Is Dan Wu full of ramen?

If by ramen you mean shit, then yes–but he’s also got bad editors

Last weekend saw the release of the second batch of editorials from the “Our Voices” project, a media partnership between CivicLex, Facebook and the Lexington Herald Leader. Birthed in the wake of last summer’s George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests, “Our Voices” aims to showcase Lexington “stories [that] too many of us have not heard.” The initial batch of “Our Voices” stories, released in November, focused on gentrification and affordable housing. The second batch, posted last Friday, focuses on economic opportunity, “the stories of people who’ve aspired to the American Dream of prosperity,” Herald Leader journalist Linda Blackford writes in her introduction to the editorials, “only to be woken up by racism or other institutional roadblocks facing them.”

Longtime readers know my disdain for the “Our Voices” project. In our city, both CivicLex and the Lexington Herald Leader have a recent and very public record of supporting the racist policies and institutional roadblocks that have reproduced, in Fayette County, the same sort of racial animosity and economic dire straits to which this past year’s national BLM protests called attention.  Both media outlets have also generally subordinated and marginalized those community voices who, pre-George Floyd, questioned the people who were instituting those roadblocks.

For CivicLex and the Lexington Herald Leader to then partner with a global corporate behemoth that has a pronounced record of undermining and algorhithm’ing away marginalized voices….well, it just seems like utter insanity, a recipe for continuing the bad policies that those two media outlets endorsed for over a decade prior to their newfound interest in representing marginalized communities. Have these groups changed, #awoken maybe after a particularly powerful conference presentation? Or is the project in reality just a grant-funded brand change intended to shine the same old shoddy local products CivicLex and the Herald Leader have been circulating for years?

The feature story in this batch, from Dan Wu, described as a “Chinese immigrant, owner of Atomic Ramen, and community activist & organizer,” suggests the latter motivation: a shine.

In the editorial, the Chinese immigrant chef tells his story, which, as any follower of the Lexington Herald Leader, Chevy Chaser, AceMonthly, WKYT News, the Kentucky Kernel, Lexington Creative Mornings, UK News, WTVQ, the Rona Roberts foodie hour Savoring Kentucky, The Sacramento (California) Bee, VisitLex and a cornucopia of radio-shows, podcasts, regional blogs and informal West Sixth meetings likely already knows, centers around Wu opening in 2017 his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, Atomic Ramen, in the Lexington development known as the Summit (or more specifically, in “The Barn at The Summit at Fritz Farm,”), where in late 2020 the restaurant became an early casualty of the Covid shutdowns. (Wu landed on his feet: he has a new place on the more customer-dense and ramen-friendly UK campus. The Barn at The Summit at Fritz Farm did not: it shuttered in May 2020.)

Wu uses his authentic story to then pivot and connect himself to a community of immigrant business owners who lack the access to capital and other necessities to start and run successful entrepreneurial ventures. The editorial ends with Wu calling on leaders to provide more access to resources for immigrant businesses–statements amplified in the H-L‘s article title.

Sounds innocuous, right? And it is, which is one reason why we should question how “diverse” and needed Wu’s voice actually is…and why CivicLex is getting paid Facebook money to “find” this already-celebrated and circulated Lexington immigrant. A marginalized voice Wu is not.

Dan Wu: brand ambassador for the institutional roadblock known as the Summit TIF

But I have a bigger issue with Wu’s “story”—particularly as it relates to his support for immigrant businesses. The Herald Leader’s title is pretty explicit, and so is Wu: his story is the immigrant story, and “we face the biggest hurdles to success.”

And yet, for a writer who spent so much time describing his journey as an immigrant business owner who opened and then closed a restaurant in the Summit, Wu neglects to mention that his Summit landlords in fact received $26.5 million in state and local TIF funding. If Wu is an immigrant “we” from a marginalized community, then “we” did in fact get some pretty phat city and state subsidies, and “we” also got complete local media buy-in, along with national corporate brand support set in a greenfield, high-dollar, development.

I suspect though, that when you get down to the particulars, Wu is full of shit on this claim. Most immigrant businesses aren’t getting the Wu treatment. And part of the reason why they don’t is because of city deals like the one that Wu entered into.

Short for tax-increment financing, TIFs are a localized expression of Reagan-era trickle-down economics. Initially sold as a way to spur economic development in urban, blighted areas that have nothing going for them, TIF districts redirect up to 80% of an area’s future-taxes (money that would otherwise feed into the city or state General Fund to pay for initiatives like supporting immigrant businesses) into the bank account of a single already-wealthy developer …for a period of between 20-30 years. It is not much of a stretch to state that in TIF districts, the government officially cedes its right of governance to a single private entity.

Using the despicable legacy of race-based urban poverty as a means to extract even more city subsidies for what are uniformly upscale projects is a shitty enough act. But the Summit development, where our community activist and organizer opened his Atomic Ramen restaurant, is an especially egregious abuse of TIF funding. The Summmit sits on land that is about as far from urban and blighted undevelopable land as one can get in Lexington: it was a greenfield development, eight miles from Main Street, at the intersection of two high-traffic suburban arterials, and within spitting distance from the Lexington Mall. The entity receiving the $26.5 million in city and state future-taxes over the next 20 years, the Alabama-based Bayer Company, doesn’t even reside in the commonwealth.

Whether Wu played along willingly or clue-lessly seems besides the point. From the day he signed his Summit lease on through last week’s “Our Voices” editorial, the community activist and organizer did not make a peep about the tax breaks, which means he was also promoting and benefiting from the very same racially-tinged institutional blocks to fair development that Fayette-Urban-County a good portion of our city’s immigrant businesses (and their consumers).

CivicLex and the Lexington Herald Leader are terrible and clueless editors

None of this, in the year 2021, should be considered “bombshell” news. Even the Herald Leader—“Our Voices” editor Linda Blackford herself, for FUC’s sake!—has reported on the Summit’s anti-citizen tax deals. It is odd that neither the 2021 version of Linda Blackford, nor her “Our Voices” partner CivicLex, the self-described “civic education & media organization bringing daylight to the issues impacting Fayette County,” seem to have noted the obvious incongruity in Wu’s article about overcoming the racist institutional blockages that harm immigrant and other marginalized businesses.

The “Our Voices” editors could have just asked the Atomic Ramen chef and community organizer to address his relationship to those Summit subsidies as part of the re-drafting process. That’s probably what former NoC features editor Beth Connors Manke and I would have done if this was a North of Center project from the early Obama years. Instead, the community and professional editors for this Facebook journalism project seem to have completely dropped the ball.

That’s the thing with not addressing bad ideology–if you don’t name the crap, it just changes brands and faces to keep promoting the same old shit. And truly, while there are exceptions, this is what “Our Voices” seems generally about: cover-up and brand-control rather than enlightenment and reckoning.

I never ate at Dan Wu’s Atomic Ramen cafe–the Summit never appealed to me as a place, and it wasn’t close to my home, either. I was not a target demographic, though I assume that Wu is good at his craft. I know many other people who love his food, and I have no reason to doubt them. But it is about time for the citizens of this city to begin to recognize: Wu’s craft is narrow–a ramen noodle restaurant owner.

Let’s not confuse that craft with community activism; nor should we confuse last decade’s Make-Lexington-Great-Again community activists and writers with the aware and competent community activist brands that they’re getting Facebook money to project.