Franchise // The Golden Arches in Black America

An estimated one-third of all American adults eats something from at a fast-food restaurant every day. Millions start their mornings with paper-wrapped English muffin breakfast sandwiches, order burritos hastily secured in foil for lunch, and end their evenings with extravalue dinners consumed in cars. But while people of all ages and backgrounds enjoy and depend on fast food, it does not mean the same thing to each of us. For African Americans, as acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain reveals in Franchise, fast food is a source of both despair and power--and a battlefield on which the fight for racial justice has been waged since the 1960s. On the one hand, we rightly blame fast food for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, and fast food restaurants are viewed as symbols of capitalism's disastrous effects on our nation's most vulnerable citizens. Yet at the same time, Chatelain shows, fast food companies, and McDonald's in particular, have represented a sour