White Consumers Research Articles

Racial and ethnic differences in unmet needs among older adults receiving publicly-funded home and community-based services.

Unmet need for home and community-based services (HCBS) may disparately impact older adults from racial and ethnic minoritized groups. We examined racial and ethnic differences in unmet need for HCBS among consumers ≥65 years using publicly funded HCBS. We analyzed the National Core Indicators-Aging and Disability survey data (2015-2019) from 21,739 community-dwelling HCBS consumers aged ≥65 years in 23 participating states. Outcome measures included self-reported unmet need in six service types (i.e., personal care, homemaker/chore, delivered meals, adult day services, transportation, and caregiver support). Racial and ethnic groups included non-Hispanic Black, Asian, non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, and multiracial groups. Logistic regression models examined associations between race and ethnicity and unmet need, adjusting for sociodemographic, health, and HCBS program (i.e., Medicaid, Older Americans Act [OAA], Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly [PACE]) characteristics, and use of specific service types. Among 21,739 respondents, 23.3% were Black, 3.4% were Asian, 10.8% were Hispanic, 58.8% were non-Hispanic White, and 3.7% were multiracial or identified with other races/ethnicities. Asian and Black consumers had higher odds of reporting unmet need in personal care than White consumers (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.45, p value < 0.01; and aOR, 1.25, p < 0.001, respectively). Asian and Black consumers had significantly higher odds of unmet need in adult day services versus White consumers (aOR, 1.94, p < 0.001 and aOR, 1.39, p < 0.001, respectively). Black consumers had higher odds of unmet need versus non-Hispanic White consumers in meal delivery and caregiver support services (aOR, 1.29; p < 0.01; and aOR 1.26, p < 0.05, respectively). Race and ethnicity were not significantly associated with experiencing unmet need for homemaker/chore or transportation services. Future research should identify driving forces in disparities in unmet need to develop culturally appropriate solutions.

White Americans’ preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 years: A meta-analysis

This study investigates Black and White consumers' preferences for Black versus White people in United States advertising contexts over 66 y, from 1956 until 2022, a time in which the United States has experienced significant ethno-racial diversification. Examining Black and White consumers' reactions to visual advertising over more than half a century offers a unique and dynamic view of interracial preferences. Mass advertising reaches an audience of billions and can shape people's attitudes and behavior, emphasizing the relevance of clarifying the influence of race in advertising, how it has evolved over time, and how it may contribute to mitigating discrimination based on racial perceptions. A meta-analysis of extant experiments into the relationship between the depicted endorser's race (i.e., the model in a visual ad) and the reaction of Black and White viewers pertains to 332 effect sizes from 62 studies reported in 52 scientific papers, comprising 10,186 Black and White participants. Our results are anchored in a conceptual framework, including a comprehensive set of perceiver (viewer), target (endorser), social/societal context, and publication characteristics. Without accounting for temporal dynamics, the results indicate ingroup favoritism, such that White viewers prefer White models and Black viewers prefer Black models. But by controlling for the publication year, it is possible to observe a time-dependent trend: Historically, White consumers preferred endorsers of the same race, but this preference has significantly shifted toward Black endorsers in recent years. In contrast, the level of Black consumers' reactions to endorsers of the same race remains largely unchanged over time.

Who is paying all these fees? An empirical analysis of bank account and credit card fees

Banks impose a variety of account fees, and credit card issuers impose a variety of fees related to card usage. Using detailed data from a 2021 representative diary survey of US consumers, we investigate whether lower-income consumers and Black consumers are more likely to pay bank account or credit card fees, and how payment behavior varies depending on paying such fees. We find that the probability of paying several types of bank account and credit card fees is correlated with consumers’ demographic and income attributes. The percentage of Black consumers who pay overdraft or low-balance fees on their bank accounts or pay late fees or cash-advance fees on their credit cards is higher than the percentage of White consumers who pay those fees. We find that some fees on bank accounts and credit cards are regressive: lower-income consumers are significantly more likely to pay overdraft, bounced check, or late fees. While Black consumers were significantly more likely to pay any bank account fee, the race effect was smaller when controlling for income in the regressions.

