By Keenan Teddy Smith
You’re waking up. It’s a Monday morning and you’re drinking coffee at your kitchen counter. The snow-blanketed terrain of the Willow Creek Valley is mundanely breathtaking, as many people who visit such alleged “postcard†locales often report.
Then, across the hazed lighting of the public access channel you left on for noise, two extremely handsome Black men with shining bald heads, full beards, and taut muscles who star in a new local ABC television show called Double the Flavor appear. They sit for an interview with a white woman who doesn’t look entirely too different from your white mother, strolling down the stairs to hear what your Black self is fussing about.
That there are Black people in Alaska is a surprise to many outside of the state. In fact, the most common reaction I receive upon disclosing my family’s relationship to Alaska is, “are there any Black people there?â€
But as any time spent in Alaska or watching Double the Flavor will show, Black people are as present within the American settler-colonial project here as we are anywhere else. And their experience from this colonial periphery is example of what professor Christina Sharpe describes as a global anti-Blackness that is as “pervasive as climate.”
“The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies†(In The Wake, 106). No river, no coast, no mountain, no ice is untouched by the anti-Blackness which produced the conditions by which chattel-slavery began (and continues to reiterate itself in new and nuanced ways).
Double the Flavor stars Kelsey and Kelly Johnson, also called “Don†and “KJ†respectively. The brothers expertly distill useful tips for what is clearly a labor of familial intimacy: cooking. The mundane, quotidian act, in its relationship to ideas of sustenance and intergenerational knowledge sharing, contributes to a burgeoning, self-fashioned conception of Alaskan Blackness.
Unlike The Great British Baking Show or Chopped Junior, Double the Flavor engages in a much more cozy, localized (re)presentation of food preparation that imparts the fraught nuances of Black life within the classed, raced, and heavily gendered hierarchies of Alaskan colonial life.
In their first episode, Don mocks KJ for his pronunciation of “salmon†as being too indicative of where they are from: Alabama. KJ, preferring adherence to his accent, asserts “SAL-mon†(as one might refer to a man who is from Sal).
KJ’s refusal to remold his tongue constitutes a larger seeming hyper-awareness of the fact of their presence on this show, on this station, in this state. Black men performing labors often designated “feminine,†but doing so as an intervention in what is defined as “manly†or “Black†within the overwhelming whiteness of Alaskan society.
One of their signature dishes is “Alaskan collard greens,†afterall. Here they emphasized the dish’s relationship to the source of its ingredients (Alaska), claiming a freshness seldom paralleled elsewhere.
Additionally, the show’s camerawork at times awkwardly includes shots which reflect lighting and footage of the peripheral studio itself. These serve as constant reminders that what we are watching is conjured, is intentional, and that the Black quotidian being produced is a representation.
As professor Tina Campt shows us in Listening to Images, uniform visual representation often speaks volumes to the uniqueness of the subjects depicted. Don and KJ’s show stands alone in its precision: every Sunday, the two are connected to thousands of Alaskan homes by way of the mundane practice of cooking. This punctures the anti-Black imaginary of “the final frontier†associated with the state that would have viewers forget the capitalist afterlives of slavery.
The brothers’ preferences, their tastes, and their senses of futurity are evidenced in their foods, representative of where they come from, who they are and where they are now. Kelsey and Kelley are part of a generation of Black Alaskans so far hardly documented due of the mythos of white wilderness.
This stereotyped imaginary is fleshed out by Megan Sherval in the Journal of Rural Studies, wherein she parses through the false narrative of white preeminence in notions of “the rural,†especially that of a largely subarctic wilderness. These narratives, according to Sherval, erase the historical and contemporary presence of Indigenous economic and cultural power structures which predate both Russian and American imperialisms in the Pacific of the mid and late 18th century:
Thus we still find places such as Alaska for example, constructed and labelled as: ‘the Land of the Midnight Sun’, the ‘Last Great Wilderness’ or ‘the Final Frontier’ (Swaney, 1999; Williams, 2002). These descriptions are reminiscent of many of the established frontier myths that valorise ‘wilderness’ and exclude all previous human presence in their depiction. American classics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, Henry David Thoreau’s On Walden Pond, and Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ all depict wilderness as pristine and empty and as Langton (1996: p. 17) argues poignantly, it is a wilderness that has ‘‘accompanied an amnesia about the fate of Indigenous peoples’’ and areas that ‘‘are and have been inhabited and used by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.’’
Sherval’s sociological and demographic research creates space for the conflict between the rhetoric and reality of Alaska. She highlights how overwhelming state land ownership functions to precisely perpetuate this mythic white ‘wilderness.’
By dispossessing materially and rhetorically the presence of the 228 tribes officially recognized by the state of Alaska, such conjurings of “wilderness†abstract the people who have inhabited these lands for centuries.
KJ and Don’s “striking†presence could even be seen as an extension of these state-sanctioned processes of narrative removal via ideas of “conservation.†In disguising resource extraction with Coca Cola bears and Cabela’s outlets, we inspire further imperial ponderings of a paradise in the colonial periphery along the North Pole.
The undoubtedly geographically unique experience of Black Alaskans may seem exceptional, but they parallel the experiences of our cousins in the American West. Kenneth J. Cooper describes his own history as a Black westerner, both his parentage descending from slaves owned likely by Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes in the American South as exemplary of the resilience with which Blacknesses maintain themselves in spite of shifts enforced by white-supremacist society.
This is not to conflate different tribal governments and their policies on slaveholding, but instead to implicate the Anglo-American colonial regime in the simultaneous erasure of Indigenous peoples and transfigurative afterlives of slavery.
Don and KJ present, through the intimacy with which they prepare food and extoll insights about their experiences of quotidian Alaskan life, a thoroughly enjoyable 30-minute meal prep by two highly skilled Black Alaskan chefs. Their practice refuses notions of masculinist Blacknesses that would preclude them from the conventionally domestic space of the kitchen, as well as refuses a predominant narrative which disintegrates the ever-presence of Blackness in American labor economies, and the world at large.
Black Alaska should be understood as synonymous with Black life as much as the rural American South or the urban American North East. It is important to develop an understanding of Blackness that—while not in constant motion—refutes larger global narratives regarding the climates in which Blackness can and does thrive in spite of our forced entanglement with American empire.
Undoing and refusing anti-Blackness means recognizing all of the nuances through which Blackness regenerates herself. Then, even casually over Sunday morning coffee, we can begin to see the work needing to be done being done, and do it ourselves everywhere we are—everywhere. Â
Suggested Reading:
Girmay, Aracelis. The Black Maria. BOA Editions, 2015
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Black Like Them.†The New Yorker, 1996
1745. Directed by Gordon Napier, screenplay by Morayo Akandé, 2017
Keenan Teddy Smith is a writer based out of New York City, originally from Flint, Michigan. His words have appeared as prose and poetry in PAPER Magazine, The Advocate, American Chordata, The Shade Journal, and New York Times’ T: Magazine. Keep up with him on Twitter (@kleopatra_bce) or Instagram (@keeleopatra)!
