A Recipe for Equity? Three Perspectives on Tunde Wey’s Dinner.
by Rebekah Modrak
You may have read about Tunde Wey’s Blackness in America dinner series in which he travels the US cooking fine meals inspired by his Nigerian heritage and then using the jollof rice, Scotch eggs, braised cabbage, and other specialities as media to initiate conversation around a topic related to blackness. In April 2018, Wey hosted and created a four-course meal for two events in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
1. A dinner at Hikone Community Center for staff and residents of three housing communities — Green-Baxter, Bryant and Hikone, home to predominantly low to middle income, largely African American communities that have historically experienced tensions around education, transportation, and housing. This group welcomed a few University of Michigan students (engineering), faculty (urban planning and education) and city administrators (Ann Arbor Housing Commission).
2. A dinner at Jefferson Market to bring together members of the University of Michigan with local community members, all concerned with equity and race. Community members consisted of staff from the Peace Neighborhood Center, the Community Action Network, The CivCity Initiative, Transforming Justice Washtenaw, the Ann Arbor District Library, and other organizations. University participants came from the Colleges of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Engineering; and the Stamps School of Art & Design, as well as from the Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning, the National Center for Institutional Diversity, and the Wallace House. The majority of guests were African American.
While Wey and I jointly collaborated to bring together communities “concerned with equity,” our intentions may have differed at this point. As a member of both academic and local groups, I saw the dinners as an opportunity to connect people and create bridges between actions and experiences around inclusion and equity in Ann Arbor communities and at the University. As someone with a commitment to this community, I was aware of the significance of each individual who chose to attend these events and hoped that these meetings would be a step to strengthen their future partnerships in Ann Arbor.
As the chef and creator of the Blackness in America dinner series, Wey made the decisions for the dinners, such as what food to cook and serve, and how guests encountered the food (he chose not to provide a menu). He decided whether to initiate a larger group conversation at each dinner (at Hikone, he did not initiate a collective conversation), and assumed the role of moderating the conversation at the Jefferson Market, beginning this conversation with his own observations about gentrification in Detroit and then shifting to his main question: “What are white people going to give up?”
Throughout this series, University of Michigan students who attended the Jefferson Market dinner share their perspectives on the event, their anticipation and apprehension in coming together with others committed to equity from across disciplinary, class-based, racial and community/academic lines, and the tension and weightiness that arose as Tunde initiated the group conversation.
Read the perspectives of three Tunde Wey dinner guests:
Rebekah Modrak is an associate professor in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, and is a member of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity.
