Wandile is the founder of Anti-Racist Hot Dog and GrindTea.com
He wanted to create a protest that not only recognized victims of racism but also one that gave back in a positive way.
Video Transcript
WANDILE MTHIYANE: I think to do the work that I'm doing within race and inclusion, you have to be a hopeless optimist. So you constantly have to be ambitious because the odds, at face value, look like they're against you. Hi, my name is Wandile Mthiyane. I am an Obama leader and the founder of the Anti-racist Hot Dog and grindtea.com.
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So the Anti-racist Hot Dog started when I got kicked out of a racist restaurant in South Africa and I thought to myself, how can I respond to this as an architect? We wanted to create a protest that made a statement, but also gave back to the victims. So I designed and built a Hot Dog stand physically on top of where the racist restaurant was and I brought in my friends who are house music DJs. So it was house music, Hot Dogs, and dialogue on race and started bringing people of different colors, different age groups and we all started grappling with this idea. What does a post apartheid, postcolonial inclusive city look like?
President Obama tweeted about it and from there, we thought to ourselves how can we then take this and use it in the spaces where we spend most of our time, which is our workplace and our school, and that's how the consultancy was born. The premise of our work is that if bias, discrimination are such thorns within our workplace culture, within our schools, within our society, then anti-racism ought to be fun. So we throw these disarming parties where we have Hot Dogs, house music, and dialogue on race as well as Anti-racist Hot Dog cards for us to spark that conversation. Because we believe that changing and transforming culture isn't something that happens during Black History Month, or during a particular event. It's something that happens throughout the year on a day to day basis.
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So food is like the one place where we've gotten inclusion, right, like you can love Taco Tuesday and still hate Mexicans, right, which is absurd when you actually think about it. When you ask people what their favorite food 75% of the time it's food from cultures outside their own. So just because I love Indian food, does that make me less Zulu, or less Irish? No, it serves to enhance my experience and enhance my palate, and this is true for diversity and inclusion as well. But we live in this very polarized world where it's a us against them, it's a zero sum game, and that's what we're trying to work to change and transform. Help us realize that each of us coming together and hence is all of our collective experience and we all live a better life. So that's why we use food in this space, this space for all the conversations that we have, because food is the one place where we sort of kind of got it right.
I think the premise of the Anti-racist Hot Dog is to help people realize that to be biased is to be human and to challenge your biases is to be a good person. The Anti-racist Hot Dog exists to humanize the conversation on race, to help us realize that we are a lot more alike than we are different. That in order for us to build a culture of inclusion we need to be willing to have meaningful conversations where we listen to the other and their experiences, and we draw parallels and we learn from each other. So we want to facilitate those dialogues and help people realize that at the end of the day, we're better together. We're more creative, the more we keep to ourselves, the more we perpetuate exclusion, we all lose. [MUSIC PLAYING]