Racial and gender differences in financial advice seeking: Evidence from the National Financial Capability Study

AbstractThere is a growing interest to increase diversity among consumers who are seeking financial advice, but the influences of race and gender on financial advice seeking have not been widely explored in the literature. We examine the role of race and gender on financial advice seeking among U.S. households by employing a decomposition technique. The findings highlight that asking for financial advice is not determined by race or gender in and of itself, but by the racial and gender differences in the predictors associated with financial advice seeking. Black and female consumers were found to be more likely to ask for financial advice when making savings and investment decisions. The relationships between financial advice seeking and income level, employment status, education level, and subjective knowledge differed significantly for Black and White consumers. Employment status, race, and homeownership differed significantly for women and men seeking financial advice. The results show that the predictors which explain financial advice seeking may not apply in the same way to all consumers. Practitioners can use this research to refine how they market and gain a better understanding of how race and gender are associated with certain important variables that are associated with seeking financial advice.

Profiling consumers who reported mass marketing scams: demographic characteristics and emotional sentiments associated with victimization

AbstractWe examine the characteristics of consumers who reported scams to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We assess how consumers vary demographically across six scam types, and how the overall emotional sentiment of a consumer’s complaint (positive, negative, neutral/mixed) relates to reporting victimization versus attempted fraud (no losses). For romance, tech support, and prize, sweepstakes, and lottery scams, more older than young and middle-aged adults reported victimization. Across all scam types, consumers classified as Black, Hispanic, and Asian/Asian Pacific Islander were more likely than non-Hispanic white consumers to report victimization than attempted fraud. Relative to complaints categorized as emotionally neutral or mixed, we find that emotionally positive complaints and emotionally negative complaints were significantly associated with victimization, but that these relationships differed by scam type. This study helps identify which consumer groups are affected by specific scams and the association between emotion and victimization.

Research on low-carbon technology diffusion among enterprises in networked evolutionary game

The diffusion of low-carbon technologies (LCTs) is one of the important measures to mitigate carbon emissions. Local governments, enterprises, and consumers are crucial participants in the complex adaptive LCT diffusion system. In this context, this study builds an evolutionary game model based on a complex network comprised of three sub-networks, which respectively represent the connections of local governments, enterprises and consumers. Using this model, this research explores the impacts of homogeneous subsidies, heterogeneous subsidies, homogeneous carbon taxes, heterogeneous carbon taxes, targeted penalties, market demand, and policy mixes combined with these instruments on LCT diffusion. The results show that carbon taxes, subsidies, and penalties can all promote the diffusion of LCTs. The comprehensive effect of LCT diffusion brought by heterogeneous subsidies or carbon taxes is slightly better than those achieved by the fixed subsidy or the carbon tax equal to their respective mean values. Compared with pure carbon tax and subsidy policies, the mixed policy of introducing targeted fines brings a more obvious LCT diffusion effect. However, none of these policy interventions can achieve the complete spread of LCTs. Meanwhile, increasing the potential market demand for low-carbon products can achieve a very significant diffusion of LCTs. And when the proportion of white consumers reaches 0.9, the full proliferation of LCTs can be realized. This research develops a valuable framework that enriches the modeling practice of the diffusion of LCTs and provides insights for implementing well-designed policy packages.

Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott

Reviewed by: Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott Simon Balto Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas. By Terry Anne Scott. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 390. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-218-4; cloth, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-189-7.) Terry Anne Scott’s Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas is a painful, important book. In it, Scott explores the lynching of Black Texans from the wake of Reconstruction to the 1940s, assembling a record of anti-Black racist atrocities in Texas—atrocities that remain undercounted to this day. Separated into two halves, Scott’s argument in Lynching and Leisure is ultimately about the evolution of lynching practices in post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas. In the book’s first half, Scott routinely returns to the point that while lynching itself was not a new phenomenon, the cruel sadism that came to define it was. Put another way, while white Texans had lynched and continued to lynch other white Texans, the point in such contexts was punitive. These victims were not tortured; there was no public spectacle associated with their deaths; and those who enacted the violence were not eager to reveal their involvement. Lynching changed in the late nineteenth century, as the practice became increasingly, and eventually overwhelmingly, directed against Black people. Torture, spectacle, and the mob’s reification of white supremacy became the point. Lynching and Leisure’s fundamental strength lies in its second half, when Scott turns her attention toward analyzing lynching as a form of leisure. Countering assumptions that lynching was some sort of antiquated barbarity, Scott instead shows how modernity and developments in technology and American popular culture helped build “the new lynching culture” (p. 9). She considers Texas’s expanding network of railroads as a critical facilitator of this culture, allowing for the long-distance transport of Black people to the place they were to be lynched, and carrying mobs of white Texans eager to attend lynchings. She also explores how the advent of the automobile provided a literal vehicle for lynchings. Cars were used as removable platforms during hangings, and tourists out for a “Sunday drive” attended lynchings or visited famous lynching sites for recreation (p. 210). The arrival of projected film in Texas during the late 1890s allowed white Texans who had missed out on a lynching to see it replayed, as theatergoers at the Dallas Opera House did in 1897. The invention of the phonograph allowed people to consume the sounds of a lynching. Phonographic recordings of the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, made their way to communities as far north as Iowa and Nebraska, where white audiences listened to Smith being burned alive while they attended popular attractions like county fairs. Scott shows that there was a large material culture associated with lynching, beyond the photographs and postcards familiar to historians of racist violence. Scott asks that we see anti-Black lynching as of a piece with modernity and the making of race and identity in Texas and beyond. For its white practitioners and the white consumers of both its immediate spectacle and its enduring material culture, lynching was entertainment; it was leisure. And it was leisure in service of a larger effort to settle a racial order that Black achievement and mobility were routinely unsettling. [End Page 371] While I understand the reasons Scott has for focusing this story exclusively along a Black/white binary (across the late 1800s and early 1900s, a large majority of lynching victims in Texas were Black), Lynching and Leisure would have been further strengthened by a comparative analysis examining the lynching of ethnic Mexicans during this same period. There is a large literature on anti-Mexican racist violence in Texas, particularly in the borderlands. Bringing that story into conversation with the one Scott tells may reveal still more about violence and the making and affirmation of white identity and white supremacy. Similarly, the argument that white Texans were binding together Blackness and criminality during this period by seizing the power to...

Building Successful Black-Owned Businesses: How Black Entrepreneurs and White Consumers Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap in America

Building Successful Black-Owned Businesses: How Black Entrepreneurs and White Consumers Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap in America

'No Person Shall Sell Goods at an Unjust Profit': A Review of Consumer Price Controls in Southern Rhodesia, 1939-1949

This article explores the regime of consumer price controls instituted in Southern Rhodesia during World War II and continued in the post-war period up to 1949. The 'war effort' required the colony to change rapidly and tackle emerging shortages, bottlenecks, and general wartime disruptions. Southern Rhodesia responded to rising consumer prices and the spiralling cost of living by assembling price control officials, institutions, legislation and policies. Besides evaluating the immediate outcome of consumer price controls, the article also examines their socioeconomic impact. It argues that while the first few years saw some success in stabilising prices and curtailing price hikes, controls incentivised contravention and other unscrupulous practices as businesses sought to realise profits. Furthermore, controls sacrificed industrial competitiveness because businesses had little incentive to improve their production methods. On consumer price controls extended to Africans in this colonial society, the article argues that the measures were socially retrogressive because they slowed down the emergence of African business enterprises in rural areas while also stifling African wages in urban areas. Thus, while deliberately protecting white consumers, consumer price controls simultaneously enforced African under-consumption to maintain the settler colonial model.

Rethinking common ingroup identity model in minority restaurant messages: The moderating role of moral identity

How minority-owned small restaurants could effectively communicate to mainstream markets is the key for their survival. This study applies the common ingroup identity model to explore the underlying mechanism through which group identity framing leads to White guests’ patronage intentions to minority-owned restaurants. Through two online experiments, the study reveals a different result from the common ingroup identity model. While a common identity (vs. different identity) message increases White consumers’ perceived closeness with the minority owners, it does not lead to higher restaurant visit intentions. Instead, for those with higher levels of moral identity, a different identity (vs. common identity) message leads to stronger visit intention to the ethnic minority-owned restaurant. The study findings provide valuable implications for minority restaurant owners to manipulate their marketing messages to appeal to a larger mainstream customer base.

