Burning Minnesota

Protesters gather to watch an apartment building burning near the Minneapolis Police third precinct on Wednesday as protests erupt in the aftermath of a police brutality case in Minnesota, United States. A white police officer was caught on a bystander's video pressing his knee into the neck of African-American man George Floyd, who later died at a hospital. 

-reuters-

Popeyes sandwich strikes a chord for African-Americans

KANSAS CITY, Montana — The videos of mind-numbing first bites and long lines, the celebratory memes and fawning reviews: The return of the Popeyes chicken sandwich Sunday has met with the same social-media frenzy that first greeted it last summer.

But embedded in many of the catchy memes and witty messages is not just an affection for spicy seasoning and crisp breading. There’s also a sentiment that Popeyes has struck a special chord for African Americans — specifically, that its celebrated sandwich tastes like something that could have come from a black home kitchen.

One Twitter user, @RocBoy_Mel, wrote Sunday that he did not know whose “grandma” made the sandwiches, “but I finally got my hands on one today and I was very impressed.”

In a video clip that went viral on Twitter after the fast-food sandwich was introduced in August, a white host on the news and entertainment show “Daily Blast Live” tried the sandwich, and her black co-host asked, “Does that taste like a neighborhood you’ve never been to?”

In a Facebook post in August, Nadiyah Ali, a nurse from Katy, Texas, compared the sandwich to a rival’s: Chick-fil-A’s version, she wrote, tasted as if it were made “by a white woman named Sarah who grew up around black people.” The Popeyes sandwich, she added, tasted “like it was cooked by an older black lady named Lucille.”

Black people were saying they liked the chicken not just for its taste, but also for the feelings of home cooking it evoked. It was the type of chicken they could take to a family potluck and not get a side-eye.

“You most definitely can take a bucket of Popeyes chicken, and nobody’s going to say anything,” said Los, 27, who declined to give his last name as he left a Popeyes in Kansas City, Missouri. “They’ll be like, ‘Ah, who cooked this?’ ”

Not everyone, of course, thinks Popeyes tastes down-home. Asked if Popeyes chicken reminded him of home cooking, Corey Thatch, 38, a friend of Los’, replied, “I ain’t going to say all that, because my grandma’s chicken was my grandma’s chicken.”

Still, even approaching authenticity is no small feat for a company that was started by a white man and is now owned by the conglomerate, Restaurant Brands International, that also owns Burger King and Tim Hortons.

It can be easy to misfire with dishes that have deep traditions among African Americans — I recall my wife’s gagging as she described biting into macaroni and cheese made by a white co-worker, and discovering that it contained corn. Then there was the moment in 2006 when Oprah Winfrey took an on-air bite of a chicken-and-spinach dish made by a white woman who had won $1 million for it in the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

“Did we add salt and pepper?” Winfrey asked with a befuddled grimace. (The woman had not.) “I think we needed salt and pepper.”

When the founder of Popeyes, Al Copeland, opened his first fried-chicken joint, Chicken on the Run, in a New Orleans suburb in the early 1970s, sales were underwhelming. He reopened with a new, spicier seasoning mixture, and Popeyes was born.

The South has its own well-known flavors, from the hands of chefs of many backgrounds. So it is unsurprising that the recipe trademarked by Copeland, who died in 2008, has resonated across racial lines.

“The heritage of the Popeyes brand comes from Louisiana, where many cultures come together to produce a unique and beautiful culinary experience,” Dori Alvarez, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

But black people were at the root of many southern culinary traditions. Those traditions have traveled with African American families who resettled throughout the country. “Black hands were in that pot all the time, and still are,” said Omar Tate, the chef and founder of Honeysuckle, a pop-up dinner series in New York and Philadelphia that uses food to explore black identity.

Popeyes would not provide information about its customer demographics. But overall, African Americans, who are about 13 percent of the country’s population, buy more fried chicken than their numbers would indicate: nearly 30 percent of all fast-food fried chicken, and 15 percent of all breaded chicken sandwiches, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm.

