Naa Oyo Kwate, associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology, has been selected to receive the Urban Affairs Association’s (UAA) 2024 Best Book in the Field of Urban Affairs Award for White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation. It was among 64 books based on rigorous research on an urban issue within any national context that were nominated this year for the UAA award. Kwate also won the 2023 Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.
An interdisciplinary social scientist with wide ranging interests in racial inequality and Black urban life, Kwate will receive the UAA award on April 24 at the International Conference on Urban Affairs in New York. This year’s conference, “Cities on the Edge: Promoting Equity and Resiliency through Research, Activism, Planning and Policy,” will convene more than 1,200 participants from over 55 countries.
Originally trained as a clinical psychologist, a startling burden of chronic illness among the patients she treated in large New York City hospitals led her to a research program investigating the social determinants of African American health. With the support of more than $2.7 million in federal and foundation funding, Kwate has led interdisciplinary research studies at the intersection of social science, public health and the humanities.
She’s also published the short work, Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now, which examines restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. She also edited, The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality, a visual taxonomy of inequality using Camden, NJ, as a case study.
Kwate has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library and has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the European Institutes for Advanced Studies, and others. She is currently writing a book investigating the impact of corner liquor stores in Black communities from 1950 to date.
According to the UAA Assessment Committee:
“White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation by Naa Oyo A. Kwate (University of Minnesota Press) is a detailed, fascinating, and insightful study of the history and current practices of the fast food industry. The book is impressively interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and themes from history, public health, geography, planning, and sociology. Dr. Kwate dissects the creation of racialized landscapes over time in urban America, detailing how exploitative retailers have come to characterize black spaces. Dr. Kwate uses the lens of a single industry to show how structural forces of racism, capitalism, and politics intersect with the individual acts of businesses, customers, and local officials. The book’s engagement with the everyday experiences and materiality of the city, while always keeping in mind connections to broader drivers of urban development, is very strong. This timely book will be of interest to scholars, students, and the general public. Dr. Kwate does an excellent job of presenting archival evidence and contemporary data while telling a compelling story of why U.S. cities have assumed particular racialized landscapes.”
