You've Hit the Follow Button. Now What?
To those wondering how I’ve gotten to this place of using my voice and why I even care: I have the advantage and the privilege of where I currently sit in this movement. I’m multiracial and live a life of intersectionality. I simultaneously flow between traditions of Puerto Rican and Southern Black American cultures because of my upbringing and where I was raised in Charleston, South Carolina; one of the many epicenters of traditional Black food culture here in America, including but not limited to, the Gullah Geechee people of the Lowcountry.
My culture, heritage, and food content are all a part of the Caribbean diaspora. Because of those factors, I’m in the current scope of the voices that are being amplified online right now. I fall under the vast umbrella of identifying as Afro-Latina, despite the fact that I may not appear to be because of my skin tone, which has undoubtably awarded me privilege in my life. I toe the line of racial ambiguity, being palatable enough for a white mainstream food audience while being a person of color for them to use as a diversity hire to fulfill some quota. I’m the safe choice.
That has always been the role I’ve served at almost every single job I’ve had, in and out of the culinary industry. My life has always been a blend of not being Puerto Rican enough for those on the island while not being white enough for those in the United States. The first vivid memory of my place in this world was as early as first grade: I wasn’t allowed to sit at the white kids’ lunch table but the Black students let me sit at theirs. That alone, speaks for itself.
If you haven’t been living under a rock and have been following the culinary scene on social media, you’re probably aware of the outpouring and newfound support for Black and POC food blogs given the current climate and the propelling push of the Black Lives Matter movement. Countless mainstream food media accounts and bloggers are being applauded by a wave of white guilt and a sudden awakening of color: amplifying Black and brown voices. Black and brown work. Black and brown recipes. Black and brown content.
Granted, under normal circumstances, a sudden surge of a large and newfound audience is something to be excited about. It’s great, right? More visibility, more engagement, more ways to share our food and our recipes with them. So, why wouldn’t we be happy about it? We all work hard, busting our collective asses cooking and creating. Braintstorming and scrapping recipe ideas. Hours of grocery shopping for quality ingredients (pre-covid, of course). Hours of editing photographs. Hundreds of dishes that just didn’t come out right and bloopers that might never see the light of day. And for those who work in the industry professionally, simultaneously working in kitchens and working from home to create content on our days off. Not to mention the anxiety-inducing editing and mincing our words on content posts to “fit in” and not alienate the base or lose out on paid work.
It’s a strange feeling that’s currently being juggled: the juxtapositional feelings of wanting your work to be seen and heard while wanting to retain our autonomy. Feeling guilt and shame for voicing how you truly feel because of your new audience that showed up due to often performative, hyper-focused online work. Navigating this new “shared” space with an influx of brand new faces. For so long, it’s been our thing. Our community. Our tribe. Our space. We made it special. I’ve personally curated my timeline and interacted with fellow food content creators that reflect who I am and what I do.
We all share very similar struggles: our voices being unheard, our recipes going unpublished or promoted. Our writing pitches thrown to the side because they were a little “too controversial” or not what the mainstream media wanted to see. The attempts of networking and putting our people on that get ignored. Our work not wanting to be seen or even credited by the white and often male-dominated spaces of the food world. Our food being acceptable for feeding the entire restaurant staff with family meal but not enough for the window pass as a menu feature. So, we adapted and did our own thing for ourselves. And to me, it’s beautiful and it’s sacred. And this space must be respected.
We share the same uneasy yet frustrating feeling when we endlessly scroll the social media feeds of brands, companies, food suppliers, fellow chefs, cooks, food writers, and bloggers and not see a single face or a singular hand that looks like ours. The same hands that, more than likely, originally created the food content being shown to begin with, but was appropriated by others and pushed into mainstream food media as a new “trendy” or “ethnic” superfood dish to the masses.
The onslaught of constant scrolling on accounts that are made for us and to showcase our hard work, but that hold stipulations about how many social media followers or engagement numbers we have before getting an actual feature. Like that even really matters at the end of the day when it comes to what we can actually cook. Remember, things that can’t go viral don’t get a prominent space online in the food world.
Granted, all of these new (mostly white) faces are here for a reason. And for the most part, if you’re new here, that means that you’ve done a little bit of digging to get past personal prejudices and biases to diversify the content that you consume on a daily basis.
And kudos. Maybe you’ve taken the first, yet tiny, step. I’m not one to spare feelings when it comes to how I truly feel about things, so I’m not going to give you a cookie for hitting that follow button. Sorry, not sorry. From this point onward, it’s about doing the work.
That work is constant. It’s more than hitting a follow button or posting a black square on your Instagram feed with a trending hashtag. I’m not going to say that you don’t care, because maybe you do. You certainly should. It’s the bare minimum you can do as a decent human being. You’re making the effort, right? But let’s get to the intention behind it. Did you follow because you’re feeling guilty of what’s happening in the world right now? Are you messaging us privately to let us know how anti-racist you are rather than being loud about it in public? Is this your feeble attempt at making things right? Are you going to continue promoting our work to diversify the massive timeline feed and the algorithm that often works against us?
The big takeaway is this: bring us into your spaces outside of social media. Open your wallet and open your network. Pay for and promote our digital or physical books and merchandise. Invite us to the food conferences and elbow-rubbing events. Hire us for the private clubs, catering gigs, and pop-up dinners. Hire us for editing and leadership teams in large-scale food media. Are brand partnerships your thing? Slide a few opportunities to your new favorite follow. Freelancing work that you can’t fit onto your busy plate? Send it to someone else who may be a good, or even better, fit. Give up your platform and your performative stage for others; use the privilege and the access that you have been handed in this industry and push forward writers and cooks who need the amplification. And do it with intention, grace, and compassion, not because of pity.
Pay us to do the work and don’t ask for our time, knowledge, or resources in exchange for “exposure.” Exposure doesn’t pay my bills and it certainly can’t be deposited into my bank account. Don’t be condescending about our knowledge and skill set when it comes to the work we do; because frankly, we can cook circles around you. We’ve always had to be twice as good to just get our foot in the door. Don’t dive into our direct messages asking for help on “what you can do next” when Google is readily available on the same phone you’re typing on. Respect people’s boundaries.
Don’t police our thoughts and feelings when we share how we feel and what we do on our pages. Sit back, listen, and learn. Now, more than ever, is the time for you to truly be silent and take in what’s happening around you. Take that newfound knowledge and perspective and do the work for yourself.
We aren’t here to pacify the need for diversity on your timeline. We aren’t here to perform for you. We aren’t here to coddle you and to hold your hand while you learn to dismantle the racism, prejudices, and microagressions that live and thrive, often openly, in your very own community, workplace, and home life.
If you’ve followed us to hit some brand new woke checklist that you created in your head, that’s cool, too. I’m not going to knock you for that because that’s your journey. But don’t feel threatened by us when we continue to share work that reflects us, our culture, and our people. Don’t feel threatened when we continue to create space for each other. Frankly, that’s all we’ve known and that’s all we’ve had the capacity to do. Now that you’re seeing a lot of different faces on your feed that don’t look like you, embrace it. Someone else in the spotlight for once? Praise them and be genuine about it. Trust me, we can tell when you aren’t. Take that lingering, stinging yet numbing feeling you have in your chest when you feel out of place in a huge crowd and sit in it. Own it.
We’re here to continue doing our own work, cooking and sharing our experiences and our stories, without you creating speed bumps along the way. We’ve got enough to get done without additional hinderances from a new and large audience that possibly may not want to do the work with us or for us. Let us own this hesitation. We deserve to feel this way. So, now that you’ve hit the follow button? Stay in your lane and let us do the cooking.