Ali, who wrote the Facebook post comparing the Popeyes sandwich to Chick-fil-A’s, said she wasn’t suggesting that white people could not cook as well as African Americans — just differently. They seem to rely on precise measurements, she said.

“Black folks don’t cook like that,” she said. “Our recipes are a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We season until it’s right. That’s what Popeyes tastes like.”

Tate, the chef, said it was difficult to liken Popeyes to authentically black cooking. When he thinks of authenticity, he thinks of the techniques of someone like Edna Lewis, a pioneering black chef, who fried meats in lard and seasoned the fryer with smoked pork.

“That’s authentic. That’s what soul food is to me,” he said. “It’s one of those black magic things that can’t be reproduced.”

Popeyes’ inroads with black Americans may be as much about marketing as anything else. The company has made bald appeals to African Americans in its advertising, stoking criticism that it is pandering. When the chain introduced a fictitious black woman named Annie the Chicken Queen in its commercials about a decade ago, some people criticized it as racist. Alvarez, the Popeyes spokeswoman, declined to discuss the company’s marketing.

But those marketing decisions, and the location of many Popeyes restaurants in black communities, have given many African Americans a sense of connection with the menu, said Psyche Williams-Forson, the chairwoman of American studies at the University of Maryland-College Park and the author of “Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power.”

“Black communities can say, ‘This is our own and it tastes like our own,’ ” she said. “You’ve got location. You’ve got taste. You’ve got texture. And you’ve got a food that people enjoy. You have a perfect storm there.”

If Popeyes has impressed African Americans, the hubbub over the sandwich has also raised questions of corporate responsibility. There have been demands that the chain invest in the black communities that have driven much of its success, and calls for better treatment of low-wage workers who have toiled to meet the heavy demand for the sandwich.

“We own the fried-chicken narrative,” said Nicole Taylor, who is black and the executive food editor at the website Thrillist. “Black people are turning it into a political moment.”


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Leah Chase, Creole chef who fed US presidents, freedom riders, dies at 96

Leah Chase, the nation’s pre-eminent Creole chef, always knew what to feed her famous customers.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. liked barbecued ribs, and James Baldwin preferred gumbo. Singer Sarah Vaughan ordered stuffed crab to go, and Nat King Cole always wanted a four-minute egg.

She once had to stop President Barack Obama from putting hot sauce in her gumbo — a real culinary sin — and, despite pressure from a city still angry over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, she fed President George W. Bush crab soup and shrimp Clemenceau on the second anniversary of the storm that nearly closed her restaurant, Dooky Chase, for good.

“In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken,” she would often say.

Chase died Saturday at her son’s home near her restaurant in New Orleans, her daughter Stella Reese Chase said. She was 96.

Chase was much more than a gifted chef, although she would argue that there is no greater calling than feeding people. She spread her message through cookbooks, countless media interviews and television shows. Princess Tiana, the frog who wanted to own a restaurant in the animated Disney feature “The Princess and the Frog,” was based on Chase. It was the first African-American princess in a Disney movie.

Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica Harris, an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who Chase came to view as another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

Leah Lange was born in Madisonville., Louisiana, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, on Jan. 6, 1923. She was the oldest of 14 children of Charles Lange, a ship’s caulker, and Hortensia (Raymond) Lange, a homemaker and seamstress. Her parents valued hard work and education, admonishing the children to keep their elbows off the table and teaching them to read with books that her father had salvaged from the trash heap at a nearby school for white children.

Because her hometown had no schools for African-Americans past sixth grade, she was sent to live with an aunt in New Orleans to complete her education at a Roman Catholic high school.

Chase was, by all accounts, exceptionally smart, and by an early age had memorized the Latin Mass. She graduated from high school at 16 and two years later took a job at a French Quarter restaurant.

It was the first restaurant she had ever been in, and it sparked a love of food beyond home cooking and an appreciation of beauty that she would nurture for the rest of her life.

She met Edgar Chase Jr., a jazz trumpeter and band leader known as Dooky, in 1945. Three months later they were married and began a family. Edgar Chase died in 2016 at 88.

