Tunde Wey has been called a lot of things.
NPR once referred to him as “a traveling showman.”
Renowned Southern food writer John T. Edge called him a “provocateur.”
And plenty of online commenters and detractors have called him “racist,” particularly after news coverage of his most recent dining concept Saartj went viral. Named after a South African woman who was displayed in 19th-century Europe because of her large buttocks, Saartj was a monthlong New Orleans lunch counter that highlighted racial wealth disparities by charging people of color $12 and offering white people the option to pay $12 or $30.
Now, the Nigerian-born cook is bringing his “discomfort food” (as the Washington Post called it), back to his original second home: Detroit, where Wey found himself as a 16-year-old sent to study in America.
Well, more like Hamtramck, where the traveling activist first got his start in the local food scene in 2013 as an original co-founder of Revolver, the permanent pop-up space featuring rotating guest chefs.
For the first week of May, Wey will run a different kind of restaurant pop-up inside the community space Bank Suey, which will transform into Saartj’s next phase.
Saartj Hamtramck won’t just be a rehash of his New Orleans lunch counter, however. The goal here, Wey says, is to highlight the work already being done in the city by Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and Devita Davison of FoodLab. Both are non-profit advocacy organizations that employ food as a tool for community-based developments that aim to improve outcomes for Detroiters, namely African-Americans. The latter does this mainly through entrepreneurial support and the former through farming. Education is central to the work of both.
Wey wants to keep the exact details of how the Saartj experience will go down as a surprise, but in an extended conversation, he offered some insight into what he has planned, what his goals are and why he’s not a racist. (The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Question: Tell me about your upcoming Detroit-area restaurant project. What can guests expect?
Answer: If you go to a restaurant right now — any nice, high-end restaurant — as much as possible folks try to tailor the experience to you. They want to know what you like. I want to take care of guests in a different way. I want to tailor the experience to them and I want to predicate that experience on their privilege. So I’m asking folks to fill out a form and that form just gives us an idea of who’s coming. That form asks about race, about gender, about educational attainment level, about income, about mobility. Based on that we’re going to create a profile and we’re going to create a menu for that individual. We want to present to you, in essence, what your privilege represents.
Q: How is this an evolution of your work?
A: With the thing that I did in New Orleans, it was a 10-minute exchange with a person and there was a moment of feeling. And then you go with that and you think about it. With these dinners, I want to do the same. I want to create that moment of feeling. I want people to enter into the space and then be arrested in a particular way and then have that lead into a conversation.
When you go to eat, you’re eating based on your privilege. When you go to a nice restaurant, it’s your privilege on a plate. But restaurants, they don’t highlight that. It’s something that is embedded in your experience. But the dinners we’re going to have are going to highlight that. We’re going to highlight it in different ways – let folks really take a sharp look at their plate, and then in doing that take a sharp look at themselves and then hopefully begin to look at everything around them and the space that they occupy and think about how we can invest in the self-determination of communities that have been disinvested in.
Q: You were highlighting the racial wealth gap with Saartj in New Orleans and this seems to continue that work. But what in particular inspired the Detroit concept?
A: I am inspired by the work of Malik Yakini and what he represents. I think what he does and the work that Devita Davison does at FoodLab – these people and their work represents models that are in my mind just as viable as a traditional model of development and growth in Detroit.
The way we think about growth, the way we think about development, I think we mostly think about big developers building these new properties, or now we also think about smaller developers buying homes and taking up land to farm and cultivate. But the difference with what Malik Yakini is doing specifically and what these other folks are doing is this emphasis on community self-determination, which is about controlling the resources and determining what direction the community is going to move in – which is about robust debate, which is about individual transformation in those communities so that the work is democratic.
I also can see very clearly how destructive some of these other models are. So the dinner is about uplifting self-determination and having a conversation around self-determination as a tool for community transformation as opposed to relying on an exploitative, extractive, free-market system or relying on philanthropy that controls and dictates how money is spent and to whom it is given.
Q: What’s special about the work Yakini and Davison are doing?
A: The reason that we have these inequitable communities is because the racialized capitalist system is working effectively. There has to be an exploitable class for there to be a class that enjoys the fruits of that exploitation. And so the work that Malik Yakini is doing, that Devita is doing, is about upending that racialized hierarchy. It's about flattening it.
Anything you do that doesn’t break the wheel — if you will take the “Game of Thrones” reference — but only has these incremental benefits is just an evolution of the same oppressive system. We need to radically address this. Not just because it’s a black issue or a POC (people of color) issue. It’s a sustainability issue. It’s just not feasible. We can’t continue to create communities that are disinvested in. We can’t continue to disempower communities under the guise of empowering them and expect that the domino effect will not eventually reach us.
Q: Based on the kinds of people that show up to your dinners, do you feel like maybe you’re just preaching to the choir?
A: Do you know what I say? I say, "The choir needs to hear the sermon every Sunday!"
Q: On the other hand, it seems like you’ve gotten quite a wide-ranging response from your recent work.
A: I was hoping for a conversation to happen. I wasn't expecting how big it became. Internationally, I spoke to German public radio and Australian public radio and a French paper.
Q: I’m sure you must’ve been accused of racism and received other negative feedback?
A: When you talk about racism, in this context we're talking about control over one's life outcome. That's what racism is. It's a systemic reality that affects the outcomes of a specific racial group. We're talking about wealth. We're talking about health. We're talking about education. These are outcomes.
And so me having a stall and engaging a white person for 15 minutes and giving them a choice to pay $12 or $30 — that is an inconvenience for them. That is not racism. They have a choice and it’s a short window that the inconvenience transpires over. And then they can leave. Nobody’s wealth was affected. Nobody’s health was affected. Nobody’s education was impacted. Nobody’s mortality rate was impacted. For people who are willing to listen to that, when you explain it that way and you define what racism really is, then you understand that all these accusations are just frivolous.
Q: So you won’t be reading the reader comments on this story?
A: The project happened in New Orleans and it was over, and people were sending me all this racist stuff. And I said "We're having a public conversation about this." There was a two-week window where people had time to prepare. I was like, "Come! Let's talk about this." I was engaging people. I wasn't belligerent at the stall. I told people what I was doing. I wasn't insulting or belittling. I was just stating facts. And I said, "If you have a problem with the project, come out and let's talk about it." Nobody from that camp showed up. It was all folks who were curious about the work, who had questions and wanted to probe and see what we found out. There wasn't this belligerent and caustic voice that you find online or find in my emails. Anybody who has anything to say and wants to have a conversation, I'm happy to have a public conversation with you. Come through.
Q: You may have just invited Richard Spencer to dinner.
A: Hey, as long as he's respectful and can sit down and listen …
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