Georgetown attracts some of worlds top retail names, finest restaurants, smart young people and deflects Black people. In observation at the corner of M and Wisconsin Avenue I saw few black people and was focused on performance of whiteness. The uniform for white males being khaki pants or jeans and a button down shirt with colorful stripes, for females tight jeans, boots and a fitted top. Doing an observation allowed me time to sit and compare, where I usually would not. I must have seen five to ten of the same shirts on guys and around the same for the ladies. The uniform as I began calling it was ubiquitous. Also shoes I looked at shoes for a while and noticed that the same pair of high heeled boots must have been on sale some where on M Street. This is not a fashion observation, but the fact is uniformity and my perception of a Georgetown uniform acts as a performance of Race. Whiteness is at it’s peak in Georgetown. This summer during a Crime emergency, where a rash of 15 murders occurred in as many days, a police inspector said on the record "This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown.". Not a racial thing? If it wasn’t a racial thing why was the word Black mentioned. So maybe it is not just the residents and patrons of Georgetown who are performing whiteness there. It is perhaps an all encompassing performance of whiteness. An organized performance by the police with their enforcement directives, shop owners with high prices, white students who do not socialize with other races, patrons who appreciate a racially homogenous (the word sanitized also comes to mind) environment.
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.
1 comment:
Wow...this is an interesting blog. I'd like to see more in-depth analyses of these situations, if you do those.
Keep up the good work...and I'll keep reading.
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