In the early years of their marriage his parents ran a sandwich shop and lottery business in New Orleans in the Treme, one of America’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. Once the couple’s children were old enough, Chase began working with her husband at the restaurant. She slowly pushed her husband and his parents to expand the business, to make it more like the finer restaurants she had worked at in the French Quarter.

In a city operating under the heavy cloud of Jim Crow laws, Dooky Chase’s became the only upscale restaurant where African Americans could gather.

“In these desegregated times it’s hard to imagine what it meant for Leah Chase to try to create a fancy restaurant for black people,” said Lolis Eric Elie, an author and filmmaker whose father was a prominent New Orleans civil rights lawyer and whose mother was a well-regarded educator.

“Even in the days when my parents were courting, black people had Little League championship teams, college graduations and date nights with special people,” Elie said. “Dooky Chase’s was the place you went to for those occasions at the time when Galatoire’s and Antoine’s didn’t serve ‘colored.’”

The restaurant became a gathering place for leaders of the civil rights movement to discuss strategy, often with their white allies. At the time, it was illegal for black and white people to mix.

At the restaurant, Chase fed hungry Freedom Riders fresh off the road and hosted meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She let a young Thurgood Marshall use her telephone to call Robert F. Kennedy even when phoned-in lunch orders were pouring in.

“We were trying to be accepted without hurting anybody,” Chase said in an interview with the National Public Radio program “The Splendid Table.” “In the ′60s, here come these young people — bam! — they would just go in there and break the door down. They were going to take chances, go to jail if they had to. We couldn’t understand that, but it worked. A lot of mistakes were made, but sometimes that’s what it takes to change a system.”

The era’s great musicians and actors, too, came through her door. The restaurant had such a hold on the cultural firmament of the time that Ray Charles rewrote the lyrics to “Early in the Morning Blues” in tribute to the restaurant: “I went to Dooky Chase to get me something to eat./The waitress looked at me and said, ‘Ray, you sure look beat.’”

Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.

“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

She supported Tipper Gore’s campaign in the 1980s and ′90s against explicit and violent rock and rap lyrics and demanded that young people dress properly when they came to her restaurant, yet she didn’t leave the neighborhood when it fell on economic hard times in the 1980s, and an 896-unit public housing project opened up across the street. People urged her to move out. Instead, she renovated.

“If we would have moved off this corner, this whole community would have been gone a long time ago,” she told Carol Allen, a biographer. “Running away from it isn’t going to help anything or anybody. I say like this, If you can’t take a risk, you’re wasting God’s good time on earth.”

Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

Chase won numerous awards for her civil rights work and her cooking, but she was perhaps proudest of the work she did to promote art, Harris said.

Chase was 54 when she first walked into an art museum.

“Museums were segregated, and you didn’t go there, so we knew nothing,” she said. Her guide was Celestine Cook, a New Orleans socialite and civic leader who was the first African-American to sit on the board of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which Chase would join in 1972.

Her husband gave her a painting by the late African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, and her love of collecting was set. The walls of her restaurant were soon filled with pieces by artists like Elizabeth Catlett and John T. Biggers. It was considered by many to be Louisiana’s best collection of African-American art.

A portrait of Chase chopping squash in her kitchen by Gustave Blache III is in the National Portrait Gallery, and her chef’s jacket and other artifacts from her kitchen are on display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

She often said she would “be as mean as a rattlesnake” without art.

“Art softens people up and warms them up to deal with each other in humane ways,” Chase told a congressional committee in 1995 in an effort to save funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2005, when New Orleans’ levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, floodwater filled the floor of the restaurant but didn’t touch the art, which a grandson was able to retrieve undamaged.

For nearly 18 months, Chase and her husband lived in a government trailer next to the restaurant while they struggled to repair it. By 2007, it was open again.

The flood was only one of many setbacks Chase countered by cooking. Her eldest daughter, Emily — her right hand at the restaurant — died giving birth to her eighth child in 1990. That child died a short time later. The day after her daughter died, Chase was scheduled to open the restaurant at 11 a.m. So she did.

“I lost myself in the pots,” she wrote in “The Dooky Chase Cookbook.” “I had more tears in the gumbo pot than I had gumbo.”

