Tom Colicchio Changes His Restaurant’s Racially Tinged Name

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/dining/temple-court-fowler-and-wells-tom-colicchio.html?mcubz=3

In an age of careful branding, restaurateurs put a lot of thought into choosing just the right name. Rarely will they go to the trouble and expense of changing it.

Yet the chef Tom Colicchio is dropping the name of his newest Manhattan restaurant, Fowler & Wells, after learning that it has historically racist connotations. The new name is Temple Court.

Fowler & Wells, which opened last October, was named for a publishing company and scientific institute that once operated in a building on the same site in the financial district; that building was later torn down, replaced by Temple Court, the building that stands there now. The men who started the company, Lorenzo and Orson Fowler and Samuel Wells, were proponents of phrenology, a popular 19th-century belief that the shape of one’s skull revealed characteristics like mental aptitude and personality.

The practice was frequently used to justify slavery and to advance a belief in African-American inferiority. Orson Fowler wrote that coarse hair correlated with coarse fibers in the brain, and indicated coarse feelings; that, he wrote, suggested that people of African descent had poor verbal skills and traits that were best suited for nursing children or waiting on tables.


This is what happens when people aren't properly educated on racism, white supremacy and bigotry. Tom is a liberal and uses his twitter to criticize trump a lot including on racism, but he himself as he admitted; understood that phrenology “was used for nefarious reasons” but had only a passing knowledge of it. SMH!

Educate yourselves on racism, the media and the school system waters it down to protect white supremacy....

 

This is how most people in this country are racist and or bigoted. Through ignorance, trick knowledge and cognitive dissonance. Unlike Tom, others are too complacent to realize their own ignorance on the matters. So I will give him that.

 

I agree completely! Although I'd point something else out -- when you point out their ignorance, a lot of people dig their heels in and insist you're being too touchy or sensitive. This owner learned the truth and did something about it.

It's okay to be ignorant: if it weren't, we'd all be condemned, because everybody is ignorant about *something.* What's not okay is to have someone educate you and then you turn around and get upset and insist it's no big deal or that the person is wrong just because it feels bad to be ignorant.

 

I'll be honest, I doubt 2% of the general population knew the history of that restaurant name, including the owner.
Congrats for dude getting woke and being on the right side of history.

Now if only the POTUS would.

 

2% is being generous

 

Yeah that's kind of where I was going when labeling them complacent, uncritical satisfaction in their "intellect". They feel you can't tell them anything because they know better, they "got this". It's like how racist people be telling others to get "woke". I actually seen a racist on twitter put up that quote "I lied told often enough becomes the truth" using it for his rhetoric.