Since 2020 and the pandemic we’ve gone through, the importance of self-care has never left us. It has consumed social media, every-day conversation, and organized forums. We can’t go a day without finding influencer tips and testimonies, self-help blog posts, and steps for living your best life.
In Audre Lorde’s 1988 book, A Burst of Light, she wrote that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” That speaks to me as it is a necessary step for people of color, particularly Black women, to maintain sanity when the world seems to lack any appearance of it.
The emotional weight never seems to let up. Unarmed Black men and women being killed, Black mothers dying during childbirth, racism, classism, misogyny, lay-offs, and new headlines pop up every day reminding us that panic is just over our shoulders. Being sad every day is trauma within itself. So, it’s not unreasonable to want to detach from reality, at least for a while. For some, the work of self-care turns inward, but for me it’s nestling into the safe space of food and uninterrupted Black and Brown kinship. When I’m in need of a mental and emotional break, it’s the unfiltered Blackness, laughter and the joy of Black brunch that allows me to eat, dance, and laugh the gray away.
April is National Brunch Month and celebrates the food, the history, and the people we celebrate with.
I didn’t know much about brunch until I’d left college. I’d heard of it by watching television but assumed it was some luxurious event reserved for women who looked and lived nothing like me. As a broke college student, my luxury was 2-for-1 bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches at McDonald’s.
During my junior year of college, my economics class participated in an investing contest and my group won. Professor Crowley treated us to an early daytime meal on a Sunday, at a spot near campus. Barely glancing at the menu, a few people opted for the shrimp and cheese grits. Sounded so good, so I followed suit. The savory grits, paired with spicy shrimp were everything I needed but didn’t know.
Senior year, this spot we had never been to otherwise became our weekly ritual. Whether it was meeting up on Sundays, celebrating birthdays, dates, overdue catch-ups, or just because, we gathered together to unpack our week and recharge our spirits. Black Brunch has become a place we can exist both safely outside and proudly within our skin.
The concept of brunch was birthed in 19th-century England, adopted by America in the 1930s. Although it’s hard to determine when the Black community took this on as a cultural phenomenon, it seems it has become more prevalent over the last decade, when social media became the default way to communicate. Yet, Black Brunch has even spilled over into movements such as #BlackBrunchNYC in 2015, in which individuals protested Black death at the hands of police by disrupting white brunch spots in Oakland, California, and New York City.
The truth is a number of restaurants end up becoming our brunch spots simply because they are Black-owned. The more we are affected by the ways in which the world systematically shut-outs people of color when it comes to ownership, we want to put our dollars back into our own communities. There is a continued movement to support Black-owned restaurants in cities across the country, especially when many have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
Here in Los Angeles, it’s Poppy + Rose for the fried chicken benedict or The Court Café in Inglewood for red velvet waffles. Couple that with bottomless mimosas, good music, and all the smiles, laughter, hey-girl, and we-got-this moments you can hold.
Just like the family dinner table, the brunch table confirms how our capacity for a good time can coexist with meaningful dialogue about the intricacies of Black life. Any anxiety of opposing views eventually disappears and gives way to the fact that for those few hours, we are within sacred territory — a slice of public space that serves as a semi-private safe house for our humanity, away from the eyes of gentrifiers eager to capitalize on the aesthetic of Black culture without actually understanding it.
In places like these, the uninterrupted beauty of Black joy — an essential electric slide in my seat to Beyonce’s version of “Before I Let Go,” and heads thrown back in belly laughs — is a whole-body experience. It’s an emotional balm we depend on when we feel so small in a world that either looks at us through a magnifying glass or not at all.
As I looked up from what was left of my fried chicken benedict, the satisfied haze of day drinking in my eyes, I smiled at my table of friends. Like my own, their focus wasn’t on whatever unpaid bills, discouraging narratives, deflating news reports, or stressful dilemmas waited for them beyond the restaurant’s door. All I could see and feel was the lightness and joy of my people, and there’s nothing more nourishing than that.