The Evolution of Access to Public Accommodations in the United States

AbstractThe economic analysis of racial discrimination in public accommodations is remarkably limited. To study this issue, we construct a national data set of nondiscriminatory establishments from the Negro Motorist Green Books, a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 to aid Black Americans in finding nondiscriminatory retail and service establishments. We document patterns in the geographic spread and evolution of Green Book establishments, as well as the correlates of Green Book presence. We find that economic and social measures, as well as state laws relating to racial discrimination and antidiscrimination, were correlated with the provision of nondiscriminatory services. We then use the Green Book data to test whether market conditions and white consumer discrimination led businesses to bar Black customers prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We use plausibly exogenous variation from white World War II casualties and Black migration patterns to isolate the effect of a change in the racial composition of consumers on the growth of nondiscriminatory businesses. We find that the share of nondiscriminatory establishments grew faster in locations with larger increases in the share of the Black population, but the magnitudes were small. These results highlight the importance of federal legislation in ending racial discrimination in public accommodations.

The paradoxes of purity in organic agriculture in Burkina Faso

For decades, critical agri-food scholarship has sought to evaluate the outcomes of alternative agri-food systems such as organic. Two key critiques have emerged: the first focuses on the limitations of certification-based systems that rely on a neoliberal model of consumer concern; the second critique highlights the Whiteness of alternative food movements and the persistence of racial exclusions. In this paper, we draw these critiques together and extend them through an ethnographic case study of organic cotton in Burkina Faso, West Africa. We explore contradictions in the win–win–win discourse of organic cotton, which promises ecological sustainability, improved livelihoods for producers, as well as pure products for consumers. We argue there is an implicit prioritization of consumers within several organic cotton regulatory rules that focus on ensuring final products free of contamination from pesticide residues. We contend that these rules create difficulties for producers and obstacles for the expansion of sustainable agriculture. Further, the focus on “purity for the consumer” may actually reproduce and transmit (historically fraught and colonial) racialized imaginaries of purity. Some Burkinabè producers see organic as prioritizing purity for an imagined White consumer. Organic’s call to “get back to the dirt” also clashes with a cultural context where aspiration for development is often expressed as “getting out of the dirt.” This paper thus raises new questions about the implications of organic agriculture’s intense focus on purity for a) the full realization of the promise of organics and b) residual racial imaginaries embedded within the idiom of “purity” itself.

Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser

Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser

Eating Clean: Anti-Chinese Sugar Advertising and the Making of White Racial Purity in the Canadian Pacific

ABSTRACT Between 1891 and 1914, western Canada’s largest sugar manufacturer – BC Sugar – constructed a racialized discourse of food cleanliness. This discourse argued that Chinese-made sugars were contaminated while Canadian-made sugars were clean. Through an analysis of this discourse, this article argues that BC Sugar constructed a purity/polluted binary that suggested that white consumers’ racial purity was threatened by Chinese-made sugars. It then links BC Sugar’s clean foods campaign to three broader trends. First, it illustrates that BC Sugar’s construction of pure versus polluted foods supported the effort to establish white supremacy in the Canadian Pacific. Second, it demonstrates that discourses of food purity enabled white settlers to construct bodily purity by the eating of so-called clean foods. Third, it argues that since contemporary discourses of food cleanliness rely on pure versus polluted metaphors, scholars must attend to the motivations driving today’s clean eating movement.

Studying Consumer Ethnocentrism as a Factor for Depressed Rates of Black Entrepreneurship

The rate of black entrepreneurship has lagged the national average for decades. Rather than look at financial factors, as most of the literature that has explored the disparity has done, we examine the role of consumer ethnocentrism and the different views black and white consumers have about black and white entrepreneurs. Using t-test results based on the responses of 747 respondents, we found support for two hypotheses that indicate that black respondents did not demonstrate higher levels of consumer ethnocentrism than white respondents toward a black-owned business, while white respondents did demonstrate consumer ethnocentrism toward a white-owned business. This paper discusses the implications of our results, offers new insights into the lagging rate of black entrepreneurship, and discusses future directions for research.

