White Supremacy Culture in “the Test kitchen”

Hi everyone, Jessica here. My next few blog posts are about an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about: white supremacy culture in media. First, up I want to talk about the drama surrounding “The Test Kitchen”, a capsule podcast by the producers of “Reply All” from Gimlet media.

The podcast documents the ramifications of unchecked white supremacy culture at Bon Appétit magazine in the 2010’s using available media on BA’s fall from grace and powerful first person accounts from BIPOC former-BA employees who experienced discrimination.

Shortly after the first episode dropped, this Twitter thread by Eric Eddings, a former employee of Gimlet, critiqued “Test Kitchen” noting that similar white supremacy culture was also endemic to Gimlet, and specifically, “Reply All”. Within 24 hours of his tweets, two of the podcast’s producers, Sruthi Pinannamenini, who had reported the BA story, and P.J. Vogt stepped down from their positions at Gimlet and issued apologies.

Bracketing the “hot goss” element of this story, it’s important because of what it reveals about the deep roots of white supremacy culture within our media and the spaces where it is produced, even “new media” like podcasts. 

But let me pause here. If you aren’t familiar with how I’m using “white supremacy culture,” rest assured that I’m not accusing BA or Gimlet of being staffed by KKK wizards or Proud Boys. White supremacy culture means exactly what the words imply: that the preferences, values, quirks, and beliefs of white people reign supreme in many of our professional and social spaces. In other words, what makes white people comfortable is the norm. For more info—and since we’re talking podcasts today— listen to “Scene on Radio’s” second season, Seeing White (I particularly like episode 2).

The antidote to white supremacy culture I want to highlight here is REAL TALK ABOUT CULTURE. Being explicit. No, no, no, not sexually explicit. I mean really talking about the values and norms we embrace and altering those norms if they tend to be exclusionary.

At BA, the culture was all about cool. When the magazine was revamped in the early 2010’s, its mission was to become cool. The arbiters of this cool were the people in power, the editorial staff, and they were all white. Therefore, what was cool was interpreted through the lens of whiteness.

The problem with the coolness program at BA was that it was more about the group-think of the editors than any sort of explicitly articulated standard. In the podcast, one former BIPOC BA staffer recalls that part of the process of pitching ideas was figuring out what the editors liked. Even after they thought they understood what was cool, their pitches kept getting sidelined. One Asian writer pitched a dumpling piece and was turned down, but when a white colleague pitched a similar idea it was picked up.

BIPOC writers realized that the editors were responding favorably to things that contained an element of familiarity. How the white writers talked about dumplings or other foods the BA editors considered “ethnic” made them feel more comfortable than the recipes pitched by Asian writers.

Hearing about dumplings from other white people made the dumplings more palatable to the editors (yes, that pun was on purpose!). When called on this bias, the white editors flatly denied it, claiming that the BIPOC staff were being too sensitive.

The “Test Kitchen” podcast, both the story it tells and the drama it begat at Gimlet, highlights the depth of white supremacy culture’s roots in media. Because the BA editorial was white, the office culture was very white, and the magazine’s content was as well, thus reinforcing the norms they established for their readers. And, turns out, BA wasn’t the only place where this was true. That both Gimlet and BA had work cultures where unspoken norm of whiteness dictated who got to tell what stories is a testament to how deeply white supremacy is rooted not only in our workplaces, but also in the media that they produce. 

Why We Need 2 Talk: we need to make culture visible! When a group’s culture is unspoken, their unspoken biases have unchecked influence. If the BA editors had spent some time defining their work culture and making their invisible standard of cool visible, they may have recognize their affinity biases, or their tendency to like the familiar. This work is a first baby step toward embracing equity in the workplace, but to do it, We Need 2 Talk!