High on the Hog’s Stephen Satterfield: The Power of Black Storytelling

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: I do believe that there is power in observing these stories and really breaking down their origins so that we can do our own collective work about the systems that continue to hold Black people and people of color more broadly behind. We really have to start interrogating these systems.

PORTER BRASWELL: From HBR Presents, this is Race at Work. The show that explores how race impacts our careers and lives. I’m Porter Braswell. I left a Wall Street career to start a company called, Jopwell, because I wanted to help corporate America build a more diverse workforce. Each week we talk to a different leader about their experience with race and how it impacts our daily lives.

In this episode, we talked to Stephen Satterfield. He’s a food writer and founder of Whetstone, a print magazine and media company dedicated to food origins and culture. It’s the only Black owned, yes, the only Black owned food publication in print in the US. You might recognize Stephen as host of the new Netflix show High on the Hog: How African-American Cuisine Transformed America. It hit Netflix’s top 10 movies and TV category the week it was released. It’s based on the book by Dr. Jessica B. Harris and produced by an all Black crew, including Oscar-winning director Roger Williams. It’s been praised for its intimate and careful portrayal of Black food history.

Stephen told us that even though he’s been getting a lot of recognition and praise following the success of the show and as a Black creator and entrepreneur, his company Whetstone still has to fight for the respect it deserves. So before we dive into all that, we started our conversation by asking Stephen how his reputation as an origin forager came to be.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: So I went into culinary school, the Le Cordon Bleu school in Portland, Oregon, and I took an introduction to wine class, Wine Studies 1-0-1. I’ll never forget it. I had, my professor was named John Liaison, a really nice middle-aged guy who was making wine in the Willamette Valley, just south of Portland, one of the finest regions in the world for wine.

And he really kind of put me on to wine as an agricultural product, which really helped me understand food and wine as part of this collective human tradition, assess the quality of the wine based on history and tradition and soil and geography and climate, and all of these inputs inform wine experts and wine makers about what is fine wine.

And so I took this perspective and really started to look at it from the framework of origin and origin for me has become kind of my own religion in this food context. And that I believe origin is a movement of reclamation. It is a movement of inserting truth where history has erased some of its greatest actors and participants.

So that really colors all of my work.

PORTER BRASWELL: Hmm.

Why do you think that there are so few people who look like you in the culinary world on the stage that you’re now on?

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Well, we could go outside of the culinary world and ask the same questions. Right? I think that’s the answer, is that this is just the state of things.

And part of this reclamation work is a correction of a very intentional historical erasure. Erasure is a form of violence, which reflects the physical violence and displacement that is really foundational to, especially the Black American context and relationship to the United States. Right, and so story is its own form of power. And I think this is something that people greatly underestimate because of the ubiquity of stories and because of the pervasiveness of stories in our own life. We often don’t remember things that we learned in school. But we remember stories that are passed down among generations, family members, friends, these stories become codified in our own ways of life in our communities and the things we believe what happens in racism being a foundational part of the story of the formation of this country and of really, you see the impacts all over the world. Now, all of the racist stories that have [00:05:00] been codified into our society for centuries and centuries and centuries, we’re now working against. Across the board, you see, especially Black people, people who look like me, as you say, who are disproportionately represented in cultural spaces and institutional spaces and entrepreneurial spaces and economic spaces.

Our absence is part of the story of Black people in the United States and that erasure, that absence is absolutely intentional. It’s codified, it’s narrative driven, and we are using media and food media in particular, as a way to retell these stories in ways that are more truthful, more complete, and in doing so, taking back power.

So that’s what I mean about reclamation. Reclaiming the power of these narratives and the truths that they hold and that they reveal.

PORTER BRASWELL: Okay. You’ve cleared up, when I was watching High on the Hog, I kept finding myself so emotional and I couldn’t understand. And one of the things I was so excited to ask you about is why, how did, how did that show hit such a cord with its audience?

And I think what you just explained to me, I can now answer that question. I think you hit a cord, especially for a Black man watching that show. I didn’t know my history. I still don’t know the history and the realization that I don’t know the history, and then to see it play out on television on a screen, it felt so coming home, it felt so like the light got turned on for me in watching the show and we’ll get into the show and I want to hear about, you know, how it came to be and all that stuff.