The Impact of Media Use, Identity, and Pro-Environmental Orientations on Racial/Ethnic Groups’ Attitudes Toward Ecobranding

Survey data is used to explore the comparative pro-environmental orientations of Latino, African American, White, and Asian American consumers (N = 1,216) and their attitudes toward Ecobranding. Results of this exploratory study reveal U.S. racial/ethnic groups do not differ significantly in attitudes or purchase intentions toward Ecobranding. However, frequency of news consumption via the Internet, television, and through friends lead to disparately favorable attitudes toward Ecobranding for African Americans, Asian Americans, and non-Hispanic Whites. Overall, results indicate that Asian Americans have more favorable pro-environmental orientations than the other racial/ethnic groups, whereas Latinos, Whites, and African Americans do not significantly differ.

“The Place is Gone!”: Policing Black Women to Redevelop Downtown Boston

Abstract In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Boston politicians and urban managers sought to reverse the city’s postwar capital drain by luring white consumer dollars and private investment. Their recovery plan featured the Adult Entertainment District (AED), which was established to contain burgeoning sexual commerce while demonstrating the vibrancy and economic viability of the city’s downtown core. At the same time, the changing spatial dynamics of interracial sexual commerce, Black economic isolation, and discriminatory practices citywide drew increasing numbers of Black women onto downtown streets. The presence of Black women in formerly white downtown spaces ignited a powerful law-and-order narrative linking race, sex, and violence. Black women became oversignified with sexual deviance and violent criminality amid the urban crisis. The development of the AED experiment and the raced and gendered crime panic posed unique challenges and opportunities for the Boston Police Department (BPD). Like urban police departments nationwide in the early 1970s, the BPD was embroiled in a battle for its authority. But the deeper motivations of economic turnaround guiding the AED ultimately served to strengthen the BPD’s legitimacy. As the separate goals of political officials and law enforcement authorities converged—to redevelop downtown Boston, and to secure urban authority, respectively—the intensifying policing and spatial banishment of Black women in downtown Boston became central to urban recovery strategies. This history demonstrates that aggressive, racially charged morals policing was deployed to prepare the city for an influx of white capital.

Intercultural competence and customer facial recognition

PurposeIntercultural competence has been found to be increasingly important. The purpose of this paper is to understand how intercultural competence impacts service providers’ ability to recognition faces of both black and white consumers.Design/methodology/approachTwo experiments were administered to understand how intercultural competence impacts recognition of black and white consumer faces.FindingsThe authors find that the more intercultural competence that respondents report with blacks, the better they are at distinguishing between black regular customers and black new shoppers in an experiment. The authors find no impact of intercultural competence on the ability of respondents to differentiate between white consumers. These findings hold for respondents in the USA and South Africa.Research limitations/implicationsOne limitation of this research is that the studies were conducted in a controlled lab setting. Thus, one could imagine additional noise from a true consumer setting might increase the effects of these results. Another limitation is the focus on only black and white consumer faces. In this paper, the authors focused on these two races, specifically to keep the factorial design as simplified as possible.Originality/valueThe implications of this research are important given that the ability of employees’ recognizing customer faces can affect customers’ day-to-day interactions in the marketplace.

Rehabilitation technology services and employment outcomes among consumers using division of rehabilitation services

Purpose: The primary goal of the study was to evaluate how the use of rehabilitation technology impacted closure status for consumers receiving services in fiscal year (FY) 2014.Materials and Methods: Rehabilitation Service Administration (RSA-911) Case Service Report FY 2014 archival dataset was obtained from the U.S. Department of Education (2014) and secondary analyses was performed for this study. RSA-911 archival data is updated on an annual basis and consists of all state-federal rehabilitation consumers who were served in the specific fiscal year. The dataset contains information related to each consumer’s demographic information (e.g. age, gender, race) and other supplemental information (e.g. weekly earnings at closure, cause of disability, services provided).Results and Conclusions: A multiple logistic regression analysis was utilized and revealed that white consumers receiving rehabilitation technology (RT) services have significantly higher closure rate than consumers of other races, RT services differ by the employment status at application, RT services differ by the type of disability, educational level at application for people receiving RT services did predict closure status (i.e. exiting with an employment outcome), IEP status did not predict closure status, weekly earnings at application did predict closure status and the interaction effect between IEP and RT services is statistically significant. The odds ratio (ORs) were presented at the 95% confidence interval (CI). Vocational rehabilitation counselors needs training to correctly identify appropriate RT services for consumers, so that the likelihood of exiting with an employment outcome is obtained.Implications for RehabilitationRT services significantly improved their chances of successful employment compared to those who did not receive RT services.Education at closure would also have some significant impact on employment outcomes.Training in Assistive Technology (AT) for Vocational Rehabilitation counselors will assist in the proper identification of AT requirements, which may lead to a higher likelihood of consumers exiting with an employment outcome.

