Just south of downtown Dallas, a fire ripped a hole through the roof of Baby Back Shak.
It was around 9 a.m. in February 2024 when it happened. The kitchen was burning up. And Clarence Cohens, owner and pitmaster of the paprika-red barbecue spot in the Cedars neighborhood, responded quickly.
“I notified Dallas Fire,” he says, “and got my people to safety.”
It was deemed an accident, caused by the smoker’s ventilation system. Nobody was hurt, but the damage was heavy.
Born in 1955 and originally from Memphis, Cohens never thought he’d end up owning a restaurant. In the ’90s, he had a job at the convention center in Dallas, and visitors from all over kept asking him where to find good barbecue. He sent them to different establishments around the city.
Not only did he know better, he knew he could do better. Cohens grew up helping his mother in the kitchen. She was the oldest of 14 children, so every holiday was a feast for the ages. He learned how to cook pork and chicken. (Beef came later.) In Dallas, he stopped recommending places and started dishing out his own flavor.
“I never had an idea that the food would lead me, but I started letting a few of my friends taste the ribs and some products I cooked in my backyard,” he says. “I got out on the nightclub circuit, late at night, about 9:30 or 10 o’clock, and I’d sell about 50 or 60 slabs of ribs out of the trunk of my car. I’m not dealing drugs, I’m trying to feed the people, so that was my philosophy.”
At 40, he reevaluated his life and, with his wife’s blessing, opened Baby Back Shak in 1995. Now 71, Cohens says the past 30 years have been a “Six Flags roller coaster ride.” After the fire, the community rallied behind him to set up a GoFundMe, raising enough for repairs to get the joint up and running again before July 4, 2024.
“I had a dream, like Martin did, about being judged for the content of my brain and not the color of my skin,” he says. “And 30 years I’ve been running my business. Every day is a blessing to exist that long.”
Power of a Plate
Food preparation is one of the main rituals through which Black men express care for each other and the people around them, according to Wizdom Powell, an associate professor of psychiatry at UConn Health, whose research focuses on racism, masculinity and Black men’s health.
“What’s underneath that desire and intentional action around connecting and loving on one another is something we don’t acknowledge in men,” she says, “which is a deep and profound need for human connection. We presume male bodies are machines, despite what we say we want and what we think we value around emotional expression.”
Powell grew up in a household run by Black women, but noticed the same pattern with the men in her family. For example, her grandfather fried all the fish, and it was very much understood that this was his specialty.
“You couldn’t put any Old Bay on it,” Powell says. “You just had to step back because that was his job and he took it seriously. And it was something that brought him a lot of pride to see you consume what he made.”
In her research asking Black men to define manhood, the idea of being a provider came up again and again. In many ways, she says, preparing meals and literally bringing something to the table served as proof of worth.
“There’s an enormous amount of pride associated with being able to not only bring home the bacon but fry it up in the pan too,” she says.
For some men, that sizzle in the pan or that crackle on the grill becomes a language when they may not have the words to express love out loud. And breaking bread together, Powell adds, can be a powerful method for breaking down barriers between people.
“There is a part of us that, in our own human experiences, gets wounded by things that have happened to us, which limit our capacity to express love, and so we can express love through provision,” she says. “It’s what wounded people do when they haven’t found the language to access the parts of them that allows love to be expressed verbally.”
On the flip side, cooking can just as easily be used as a method for manipulation, according to Psyche Williams-Forson, professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America.”
“Food can be weaponized,” she says. “You know how to cook, but you may be angry, disappointed, upset with your friend or your significant other and say, ‘I’m not cooking this week.’ That’s powerful especially if you’re in a household where the other half does not have the same culinary power. So food is one of those things that’s messy.”
Cooking to Survive
It gets messier in the field of food studies, which Williams-Forson has spent the past 30 years digging into as one of its leading scholars. Her research into Black foodways began in the late 1990s, after a racist comment made by golfer Fuzzy Zoeller.
In 1997, Tiger Woods was on track for a historic record-breaking win at the Masters Tournament. Per tradition, the winner would get to choose the menu for the champions’ dinner. Zoeller told a CNN camera crew: “That little boy is driving well, and he’s putting well. He’s doing everything it takes to win. So, you know what you guys do when he gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not serve fried chicken next year. Got it?” Then he added while walking away: “Or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve.”