But one of the moments that I’ll never forget in my life, my wife and I were sitting there watching the series and at the end of the first episode, my wife, hasn’t seen me cry many times and being with me now for eight years, I couldn’t control myself at the end of the first episode, seeing and living through you in that moment of what it must have felt like for our ancestors to know that this is it. They’re going across that ocean for you to physically be there, felt like I was there, and I felt some sense of, I don’t know, coming home through you and in the stories that you were sharing throughout all of the different episodes. Every episode, I found myself so emotional because I just kept learning more and more and more about our history and it really pissed me off that that story is not told enough and that this show is an uncommon show because there not many people that look like you, that are taking audiences through this incredible journey.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: You know, it’s honestly emotional for me, even reliving this moment with other Black people. The power of that moment, which was so felt and so visceral it’s because the tension, the pain that it tapped into is the pain of separation. Right? It’s the rage, the fury of separation, the sadness. It is the loss of those stories.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: That perpetuates that painful separation and that painful erasure. Because as what we call African-American people, we are not a species that existed 500 years ago.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Even as Black folks, we constantly unwittingly perpetuate anti-Black narratives. When we say things like, oh, that’s not for Black people, when we’re talking about oysters. Oh, cowboys, horseback riding. That’s not for Black people. When you see that historical correction, and plus obviously the intense, lived experience of seeing someone have this, the pain of separation wash over them in their homeland and the home of the diaspora, wherever that may be for any refugee or any individual who has had to migrate either willingly or against their will.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: There’s always the pain. From the motherland, the calling, the longing, and then not knowing those parts of ourselves and our history. It is enraging. It does make you sad. You know, there is a longing to belong because we’ve never been allowed to belong in this country.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: That separation, when you are in one’s homeland, it is the culmination of that sadness of the not belonging where you are and the longing to belong where you come from the calling home. It’s deep for me to relive that with you, because even though I’m trying to explain it for your listeners, in some ways, I know I don’t actually need to explain that feeling to you because when you said that, hey my wife hasn’t seen me cry like that, I know what you mean. The world has never seen me cry, and I think that’s part of just what makes this show so deep. And I have to credit the director, Roger Ross Williams, the executive producers, Karis Jagger, Fabienne Toback for really producing the show in a way, Shoshana Guy, who was the showrunner, who emotionally allowed me to be present in the scene, right.

To not just be stoic, like, okay, I got a button up because this is for Netflix and I’m not about to have the whole world see me cry. No, you need a show where you need Black women that care, that presence, which we were, we’re lucky to have with this project. And so in the facilitation of that safe space and the facilitation of that care — allows the host, who was the vessel for this material to be in an emotionally present space where if a vulnerable moment arises, there’s no walls or barriers that go up, it’s just a translation and the translation comes through and it’s felt.

PORTER BRASWELL: Wow. You’re hitting on that, that word, acceptance, acceptance that it’s okay to eat oysters. It’s okay to be a cowboy. It’s okay to be emotional when you see, or when you feel the pain that our ancestors have gone through to then express yourself in that moment, that form of acceptance made me feel more whole as a person. So I appreciate you taking the audience on that journey with you.

Let’s take a step back. Talk about the show. How did it come to be?

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Yeah. So the show came out a couple of weeks ago, May 26th on Netflix. There’s the response has been wild. It’s amazing. It’s humbling really, but the material is based on the text of Dr. Jessica B. Harris, a literary and academic luminary.

Well known by people in the food spaces for her contributions to, in particular African diasporic food ways and traditions, which she’s been documenting incredibly and impeccably since 1972 as a food and travel editor at Essence magazine. So she herself is an icon who is overdue for such a platform. Dr. Jessica B. Harris is also the author of an essential memoir, My Soul Looks Back, which I feel appropriately places her in the cultural pantheon that she deserves to be among people like her friend, James Baldwin, people like Maya Angelou who wrote the forward to High on the Hog. People like Tony Morrison who edited some of her earlier works.

Right? So these are the people who Dr. J has been kicking it with, so that doesn’t come across in High on the Hog, but in explaining High on the Hog, I like to explain the source material, you know, on the origin forager. It’s always important to go to the beginning so that we can properly attribute and give power and credit where it is due.