In addition to her daughter Stella, survivors include a son, Edgar III; another daughter, Leah Chase Kamata; 16 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren.

Friends knew Chase’s health was failing in April, when she did not show up for her annual Holy Thursday lunch, for which she had long served gumbo z’herbes, a special dish that requires 9 kinds of greens. Seats for the lunch were always booked a year in advance, and nearly 700 people would share the meal.

For the last several years, chef John Folse had made the gumbo with her oversight, but Chase always showed up and addressed the crowd. She had worked up until a few days before Holy Thursday, her daughter Stella said, but had to be hospitalized.

“She always said you have to do something every day for somebody else,” Folse said. “She told me she tried to never say no. That’s what the school of Leah Chase was all about. You just never say no, and you keep on going.”


2019 New York Times News Service

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Sephora to shut US stores for diversity training after racial incident

NEW YORK -- LVMH's Sephora beauty chain said it would close all its US stores, distribution centers and corporate offices on Wednesday to conduct diversity training for employees, a move that follows a racial incident involving a Grammy-nominated singer.

R&B singer SZA, who is black, said in April she was racially profiled at a Sephora store in Calabasas, California.

Sephora and LVMH representatives did not respond to questions on the reason for the training, which the company called "inclusion workshops." Louis Vuitton owner LVMH is based in Paris.

SZA said a Sephora employee she identified as "Sandy" called security to make sure the singer was not stealing from the store.

"We had a long talk. U have a blessed day Sandy," SZA said in a Twitter post.

"You are a part of the Sephora family, and we are committed to ensuring every member of our community feels welcome and included at our stores," Sephora said at the time in a response to the singer's post.

SZA is a Grammy nominee who also collaborated with Kendrick Lamar on the song "All the Stars" for the blockbuster movie "Black Panther."

"We will never stop building a community where diversity is expected, self-expression is honored, all are welcomed and you are included," Sephora said on its website, while announcing the workshops.

After SZA's tweet, Google reviews for the store spiked, with many users criticizing Sephora over the incident.

Barbadian singer Rihanna last month unveiled her new fashion brand with LVMH, a rare move by the French group to set up a label from scratch as it taps into soaring demand for celebrity collaborations in the luxury world.

Sephora's workshops come about a year after Starbucks closed 8,000 stores across the country for anti-bias training after a Philadelphia cafe manager's call to police resulted in the arrests of two black men who were waiting for a friend.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Thousands of Indonesians rally against racial, religious intolerance

JAKARTA - Thousands of Indonesians held a peaceful rally on Saturday to promote unity, saying they were worried by signs of growing racial and religious intolerance in the world's largest Muslim-majority country.

Dressed in red and white shirts, the colors of the Indonesian flag, religious leaders, members of human rights groups, lawmakers and others marched along a central Jakarta street.

Some held posters with the national motto "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika", which means unity in diversity, while others performed traditional dances.

"This is about diversity, but also about unity. We have to separate politics from ethnicity, religion, and race," said 25-year old Iwan Saputra. "I want Indonesia to stay united."

Concerns about rising hardline Islamic sentiment in the country of 250 million people have grown since police decided on Wednesday to investigate a blasphemy complaint by Muslim groups against the Christian governor of Jakarta.

More than 100,000 Muslims protested against Governor Basuki Purnama Purnama earlier this month. Police fired tear gas and water cannon to quell the protest.

"The economy is growing, infrastructure is being built everywhere. Don't let this all be destroyed just because of ego," said Saidiman Ahmad, an activist with Liberal Islam Network.

Some analysts have said the police decision to pursue the case was a blow to democracy as well as diversity. Indonesia recognizes six religions and is home to several minority groups that adhere to traditional beliefs.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Indy 500: Record Heat Tests Drivers, Challenges Fans

INDIANAPOLIS — How hot was it at Sunday's Indianapolis 500? Depends on whom you ask.

Track officials announced just before 2:30 p.m. that the temperature had hit 93 degrees, which would set a record as the hottest 500 in history. The previous record was 92 degrees in 1937.

But the National Weather Service in Indianapolis listed the official temperature at 90, and The Weather Channel had the mercury at a balmy 89 degrees.