“Here we are at the turn of the century,” Williams-Forson says, “and Black men are still being called boy and still being associated with fried chicken and collard greens.”
This and two other racist incidents sent Williams-Forson digging into the archives, where she says she found more than 100 old images: mostly Black men in tattered clothes and top hats, stealing or hoarding chicken, printed on postcards, on sheet music, on greeting cards. She argues these depictions were deliberate attacks, efforts to undercut Black men in the wake of emancipation.
“There’s always been this threat of Black political power, economic power, social and cultural power,” she says, “and food is factored in the middle of all of that.”
But in the face of that history of caricature, Williams-Forson traces a history of survival and enterprise through food: Black caterers, Pullman porters, military cooks, barbecue pitmasters, men who learned to cook in prison, fathers who cooked to put kids through college.
“Black men have always done that work, whether for reasons of care or for reasons of enterprise,” she says. “Yes, people sold chicken, but there are deeper stories here about how a lot of this food preparation and selling was a part of Black liberation.”
Her own father was a short-order cook in Atlantic City in the 1930s through the 1950s, and he’s the one who taught her family breakfast, such as grits and every kind of egg. When he developed diabetes, he established meatless Mondays and tuna Tuesdays in the household.
“It is an act of love,” she says, “and it’s an act, in many cases, of health.”
How We Treat Ourselves (and Each Other)
With Black men having some of the highest rates of obesity in the country, Powell understands that food, for some, is a coping mechanism for everyday stress, functioning like alcohol and other substances.
But compared to women, men with eating disorders don’t get much attention. The late James S. Jackson, a pioneering social psychologist and Powell’s mentor, had a theory about why this is. People under chronic, unrelenting stress, especially tied to systemic racism, reward themselves just for surviving the day. These “affordances,” as he described them, are usually seen along gender lines, with women treating themselves with food while men do it with substances.
Powell thinks men who struggle with obesity are likely also struggling with that relationship to food.
“Maybe food made them feel loved when they were growing up, and it’s the way they ingest love that they can’t yet feel externally,” she says. “But the bottom line is, when people are stressed or feeling powerless, less capable in the moment with metabolizing stress, they have to figure out a way to self-soothe, and food can become that. And it’s sensitive because you can’t tell Black folk to push back from the table.”
In recent years, Powell has seen more Black men online, preparing food, from farm to table. She hopes this sets a trend for future generations, and leads to more nuanced conversations, especially as men might be less visible in the kitchen at home because “we’re all speeding past each other,” she says.
Williams-Forson has seen something else online as well: women waking up at dawn to prepare food for men, and commenters eating it up. In contrast, she says she hasn’t seen men doing this for the women in their lives.
“We have to be balanced in our representation of that,” she says. “If your partner just had a child, that is not the time for her to be in the kitchen. She had a rough day, rough life, rough anything. If she’s elder-caring for a parent as well as child-caring, that’s the time to pitch in and broil those wings. Get that mac and cheese in the oven. Ask your partner what they want.”
Well Seasoned
After three decades, Cohens knows what his Baby Back Shak customers want.
“When some of us in a hurry, we do things to make our product inferior,” Cohens says. “Take the rush out of it, put some style and some attempt, and take your time. So I give a whole lot to what my restaurant looked like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, and then at the end of the day, what it tastes like because that’s my destiny.”
It was never about the money for Cohens. He didn’t get into this business to be a millionaire, he says. He prays every day, “not that I’m super-religious,” he says, but to stay connected to his purpose.
“As a long as I can pay my bills, keep a roof over my head, some food on the table for me and my family and be there to support others in need,” he says, “then I’m doing what I need to do as a Black man on a mission.”
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Brotherly Love is a six-part digital series about the emotional and social lives of Black men through the science of love.
Funding for this series was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Acton Family Giving, and Unlikely Collaborators.
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Fantastic article. It reminded me of the many ways food intersected with my life through my West Indian roots and my southern grandma’s cooking from scratch. Also, my father’s joy in having us sample various cultural delicacies from the many restaurants in New York. It also brought back memories of working with my sons and sharing the joy of cooking with our weekly/monthly menu. Thanks for the journey.