So everything flows from Dr. J and her scholarship and her research and her love for the continent and teaching and sharing for over 40 years now. Fabienne Toback and Karis Jagger, the two executive producers, two friends, Black women in Los Angeles who were doing some creative kind of one-off projects, they did some video work for the New York times, but were looking for something more substantive to work on together as a producing team when Fabienne was gifted this text High on the Hog, and it was a completely, transformative moment for her. She felt the urge and the calling to turn this work into a docu-series and wanted to present this work with all the stories that we saw.

And so Netflix approved it, I believe this was in 2018.

PORTER BRASWELL: Wow.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: In the summer, if I’m not mistaken, we started shooting a year later in 2019. First in July, we did the Juneteenth scene.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: In Texas first. And then we went into full production the fall of 2019, starting in South Carolina with episode two, we actually shot out of order and then Africa, and we wrapped production in March of 2020 that famous month and that famous year.

PORTER BRASWELL: Oh my God.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: One week before or everything shut down.

PORTER BRASWELL: Wow.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: We closed production and luckily Netflix signed off on all of our final edits, so there was nothing that needed to be reshot. They held it in the vault for almost a year.

It just came out. So that’s, it takes a long time. It’s really hard to get television made.

PORTER BRASWELL: I appreciate the detail that you went into in terms of what does it take to actually get a show out to the public? That’s a rare look inside understanding all the nuances. Did you see representation in that process within Netflix?

Meaning like when you were going through the process and people were trying to understand the show, did you have others in the room that were like, yes, we need to do this show. Like that makes a lot of sense and those stories aren’t being told, or did you find that you were constantly trying to battle people to have people understand why these stories matter.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Yeah. I mean, and those very earliest meetings, I was not in the room, but again, can’t be overstated how much influence the director had to play in this. But that being said, for me, when I was approached, one of the first things that [00:16:00] was said to me is we have a Black director, we have a Black show runner, and we have two Black EPs.

PORTER BRASWELL: Awesome.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: And I was like, I’m in, because the important thing too, for people to realize for me personally, is that Dr. J is like an idol to me. This is someone whose scholarship has transformed my life many, many years, like going back to my early twenties.

Right. She helped give me a lot of the framing and the language around this food anthropology thing. So when you see me in the scenes with her, it’s not just like the author of this book. No, this is someone who changed my life.

PORTER BRASWELL: Wow. Talk to me about the importance of seeing of having a mentor of color, somebody that looks like you, that there’s shared experiences in that.

Talk to me about the importance of that.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: It can’t be overstated. It can’t be overstated. In fact, had that crew not been Black, I would not have attached myself to the project because I wouldn’t have had the confidence that they could move through the nuance necessary for this kind of material. Part of what makes this special is that it is a conversation among and between the diaspora.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: There’s an intimacy in the way in which we captured Black people, Black Americans that, I’m sorry to say, I’ve been on a number of sets, like it’s not, possible. And there’s no malice in that.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: I just think like when you see a film like Moonlight, it’s like, yo like that intimacy, you know, that, that room, that space, that care, that’s what’s required, you know, it has to come from a Black perspective.

And I think that too often, what has happened is Black stories have had to go through this sort of editorial filter. When you don’t have other people with a shared lived experience in positions of influence, creative influence and direction. And so when that actually happens, it looks and feels so dramatic and it looks and feels so different.

And that’s what people are responding to without having the language to articulate why it feels different. But I’m here to tell you. That’s why it’s different. And so even as consumers and lovers of arts and music, like I would love to see these stories become normalized across many diaspora’s, Asian diasporas.

I want to see what that looks like when the diaspora is convening among itself. And so for me, I feel very good and confident in saying this was made for Black people by Black people with love and it is for everyone to enjoy and for everyone to learn from. And that’s kind of the framework in which I hope we can slowly try to push media.

PORTER BRASWELL: I love that. And as I think about corporate America, you’re really hitting on the value of diversity. And so recently a CEO came out and said that they’re not going to value diversity in their hiring process because it lowers the bar. And he’s been receiving a ton of backlash because that’s just so ignorant to say something like that.