Consuming the Orient at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition

Consuming the Orient at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition Samuel C. King (bio) Centennial Exhibition, food, Orientalism, restaurants, Otherness The Centennial Exhibition of 1876, hosted in Philadelphia to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, offered visitors a distinguishing consumption experience. Fairgoers partook of technological novelties and cultural exoticisms that not only enlightened and entertained but also lent scientific credence to the concept of a "natural" racial hierarchy and to ideas of an essential distinction between Western and non-Western peoples.1 While historians have thoroughly analyzed the ethnological gradations on display at the exhibition, the cultural comparisons embodied in the fair's food and restaurants have received less scholarly attention. Thus, the documents relating to exhibition restaurants and cuisines housed in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's collection of Centennial Exhibition records, including restaurant menus and advertisements, guidebooks describing the fair's culinary offerings, and an artistic representation of exhibition restaurants, offers researchers a particularly interesting and underutilized resource for understanding the relationship between food and culture to nineteenth-century Pennsylvanians. In addition to reflecting supposed political and developmental disparities between civilizations, the cultural juxtapositions on display at the exhibition also served to reaffirm the notion of the inherent superiority of the West over the "exotic" East, an idea supported by the discourse of Orientalism.2 This discourse underwrote the appeal of the fair's Asian exhibitions, insofar as they purportedly enabled Americans to visually and materially consume "Oriental" culture. Visitors to the Chinese and Japanese exhibitions, for example, noted the "magical" power of the sights, smells, and objects of the showcases to allow them to vicariously experience their Orientalist fantasies, as if they had been transported away from the modern, industrial world.3 Meanwhile, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition, published immediately after the fair's conclusion, [End Page 390] used similar Orientalist language to describe the visible Otherness of the fair's Asian representatives, including their "comical" dress, their "almond-eyes" and "pig-tails," and their apparent lack of emotion.4 As restaurant ephemera from the exhibition collection makes clear, the exoticism of "Oriental" cultures was particularly associated with food and restaurant spaces. Non-Western restaurants at the exhibition highlighted their difference in ways that Western restaurants did not, offering white consumers the opportunity to "tour" the Orient through the consumption of Asian cuisine. For example, a notice for a Turkish café on the fairgrounds emphasized that patronizing the restaurant would "do more to acquaint [visitors] with the customs of the Turkish people" than any book could and would enable diners to "enjoy a pleasant moment in real Oriental style."5 A notice for the German department of the Southern Restaurant, meanwhile, did not claim to offer a vicarious experience of European culture; instead, it merely highlighted the eatery's low prices.6 Perhaps the best example of these trends is a clipping from Harper's Weekly entitled "Our Artist's Dream of the Centennial Restaurants." It depicts caricatures of various nationalities in the form of potential restaurants on the exhibition grounds. The caricatures generally align with gastronomic stereotypes of non-Western peoples that served to reaffirm their alleged inferior status. For example, the offerings of the hypothetical Chinese restaurant include "Hashed Cat," "Rat Pie," and "Puppy à la Centennial." The African restaurant, combining culinary exoticism and the material pursuits of imperialism, advertises "Zebra Chops" and "Hippopotamus Fricassee," along with "Diamonds on Toast" and "Gold &Silver Cake."7 In contrast, the illustration's European restaurant caricatures, though conveying certain stereotypes of particular European nations, depict no similar culinary construct of cultural essentialism or exoticism. Indeed, the most pointed of these caricatures include one restaurant's passing reference to Russian expansionist desires and the illustration of a leprechaun in the Irish restaurant. [End Page 391] Restaurants are not neutral eateries but instead operate as cultural embassies, allowing patrons to literally consume a culture in commoditized form.8 The documents contained in the HSP collection of Centennial Exhibition records demonstrate how Pennsylvanians and other Americans in the 1870s understood food and restaurant spaces as embodiments of ontological and essential cultural distinctions between Asia and the West. The Orientalist discourse of nineteenth-century America led...