In New Orleans, Chef Tunde Wey prices his meals to customers based on their melanin level. And he has every right to.

The pop-up food stall that Wey runs has decided to engage in political speech mixed with plantain pottage.

Chef Tunde Wey opened his pop-up stall in the city’s Roux Carre venue in early February. The listed price for the Nigerian food is $12. But when a white person walks up to order, they are asked to pay $30. Why? “It’s two-and-a half times more than the $12 meal, which reflects the income disparity” between whites and African-Americans in New Orleans, says Wey. […]

Wey says when white customers come up to his window to place an order, he tells them about this racial income gap and then asks if they want to pay the higher $30 price. They also have the option to pay the listed $12 price. The difference between the $12 and $30 meals, customers are informed, will be redistributed to minorities who buy food at the stall.

Let me be clear, I disagree with Way’s premise. I believe he’s been sucked into engaging in identity politics based on statistics ala Mark Twain, but he isn’t forcing anyone to buy his food or even pay the higher price.

He has the right to be wrong. And the people who pay him the $30, as long as it’s their own money, have every right to be mushheads, too.

If I weren’t 1,800 miles away, I would enjoy talking with Wey and asking him some very pointed questions. First off, I’d ask Mr. Wey “Your political experiment is getting positive press. What do you think about all the negative and hostile reactions that similar political experiments – specifically Affirmative Action Bake Sales on college campuses – receive?”

Certainly, when such bake sales are charging prices based on melanin to raise awareness about disparity of racial treatment, they are engaging in the same political speech as Mr. Wey, right?

Now, understand that Mr. Wey didn’t come up with this on his own. Anjali Prasertong, a graduate student [this is my surprised face … ed.] in public health at Tulane University helped design this experiment.

“One of the things I took away from interviewing people was a greater awareness that people of color have thought about wealth disparity and how it has touched their lives and the kinds of things they’ve lost out on because they didn’t have access to the resources their white friends did,” says Prasertong. “Not that [white people] weren’t aware, but they never really thought about how … that might have affected where they are in the world in relation to people of color. They never stopped to think, ‘Oh, that car my parents gave me in college allowed me to drive across town to get a good job.'”

Note Prasertong’s phrase access to resources. Prasertong is implying that ‘resources’ are impersonal, beyond the impact of people, that cars grow on racist trees where white children just ‘receive them’ and black children don’t. Wouldn’t the fact that almost 70% of black children are in single parent households as compared with 25% of white children be much more significant?

Such experiments as this have unexpected results …

One limitation of this experiment is that the customers who came to the stall were all in a higher-than-average income bracket. Prasertong says that may be one reason why the vast majority of customers of color – African-Americans, Latinos and Asians – declined to sign up to receive the redistributed money made from charging whites the higher price.

Evidently, irony was lost on Prasertong who wants to make ‘wealth disparity’ about outside forces rather than individual choices.

Mr. Wey, on the other hand, may actually have an inkling.

“We think of this as a systemic issue, like something that happens outside of ourselves, when in fact the aggregate sum of all of our actions and choices exacerbates or ameliorates the wealth gap,” says Wey. That includes actions like “where we choose to send our children to school, where we choose to buy a home and critically, how we choose to spend our money and where we choose to spend our money. “

Exactly.

Let’s have that “honest conversation” on race. Mr. Wey has opened a door, even if Prasertong doesn’t realize it may not go the way he expects.