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April 06, 2009, 01:18 PM ET
Obama Fried Chicken
There are two recently re-named “Obama Fried Chicken” fast-food restaurants in New York City. That’s right. Instead of, say, “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” they’ve called these places “Obama Fried Chicken.”
According to the store owners, each establishment is meant as a kind of homage to the greatness of America’s newest leader, but detractors bristle at the too-ease conflation of the nation’s first African-American President with deep-fried chicken, the stereotypically racial meal par excellence.
Both stores advertise themselves as serving halal food prepared in accordance with Islamic mandates, and some defenders would like to use that fact as a way to let the owners off the hook. These are people of color, the argument goes, serving black communities and trying to express a kind of flat-footed solidarity with their customers. They might have miscalculated. Their strategy might backfire by offending the sensibilities of certain segments of their local communities, but they definitely can’t be equated with KKK-esque attempts to purposefully lampoon Obama by deploying age-old tropes of racial savagery and difference.
The latter may be true, but that doesn’t satisfy many residents in those neighborhoods, some of whom have already uploaded their own YouTubed video responses to these new stores.
From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of those videos express surprise and outrage at the restaurants’ awnings. One woman gives us 30 seconds of the storefront from her car, proving to any incredulous out-of-towners that such a ridiculous thing is actually in her neighborhood.
In another video, two men, laughing about the utter absurdity of the store’s name, actually enter one of the restaurants and ask the person behind the counter-to-ceiling bulletproof glass why they didn’t rename the place (formerly “Kennedy Fried Chicken”) “Presidential Fried Chicken” or something. Anything else. “That’s crazy,” the cameraman says. “Like really think about that, son. Come on. Seriously. Seriously….yo, this is crazy.”
Crazy, indeed!
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