What?

This blog is part of a larger project of our anthropology class. While others pay particular attention to public communication, sex and sexuality, and body language, our focus here is the performance of race. We look at the many ways in which people or things become of an ethnic background. This can include how a person references, whether through physical attributes, speech patterns, or surroundings, another ethnicity. It can include the ways in which a person makes their own ethnicity apparent (or render them invisible). Even within one ethnic diaspora, we meticulously capture the events in which they separate themselves through even narrower ethnic classifications. Every entry displays a reenactment of a racialized characteristic in the context of American life -- and a profound sense of the meaning of culture.

Why?

We participate in the mass observation movement because we believe that it has much to contribute to the field of anthropology. We capture the "thick description" described by Geertz without the consequences of our participation. In each moment, we are able to catch power structures, cultural flows, functions, structures, an individual's or community's relationship to its environment, human agency, symbols and symbolic meaning, the difference differences make, and/or how history is played out in one simple incident.

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

"Acting" White vs. "Acting" Black

Stereotypes have always played a large role in framing the way people viewed or responded to people of different races. The idea that someone can act a certain color is beyond me. However, everyday you see people making generalizations of others based on their appearance. In addition, everyday you see people debating whether or not it is possible for these stereotypes to be true. So I decided to try and answer that question for them. I asked many people of different races what they thought about the stereotypes of blacks versus the stereotypes of whites. I also asked them what they felt about the notion of people “acting” a certain type of race, for example, when people say that someone is acting white or acting black.
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