FoodLab Detroit
@foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
550 followers 470 following 420 posts
A writer, strategist, and cultural worker whose work lives at the intersection of food, equity, and memory. Currently exploring the role of Black abstraction in processing grief and legacy. Detroit-made, globally engaged.
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Reposted by FoodLab Detroit
politico.com
EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of leaked messages show leaders of Young Republican groups joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape in a private Telegram chat.

Inside rising GOP leaders’ racist chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than 7 months👇
‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat
Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
www.politico.com
Reposted by FoodLab Detroit
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Black folks consistently overperform in political analysis — not because we have access to better data, but because we’ve had more at stake. Project 2025 was OBVIOUS to us because it’s part of a long lineage: COINTELPRO, Reaganomics, the 1994 Crime Bill, voter suppression — we’ve seen this before! 😒
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Taraji used a platform where Black voices aren’t filtered & said it plain: Project 2025 is real! That wasn’t a celebrity moment. That was an act of cultural organizing. And it was dismissed by y’all. That’s the cycle: We ring the bell. Folks ignore the fire. Then act surprised when the house burns.
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Black folks consistently overperform in political analysis — not because we have access to better data, but because we’ve had more at stake. Project 2025 was OBVIOUS to us because it’s part of a long lineage: COINTELPRO, Reaganomics, the 1994 Crime Bill, voter suppression — we’ve seen this before! 😒
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
“As medical care evaporates, it is moms who die in childbirth. As food disappears and babies cry from hunger, husbands abandon their wives and children. As social order unravels, it is mostly girls who are raped — and when times are desperate, it is girls who are married off against their will.”
Opinion | The Tax on Being a Girl
www.nytimes.com
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Ezra Klein has been rewarded his whole career for this shallow depth, treated as an intellectual heavyweight. 😒 In this moment, we don’t need centrist “what plays well.” —we need voices who understand survival as political, struggle as inherited, and clarity, born of history, as the compass forward.
angryblacklady.blacksky.app
Here’s a free version. It’s well worth reading.

Klein has an outsized opinion of himself if he thinks that he needed to write nonsense whitewashing Kirk’s legacy in order to sit in grief with people who mourned his loss. It’s absurd.

Coates makes Klein look feckless and uninformed.
perrybaconjr.bsky.social
This was revealing. Worth reading. The basic demand is that Coates spend less time thinking/writing his true feelings and more time playing political strategist. Klein asks him over and over him to do Dem strategy; he says no, over and over. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/o...
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
The contrast exposes how hollow technocratic analysis feels without history, lineage, or the weight of truth. When you’re descended from people whose very survival was political, you don’t have the luxury of detaching values from the conversation.
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
💯. Ezra Klein treats politics like box scores—tracking “strategy@. What’s missing is moral clarity & lived truth. That’s why he falters next to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who isn’t gaming numbers but carrying ancestral memory & historical struggle. One dissects power from a distance; the other embodies it.
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
💯. Ezra Klein’s lane is policy mechanics, systems analysis, technocratic breakdowns. Ta-Nehisi Coates operates from a deeper register: ancestral memory, historical lineage, moral clarity.
Flattening those two into the same intellectual plane is embarrassing - they’re not doing the same kind of work.
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Ezra frames “going into hostile spaces” as a noble democratic exercise. For Black folks, that’s not just uncomfortable—it’s dangerous. History gives examples of Black ppl beaten, jailed, or killed for existing in “unfriendly” spaces, let alone debating outside a white evangelical church in Alabama.
sharonk.bsky.social
Klein vs TNC is such a fascinating example of how Ezra views the world:
Of course, he wasn’t debating to find the truth. He was doing politics. He was trying to persuade people. And I’ve watched on our side, not opportunistic engagement but a lot of, I would say, counterproductive disengagement.
But would you like to see one of us put up a sign outside of, say, some white evangelical church in Alabama: Debate me on abortion? And then use that content to say: Such and such “smashes” church parishioner? Or: Such and such “owns” church parishioner?
Would you like to see a version of that?
I would like to see people on our side, yes, go to evangelical churches. Go to places that feel unfriendly, have conversations.
Reposted by FoodLab Detroit
tenorune.bsky.social
That "deterministic" line jumped out at me too, and I appreciate this take. It highlights for me the throughline in Coates' responses, conveying a Black American tradition that viscerally experienced and experiences dehumanization. Klein seems to only appreciate it philosophically.
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
When Ta-Nehisi says he will make his contribution, he’s standing in a long line of struggle & legacy. He is not alone. Our work is connected to what came before & what will come after. That doesn’t need to be explained or translated. It just needs to be recognized for what it is: ancestral clarity.
ezrakleinbot.bsky.social
Today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

Ta-Nehisi Coates joins the show to discuss how the left should think about the work of politics and persuasion in this moment.
open.spotify.com/episode/4jQE...

youtu.be/UaeoDlLNnok?...
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein Hash Out Their Charlie Kirk Disagreement
YouTube video by The Ezra Klein Show
youtu.be
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
A Black Congresswoman was slurred with racist language and there was no consequence. Institutions & leaders who know better are normalizing this climate. We haven’t seen explicit bigotry embraced at this scale since the civil rights era. When racism is rewarded, democracy itself is endangered.
sifill.bsky.social
If you read nothing else today, I pray that you will read every word of this necessary, powerful, and much-needed piece by @nhannahjones.bsky.social.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/m...
What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed
www.nytimes.com
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
This! 👇🏾
antitractionist.bsky.social
Ta-Nehisi Coates having to pretend Ezra Klein is his intellectual equal is such a disgrace
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
I asked, “Aren’t there risks in presenting these events—so often twisted to downplay or absolve European & American culpability in the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—right now?”

He said, “Only if I was telling a lie.”

“Black people see things as they are, not as we wish them to be.“
Kerry James Marshall on Making ‘the Paintings Nobody Else Is Making’
www.nytimes.com
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Chef Bailey cooks from the traditions of the Black South, but always through the lens of movement—of crossing borders, of transience, of arrival. The question now: will her intimate, deeply personal expression of Southern Black cuisine speak to Parisians the same way it has spoken to Americans? /n
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
Chef Mashama Bailey is carving out a new sense of place in Paris. After more than a decade at The Grey in Savannah, Ga.—a restaurant that redefined Southern dining and won her national acclaim—she’s crossing the Atlantic with L’Arrêt by The Grey, in the heart the world’s most storied food capital.
Is Paris Ready for Real Southern Cooking?
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by FoodLab Detroit
nazishmunch.bsky.social
Our "leaders" completely lack courage and a moral compass. They could resist, but choose to sacrifice their dignity to a corrupt power. History has shown they will come to regret that...but others will pay for their cowardice first.
foodlabdetroit.bsky.social
“Why would you not want to measure it? I think the reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you’re planning to cut food assistance, it allows you to pretend like we don’t have a food insecurity problem.” - Lindsey Smith Taillie, professor, University of North Carolina
www.wsj.com/economy/trum...
Exclusive | Trump Administration Cancels Annual Hunger Survey
The government has been measuring food insecurity since the mid-1990s but now says the report has become “overly politicized.”
www.wsj.com