Goodbye to the Dude-itor-in-chief
Issue 167: On Adam Rapoport, Bon Appétit, and paying people of color who appear on BA's YouTube channel, which was somehow not already the case?!
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter that usually comes much earlier than this, but I’ve been fighting technical difficulties with the newsletter platform I use for, like, three hours. Grrrrr. So, a dinnertime-ish food newsletter today.
Read yesterday’s dispatch: How 4 Black chefs are handling *gestures wildly* all of this
Did I spend four hours lying in bed watching Bon Appétit Test Kitchen videos on YouTube last Sunday morning? Um, yeah. It’s such an easy rabbit hole to fall into. The series pitches itself, as Soleil Ho describes in an article about the race problem on BA’s channel, as “a fun, wacky workplace full of interesting and diverse characters from all walks of life.” But, as Ho and so many others have called out time and time again, it’s not diverse. Nearly everyone who appears on camera is white. And people of color have long been mistreated there, which we’ve learned more about as BA’s simmering racism problem came to the fore yesterday and today.
First, the news: Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport stepped down yesterday. He resigned after writer Tammie Teclemariam resurfaced a photo of him in a Puerto Rican brownface costume (which came days after he flailed around in explaining why BA had rejected a pitch from Puerto Rican writer Illyanna Maisonet about Afro-Boricua cooks and then had a white editor write about the Puerto Rico street food district Piñones.)
While this photo was the spark, the lack of diversity, mistreatment of employees of color, and erasure of Black food culture have been a problem for a very long time.
Sohla El-Waylly, one of the few women of color on BA’s staff, called out Rapoport in no uncertain terms and pointed out some genuinely shocking and horrifying practices behind the curtains. On Instagram, she wrote:
She has not been paid for appearing on BA’s MASSIVELY successful YouTube channel!!! And a $50k salary is significantly low for the work she does. Meanwhile, Brad Leone (who, yes, is entertaining to watch) left his role as the test kitchen manager to focus *solely* on video. This is all truly bonkers to me. Sohla told BuzzFeed News:
"Their reasoning for it was always that the people who have contracts are the people who have series, like shows, but all those people who have shows are white and [Condé Nast Entertainment are] the ones who decide who has a show," she said, adding that some of her other colleagues who are people of color also do not have contracts despite appearing in the YouTube videos.
And former BA photographer Alex Lau pointed out the hypocrisy in the mag publishing notoriously long and complex recipes while using this as their reasoning for not featuring African dishes:
And keep reading for perhaps the worst article you’ve ever read — the source of the Dude-itor.
Here’s the BA test kitchen staff, for reference. Rapoport is on the bottom right, and Sohla is directly to the left of him.
(photo courtesy 92Y)
So, what’s the Dude-itor? In a glowing profile in WWD in 2011, Adam Rapoport and other young-ish male editors were described completely unironically in this truly, truly horrifying way:
Just a night of dudes being dudes, bros being bros, but there’s a lot of this going around Manhattan media these days. In fact, you don’t have to look farther than the youngish, vaguely athletic, literate and street-jargoned top editors at The New York Times Magazine, Bon Appétit and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. They’re dudes; they’re editors. Ladies and dudes, meet the Dude-itors.
Barf. Words cannot describe how much I hate this. Plus the story contains this bananas quote from former Time managing editor Rick Stengel:
“They’re not the future — they’re the present. In terms of us figuring everything out, they will be the guys who will figure everything out. Or not.”
I’m gonna say “or not” on this one, my guy. (Sorry, “my ~dude~”)
If you can’t get your face unstuck from a permanent cringe, here’s another thing that won’t help. Let us not forget the moment earlier this year, when Rapoport mixed up the only two women of color — on his own staff!! — at an on-stage event. Slips of the tongue happen but this just felt a little too on-the-nose.
Mhmm.
As lots of folks are pointing out, Rapoport’s resignation is not the end. It has to be the beginning. What I’ve included here is only a portion of the story — other current and former BA staff members have talked at length on Twitter about the discrimination they faced at the magazine. No matter who’s the next editor, there need to be serious, deeper structural changes at BA that go beyond just replacing the Dude-itor on top.
