Hot Like Fire! Racing to Win. And Who Gets to Frame the Story of Modern Caribbean Dining?

Peace y’all,

I was stoked by Olympic medalist Sha'Carri Richardson's win in Australia's Stawell Gift race, where runners begin on a staggered starting line based on their own records, mathematically anticipating all runners will cross the finish at the same time.

Richardson overcame an additional ten meters compared to her fellow runners to win the race in 13.15 seconds. She smoked everyone, even when she was technically placed at a disadvantage (having to run 120 meters instead of 110). While I’ve been watching headlines about warehouses throughout the United States curiously burning to the ground after news of non-livable wages and the Kimberly-Clark fire, I’ve been thinking about how we start and how we finish.

Around the same time I saw Richardson's win, I learned that the same group that pursued a lawsuit against affirmative action policies is now going after the Congressional Black Caucus. Edward Blum, leader of the blight that is the American Alliance for Equal Rights, is suing the CBC at the behest of two students, one Asian and one Hispanic, as reported by USA Today. Their claim is that the caucus scholarship for Black students is discriminatory because it is only available for Black students. I fear the children were in fact left behind.

I resurface my disappointment that the "melting pot of immigrants" myth, the "model minority" myth, alongside the lack of solidarity and integrity in so-called "POC" communities, will continue to pave the road of white supremacy. You'll recall that the dismantling of affirmative action didn't do much for its complainants and in some cases hurt the college acceptance rates of Asian students. Non-Black people of color positioning themselves as victims to Black-centered advocacy and declarations of equity and restitution will always be the worst joke. When will our brethren stop playing themselves?

Instead of modeling programs and initiatives after the CBC programs that responded to community needs, to identify the ways students could benefit from creative integration of resources and government funding, the goal becomes to deny progress to anyone else who's message isn't meant for you. It's obscene. And it will not answer the question they’re ultimately trying to ask, which is, why don’t we matter to this country? They’re going to have to take a closer look, and implicate themselves in the evidence you find.

Shifting culture requires having a good, long memory. Too many folks work hard to forget. Good luck with that finish.

April 1 marks publication day (“pub day”) for Kwéyòl / Creole, which blessed households last spring. Happy belated solar return to this beautiful work, chronicling chef Nina Compton’s St. Lucian-based cuisine through her life traversing her native island, Jamaica, Miami, and landing in New Orleans just over ten years ago.

It takes time to feel out a narrative cookbook, much less feed yourself from one, and while writing a book has its firm start and finish dates, it’s been fun for me to observe readers ongoing engagement with Nina’s life and culinary point of view, and the story we wove about her development as a chef. If you haven’t dove in yet, I hope you’ll visit an indie bookstore or library (libraries count for authors! Pull it off the shelf and leave it on the side, even if you don’t bring it home. Your librarian wants this. Ask them!). At your leisure.

Caribbean dining has deservedly snagged a rush of headlines over the last few years, from Paul Carmichael’s Kabawa in New York, to Nina’s Compère Lapin in Nola, to Gregory Gourdet’s Kann in Portland, Oregon. The idea of Caribbean cooking is broad, maybe too broad. But it’s specific enough to acknowledge that food culture across the islands demands its own canon, a perspective I’ve advocated for across many projects.

You’d be surprised how many times well-meaning but frankly, myopic people have suggested to me that I group cuisines from different countries or cultures simply because they’re in the same region, or because the differences were not apparent to outsiders. Anyone who’s had barbecue throughout the American South can imagine how fraught that can be. Proximity isn’t always a shortcut for similarity.