My friend Geoffrey’s mother is Puerto Rican and father is black. He attended and graduated from Howard University, which is a historically black university, and currently attends Medical School at Howard. When he was growing up he was an honors student and light skin in complexion. He also used to get teased a lot about “acting white.” However, he has never been the type who let other people dictate the life he led for himself. To those who don’t know him well, he comes off as the stereotypical black man: uneducated and ghetto. Even his own classmates perceive him as being the ignorant type who doesn’t care about school. This is mostly because he hardly even shows up for class. He spends all his time studying instead because he finds it more beneficial. However, they do not know how well he really does. He still honors on all his exams at Med School and despite his “ignorance” is passing each year to proceed on to the next. Just because someone appears to be uneducated does not mean they really are.
In conclusion, I feel that stereotypes are a way of keeping people in their rightful places, or at least the places where society feels that they belong. It is impossible to act a certain race, and when people believe that others have to act a certain way to stay true to their race and they are just buying into those stereotypes. Who a person becomes is not dictated by their race; that just happens to be a part of who they are. People dictate the way their race acts, it’s not their responsibility to buy into the “norms” of others. Most people I interviewed agreed with this. However, there were some dissenting opinions. I have always thought that people cannot act a certain color. You just happen to be a color but that does no dictate the way they live their life. You should never let it dictate your goals from life and the ways to achieve them. If color is all we see when we look at a person, then we are doomed from the moment we open our eyes.
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
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