis,” the one-sided reporting, or the high school journalism club motto, Jeff Bezos’s plaything isn’t good for much but getting your kindling going.

And no section of the paper is immune to the suck. The March 2 “Food” section is a case in point. How can you screw that up? By using it to tell an important story about how an insufferable chef has turned his food and his business into a nasty “social experiment.

Tunde Wey runs a lunch counter in New Orleans (not D.C., New Orleans). Writer Maura Judkis has covered Wey before -- he’s more of a social justice trickster than a chef, and during his “Blackness in America” dinners, he didn’t just like making food, he liked making white people squirm.

Now, at his pseudo-lunch counter, Judkis says, “Wey serves his Nigerian food with a lesson about racial wealth disparity: The median income among African American households in New Orleans is only $25,806, compared to $64,377 for white households ...”

Uh, yeah, if I could just get my food … I gotta get back to work.

“Wey will share some stats with his customers, and then he’ll tell them the price of their lunch.”

Again, interesting but, I only have half an hour and …

“If they’re a person of color, they pay $12. If they’re white, he’ll tell them they can either pay $12, or they can pay $30 — two and a half times the base price, which reflects the wealth disparity in New Orleans.”

Okay, well. I’m gonna go get a hot dog. Really hope you don’t #Resist yourself out of business, pal.

Judkis thinks this is super clever. Wey manipulates customers -- humiliates some.

When Wey devised the project in New Orleans, he wanted to study people’s reactions to it, so he enlisted a student from Tulane University to devise an exit interview that would help him understand why people decided to pay the amount that they chose. After the price reveal, the conversation would typically take one of several established paths.

Basically, after haranguing innocent lunch goers with more SJW talk  and explaining they were guinea pigs, patrons would be offered their money back. None of the results are particularly interesting to anyone outside the Post newsroom, except this:

“I thought, if given the chance to voluntarily give up privilege, folks would not because it is not in their interest,” he said. But he was wrong: So far, more than 80 percent of white customers have opted to pay the higher price, and Wey realized that he had been underestimating the power of social pressure.

Or the high concentration of easily bullied white liberals in that part of NOLA.

To Judkis this is all pretty profound, and she got an important takeaway (though, perhaps, not important takeout -- she never says whether the food is worth being made fool of):

Though Wey’s lunch counter is only temporary, he says that people who want to use food to address racial wealth disparity can do so by patronizing minority-owned restaurants, because minority businesses are more likely to hire other minorities.

On the other hand, if you’re just interested in food, skip the social justice bullies. And The Washington Post’s “Food” section.