But what you’ve just articulated in saying that, like it took a group of Black people to bring out the right stories, cause they have the experience and they understand the nuances of how to make this come to life. Just by the mere fact of being a Black person in this country. You’re going to experience this country in a unique way.

I don’t care if there’s somebody else that is white, but went to my school, grew up in my neighborhood, whatever we’re still going to have different experiences. And so when I come to the workplace as a Black person, Even if we have the same credentials, I’m going to have a different experience. And if I can share my experience, because I feel like I belong in that office culture, then you’re going to get the best ideas and you’re going to get amazing results.

You’re going to build amazing products because there are different experiences that can flourish if valued. And so I definitely understand the nuances that come with a Black crew filming that because they get it. And that is a powerful thing. So as I think again about the corporate world, is there a lesson or something that you learned along this journey that leaders within corporate America can learn from?

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Yeah, let’s, let’s just stick with where you’re at right now on the diversity conversation, because I think too often, diversity is confused and convoluted with power, right. Or representation is confused with power. They’re two separate things. On the matter of diversity, like, if you don’t think diversity is good for your business, then I think you’re bad at business.

And what I mean by that is diversity is actually a weapon. It’s a superpower in that you have people from different lived experiences from different backgrounds who can bring a unique insight and perspective into the work that you’re doing. Especially if you are making creative work. You are capping your potential to reach people in the marketplace with a lack of diversity. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful, but it means that you’re prioritizing keeping resources and keeping your own racism, actualized or internalized, active and alive as opposed to really thinking about your, your workers and the labor force as part of what is actually a competitive advantage for you, right?

Because you have a breadth of lived experiences and backgrounds and perspectives that cannot be duplicated otherwise. There’s no way to get there. Right? What I like to focus on, which is the next step after representation and diversity. Is a actual shifting of power, which is a shifting of resources, right?

A historical and overdue, a necessary transfer of resources. To enable and empower the next and future generations of Black entrepreneurs in particular and indigenous entrepreneurs in particular who have historically and continuously and systemically been locked out of opportunities. So that, in my case, even though I started a business four years ago with $0, I have been trying to raise capital since before the magazine, I was told the magazine wouldn’t work. I literally got told that print was going to die. That couldn’t be the basis of the foundation of a media company. Once we monetize again, no $0. We went from 400 magazines in 2017, and now we’re going to print 40,000 this year.

PORTER BRASWELL: Wow.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Four years later. No investment capital. We signed a deal with iHeartRadio to produce podcasts. We did 30 episodes. We’re paying writers. We’ve worked in over 80 countries. We have a creative agency. I’m hosting the show on Netflix. Guess what? I’m still looking for capital, you know, how much investment capital we’ve gotten? $0, still.

PORTER BRASWELL: That’s crazy.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: And so what we have to look at too is like, even for accomplished Black folks, even for highly visible Black folks, sometimes our accomplishments still aren’t enough. So sometimes the representation, the fact that yes I’m here. Y’all can see me. I’m in the building. I’m happy for future generations for absorbing food media as I was to see stories like High on the Hog, which is going to totally change the game, but where we are right now is that a profitable business — I’m a proven entrepreneur who has made it in literally the highest platforms in media, still might not be enough to close out that seed round. Now, am I confident that we’ll get there? I am, but I’m only trying to say diversity and representation, the being in the building, your face on the screen, that is merely step one. There’s so much other work in terms of a transfer of resources and power that need to happen and I’m far more interested and committed and respectful of companies who are committed to that as opposed to diversity and inclusion, which ultimately just makes your business better.

PORTER BRASWELL: So you have to be twice as good with half as much, and you’re still not good enough. As a Black founder and CEO of my own company. There’s, I mean, it’s, it’s a whole other episode, in terms of, in terms of what you have to go through and the hoops you have to jump through and the incredible accomplishments you have to have just to get to the table, to have a fighting chance at receiving pennies, from these institutions. And I’ve had so many conversations and, and I’m in a place of privilege where I can now have these dialogues and call people out. And what I’ve been telling folks is that all these talks about your big commitments and how you set aside all these hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to fund Black businesses and so on, where is it?

