For too long the food industry has been willing to sustain itself on Black labor while doing absolutely nothing to address the lack of African Americans in positions of leadership.
In July 2018, former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was holding a press conference just outside of the restaurant I managed in Atlanta. Her fairly progressive campaign had attracted the attention of the nation, and all eyes turned to Georgia to see if the state was ready to usher in a more inclusive future. That day, she received an endorsement from Barack Obama, which gave her candidacy the feeling of momentum, inevitability even.
When I moved to Atlanta in 2017, I had just graduated with my master’s degree from the University of Southern California and completed culinary school. Even with those credentials, securing a restaurant job in my new city proved more difficult than I’d anticipated. I interviewed at a French-style bistro run by a husband and wife team who also owned a celebrated restaurant in Decatur and a bakery just down the road.
The environment inside of the restaurant was not unique. If you walk into the finest dining establishments and cocktail bars in the city, or any city for that matter, you’ll notice a few similarities: chic decor, robust wine lists, farm-sourced menu items, and few, if any, people of color in positions of power.
I have been paraded around like a show pony to demonstrate how progressive and “forward-thinking” my employers hoped to appear. During my time spent as a general manager, two of the couple's three businesses were managed at the highest levels by me and another incredibly capable Black woman. At the time, we were two of only a handful of Black people in all of Atlanta that held general manager positions at lauded restaurants in the city.
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