Getting Something to Eat in Jackson

A people-driven ethnography that portrays how race, particularly Blackness, is experienced and performed in different socioeconomic contexts in the contemporary urban American South. There once was a time when Black Americans up and down the socioeconomic ladder lived in and around the same neighborhoods. Part of this was a consequence of racially discriminatory federal, state, and city housing policies, such as exclusionary Federal Housing Authority practices and racially restrictive deeds and covenants, which prevented those who had the financial means from living anywhere else. Today, many of these neighborhoods are now centers of concentrated poverty. The ones who are able have left; those who remain do so only with others who are poor like them and are unable to leave. Getting Something to Eat in Jackson, a people-driven ethnography, portrays how race, particularly Blackness, is experienced and performed in different socioeconomic contexts in the contemporary urban American South. The author argues that Black American life is splintered along class lines, using food and eating as a thread as he is moving through the various socioeconomic groups. This book’s overarching goal is to illustrate that there is a paradox in social mobility for Black Americans. On the one hand, the upwardly mobile enjoy some socioeconomic gains, but they never escape neighborhoods because their very sense of self is tied to Blacks in poverty. On the other hand, the ones who are left behind bear the harshest brunt of nearly all measures of inequality in the country, but they retain the symbolisms of Blackness. The book challenges persistent homogenizations of Blackness, draw out the consequences for continuing to do so, and point to the usefulness of recognizing class variation in Black American life. Caldwell; cutlery by Fourleaflover / iStock Arrangement Recorded by arrangement with Princeton University Press ISBNs C07149 5058735 9781705043257 Getting Something to Eat in Jackson Z18364 5058735 9781705043301 Getting Something to Eat in Jackson DG14361 5058735 9781705043356 Getting Something to Eat in Jackson Images Insert cover JPG and cover PDF here Getting Something to Eat in Jackson Title Getting Something to Eat in Jackson Subtitle Race, Class, and Food in the American South Series Author Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. Narrator Beresford Bennett Copy A vivid portrait of African American life in today's urban South that uses food to explore the complex interactions of race and class Getting Something to Eat in Jackson uses food—what people eat and how— to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity. Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans—from upper-middle-class patrons of the city’s fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians. By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jacks