Where’s it going? It’s not coming to me. It’s not coming to you. Where’s it going? So stop talking about it. Like, just stop talking about it. Only if you’re going to talk about investing in communities of color and founders of color, then actually do it. But if you’re just going to talk about it, you’re taking away from the cause.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: You’re, you’re really on it.

And it’s important to name this phenomenon as well, because when stuff doesn’t get named. It is allowed to fester and it becomes, as I said earlier, codified, it becomes normalized. Right. And so then what happens? We start to accept these new narratives. Like, I guess we have a pipeline problem. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no.

Here we are. We’re present. We’re here. What you’re actually doing is leveraging this moment of cultural consciousness as a way to make your business look better. So really it’s wildly offensive because not only are you undermining the actual work that needs to be done, you’re undermining the work of the Black women who brought this improbable movement and moment to the mainstream, the tension of those two truths and the way that our nation, which is so really like perverse and needs to be looked at. The only way we know to express empathy and care is to buy stuff, give them money.

Some Asian woman is slaughtered. Start a go-fund me for the family. It’s like, we don’t know how to give care.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Because we’re so disconnected from these stories. This is what I mean when I say stories have power.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. Well, you know, what’s really dangerous are people from our community who have made it and they refuse to acknowledge the obstacles that they faced.

Because then what ends up happening is everybody presumes, well if he, or she can make it, then there’s nothing wrong with the system. Know the system was broken when they succeeded, but there’s this complacency that comes with getting to a certain stage and not wanting to have your seat removed from that table because you feel like you can’t speak about something.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: No, I, I think you’re right. There, there is an ideological generational tension there, I believe as well. Prior generations of Black folks were very on the don’t rock the boat program. And so they not only had to be, as we say magical Negroes, but they also had to be quiet along the way to get to the next opportunity.

And so now as the fracturing and hyper segmentation of media and consumption and sharing has created new economic opportunities and the potential for new ideas and information to spread broadly and swiftly. Even Black people can perpetuate stories of anti-Blackness. I do believe that there is power in observing these stories and really breaking down their origins so that we can do our own collective work about the systems that continue to hold Black people and people of color more broadly behind.

We really have to start interrogating these systems.

PORTER BRASWELL: There’s so much to unpack here because there’s tension within the Black community. And when we got brought over, people were like, well, you know, at least I’m working in the house. I’m not out in the field. There’s always been tension within the community that I think the majority culture may not necessarily recognize.

And there’s a lot that we have to figure out within our own community because the systems that are in this country made us believe that we all can’t be fed. And so we fight against each other for scraps, which is crazy. I do think our generation is starting to come together in a way that previous generations may not necessarily have done for different circumstances.

They faced a different climate than what we face right now. But I think that our opportunity being a part of the millennial generation is to ensure that like, nobody is satisfied with scraps. We all want to eat and we can all do so. It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game, which is what it has always felt like.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Yeah, this is the story of Western capitalism. It is about conquering and it’s about winning at all costs. Our traditions are actually based in community. They’re based in sharing resources. It’s really unnatural in a recent occurrence. We have to, as a marginalized people, and this goes for all marginalized people, we have to find our power collectively.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: And that’s why I talk about collective liberation. Beginning with those in society who are the most oppressed, because when the most oppressed have power, society has power. Society is more equal and we have to build that empathy and the desire, especially among those of us who are in the marginalized communities, as a means of taking back power so that when you support a Black entrepreneur, because you know that they have survived and thrived under improbable conditions, your support for my business and vice versa is how we take back power.

PORTER BRASWELL: What gives me hope, and this comes out in the show. Is that despite it all, we’re still here.

Like we’re still here and we’re not supposed to be here and we’re still here. And so your show gave me that uplift, which was so special to have.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Yeah. That’s the moral of the story. That is the moral, it is our story of ultimately resilience and celebration. And in that celebration, then we have a restoration of pride.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: I’m glad you picked up on that because that’s what we really want people to feel is that sense of resilience and the sense of pride,