Official highs and lows for Indianapolis are recorded at Indianapolis International Airport. Weather Service meteorologist Marc Dahmer (Day'-mer) says the temperature at the speedway likely was higher because of the amount of pavement, the heat generated by the cars and the number of people gathered in such a small area.

article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/27/indy-500-record-heat-test_n_1548866.html

F1 title race could be an ugly battle

LONDON - Formula One cars are not a sight for sore eyes this season but, on the basis of the first four launches, at least one ugly duckling looks likely to turn into a swan as the year progresses.

Gary Anderson, the northern Irishman who designed the first Jordan F1 car more than 20 years ago, told Reuters he saw both missed opportunities and original thinking in what has so far emerged from under the wraps.

Anderson, now a technical analyst for BBC television where Eddie Jordan is a pundit, indicated the Force India presented at Silverstone on Friday had impressed him the most.

"Looking at their car, relative to other people's, I see a car here that I believe is a big step forward," he said at Silverstone. "And they weren't slow at the end of last year.

"As I said to [technical director] Andrew [Green], you could be a pain in the ass for quite a few of the guys up front.

"I'm not saying they will go out and beat Red Bull, McLaren or Ferrari but I think they [the top teams] could be looking at these guys’ lap times just to make sure they are not going to get beaten," added Anderson.

"The whole concept looks to me as though it functions.

"The move of the front wing from last year to this is, for me, absolutely excellent. The concept, the vision of it is what I'd liked to have seen...unless there's a real Achilles heel in there somewhere, I think it will be pretty good."

Sleeping policeman

Green worked with Anderson at Jordan in designing that team's first car and so did Mark Smith, now technical director at Caterham.

The latter's new car drew fewer plaudits, although Anderson felt it too was traveling in the right direction with its solution to the change in exhaust and aerodynamic regulations.

"To exploit the nose the way they did, pretty good," he said, emphasizing that the Malaysian-owned team's car had been seen only online and in photographs rather than in the 'flesh'.

"But ugly. Nothing special in the front wing that I see. It's a technical three piece front wing that doesn't exploit the areas where I believe you need to exploit.

"The area of the sidepods, the 'coke bottle', there's nothing exciting," he continued.

Ferrari, who launched their car online on Friday after heavy snow in Maranello forced them to shelve a track presentation, raised gasps of shock when the F2012 was first seen.

Team boss Stefano Domenicali said performance mattered more than whether it was ugly or pretty and Anderson agreed.

"You criticize it [the nose] on the first car but when you see it on the second or third you sort of accept it," he said.

"They [Ferrari] have exploited the high chassis, low nose, which you have to do. I think it's probably the ugliest one in a way...there's a big ski ramp there, or a 'sleeping policeman' on top of the chassis.

"Aerodynamically, the top of the chassis is not that big a deal, it's not that critical to anything but on the way there there's different things you can do," he added.

Ferrari and McLaren appeared to have gone in opposite directions in positioning the exhausts but that can all change.

The first pre-season tests begin next week and cars could look quite different when the season starts in Melbourne on March 18.

Kimi Raikkonen's Lotus and world champion Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull break cover on Sunday and Monday while Michael Schumacher's Mercedes will not be seen until later in the month.

Anderson was not impressed by the McLaren, seeing nothing to have the hairs standing up on the back of his neck, but with the usual caveats and a suspicion that perhaps they were hiding something clever for Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton to exploit.

"The front wing is the same as last year, the nose section and that area of the chassis that looks ugly [on others], they haven't done it," he said.

"And I think they missed a bit there because although it's all small, you've got to exploit every aerodynamic avenue possible.

"They didn't have a diffuser on the car so you can't comment on what you don't see," added Anderson.

"The (new) diffuser regulations, as we know them and as I read them and the way I think 99.9 percent of the teams agree with them, [are] that you can't do much.

"So if McLaren have gone to the effort of making a dummy one to put on there, maybe they have found some loophole they think is legal. Maybe their secret weapon is in the diffuser. But we will have to wait and see." – Reuters

source:gmanetwork.com