What Anthony Bourdain Meant to People of Color
'Shivana Sookdeo was in line at a food festival in Prospect Park several years ago, and turned to see Anthony Bourdain standing near her. “Hey kid, you hungry?” he asked.
From there, they struck up an easy conversation, she said in an interview, and eventually got to talking about her parents’ home country, Trinidad.
“It wasn’t like talking to a celebrity,” she said. “It was like talking to an old friend.”
After Mr. Bourdain was found dead on Friday, at the age of 61, Ms. Sookdeo described what he had meant to her. “I felt I could trust him to see what I saw in Trinidad, as if the heart of the country would be safe in his hands as a person and traveler,” she wrote on Twitter. “You trusted him with Your Heritage.”
Her tweets — shared and liked tens of thousands of times — struck a chord. To many people of color and members of marginalized communities, Mr. Bourdain was a rare traveler they trusted to get their cultures “right.” Through his writing and his television shows, the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations” and CNN’s “Parts Unknown,” Mr. Bourdain brought curiosity and empathy to parts of the world that were most likely unfamiliar to much of his audience.
“He thought of himself as a guest, and was fascinated and genuinely in love with the idea of food as a way to understand the country and its people,” Ms. Sookdeo said. “People respond to that kind of sincerity.”
Others shared her sentiment. “He didn’t look down on foreign places he visited and their ‘quaintness/backwardness/insert-usual-derogatory adjective,’” the journalist Rania Abouzeid tweeted. “He dived in, hungry to experience. His wasn’t the Orientalist gaze. He saw humanity (& food) everywhere, and connected with it.”
Ahmed Ali Akbar, the host of BuzzFeed’s podcast “See Something Say Something,” praised Mr. Bourdain for “subverting cliché.”
“Especially for a white journalist who works with people of color, it’s rare — and it’s powerful,” he said. . .
(On Tuesday, Netflix said it would keep streaming “Parts Unknown,” which had been scheduled to come off the service on June 16, for “months to come.”)'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/dining/anthony-bourdain-ethnic-communities.html?
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