PORTER BRASWELL: Your push to go back to the source of things and having the conversation about racism in America, I think fits so well because if you go back to, again, how we were brought to this country and going back to the show, like those that wrote our constitution being slave owners to then fight over the fact that, oh, no, there’s no racism in this country. Like it’s just ignorance. Like that person doesn’t want to engage in the truth. They don’t want to have a productive conversation and it’s frustrating. But if we’re going to have an objective dialogue about how we got to where we are, I think you’ve done an amazing job. Explaining through storytelling, how important it is to go back to where does it come from? Where does it start? So that we can have a better understanding of how we got to where we are. And now we have a better idea of how can we progress? So thank you for everything.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: I appreciate that. And this origin thing is deep. Like I’m trying to get people to get into it because the foundational relationship between Black people and white people on this continent is one of subjugated exploited labor. The basis of our whole relationship to white supremacy, a white ruling class is one of being subjugated. We have been actively trying to undo this since the time of our arrival on this continent. And so what happens when the people are being disingenuous, as you say, they will say, well, slavery was a very long time ago and we can trace because we can go back to the origins.

How do we get here? How did it start? What’s been the tension, the tension has been the same potential has been the same. So yes, everyone won’t be willing to honestly engage in this intellectual dialogue, but for those who are, it is very important that we begin with this foundational relationship, which was rooted in food and agriculture. It all comes back to food that we pushed back on stories for instance, that say we were brought here because we were brutes instead of what is true, which is we were brought here because of our intellectual technology and our incredible acumen as rice growers on the west coast of Africa. We need to go back to our formative history, our origins, so that we know that is patently false, and it was actually our intellectual labor that knew how to build canals and harvest rice that built the wealth of the nation and that when the civil war happened, that industry fell apart because when Black people were able to emancipate the intellectual technology, we created a void. It is completely disingenuous to say that Black folks are now in a position where we should just be able to pick it up by the bootstraps and keep it moving.

There are plenty examples in society which shows how this foundational relationship has evolved and remained codified at each step of the way to make power and equity more difficult for Black people and specifically non white people.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah. So one of the questions that we like to ask all of our guests and particularly excited to hear this from you is how do you advise people to talk about race? If you want to engage in this conversation, how should you go about it?

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Honestly, I think that food, as we see in High on the Hog is a very powerful way of getting to conversations that are otherwise hard to have in polite communities and societies. I’ve had plenty of white folks send me grateful letters saying that they’re looking at things in ways that they’ve never imagined or considered.

So my whole worldview is about food as the most powerful way of getting to those conversations because they will get you to a place of land and labor and migration and how all the stories around those things need to be re-examined. And so that’s like one strategy that I’ve used for my career, but in terms of having conversations, most people just don’t want to feel like bad people.

And that one simple truth gets in the way of so much progress, the feeling of not wanting to be implicated. Just that. And so if you can remove the need to be defensive or implicated, and you can talk more earnestly about things that are plain to see within the system that perpetuate bias. Things like the GI bill, things like red lining, things like police violence. Income gaps, discrimination in housing. We have very clear examples that are still alive and well today. And so if you want to talk about real anti-racist work it, isn’t hard for Black folks for instance, to talk about racism. It is hard for members of the racialized ruling class to talk about racism because in that dialogue, they are implicated in being the racialized ruling class, instead of being able to detach their emotions around that, that is a work in healing that needs to be done.

It is suppressed and the systems remain intact.

PORTER BRASWELL: Yeah, I can’t recommend your show enough. I’ve texted and called and passionately pitched the importance of High on the Hog. Not just because it’s well done and it’s engaging it’s because there’s so much to learn. Again, you made it for a Black people, but also for everyone, I learned so much from the show and I feel so passionately about it.

And I can’t thank you enough for being on this podcast and for continuing to push the narrative and to push people to go back to the beginning, understand how we got to where we are. And for me personally, it’s had a profound impact because I am, I’ve always been proud, but now I understand, and I have a better picture.

I have a better understanding of who I am through your storytelling. So I can’t thank you enough for that. It will stay with me forever.

STEPHEN SATTERFIELD: Thank you Porter. Thank you so much for the platform and for all the support. We really appreciate it.

PORTER BRASWELL: That’s Stephen Satterfield. Host of the Netflix show High on the Hog and founder of Whetstone, a food magazine and media company.

This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez. Special thanks to Anne Sani and Nick Hendra.

Next week, we’ll talk to Anne Chow of AT&T about creating safe spaces at work for employees of color.