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.

Monday, December 4, 2006

Oprah an Oreo?!

According to rapper 50 cent on November 30th to Elle magazine:


"Oprah Winfrey is really an Oreo - black on the outside but white on the inside. Winfrey started out with black women's views but has been catering to middle-aged white American women for so long that she's become one herself. I think the idea of being publicly noted that she's a billionaire makes [black women] interested in seeing her views. But it's even more exciting to the demographic of white American women she's been aiming at to see that she has the exact same views that they have."

The fact that 50 cent accuses Oprah of being white immediately reminded me of the time I went back to PG County, Maryland, to a "family party" consisting of my immediate family, my parent's friends, and their children whom I grew up with in elementary and middle school, and their best friends at the time. All the people there were Filipino(a), the elders being immigrants from the Philippines and their children second generation Filipinos. My parents' friends' children and I were an extremely tight group of friends in elementary and middle school until we distanced ourselves because I went to a well-known predominantly white high school in Northern Virginia while they went to the predominantly black high school in Oxon Hill. There seemed an intangible cultural barrier between us - one that they've resented and one that I've had to assimilate with - that seemed to choke us every time we've attempted to speak to each other since then. But, because I haven't seen them for a long time when I went to this party, and have heard many rumors about myself that I've rejected my Filipino heritage because I've stopped talking to Filipinos in my area, I wasn't sure what to expect, what to do, what to say since I've been distanced. I've gone on to higher education while they didn't, I don't use the African American verbal tradition in common speech anymore, and I don't dress in the style that is favored and popular with the Filipino people in PG County, MD. I walk through the gate in the back, and greeted me was 16-year-old Justin, "HEY, Jorelle! Long time no see! ...I heard you turned WHITE!" In response, mean-mugging him, I cried, "What!?" He replied, "No, no, no I'm jus' playin', jus' playin'.... hahaha, don't beat me up."

I quickly grab some offered food, greet the elders and apologize, then tell my boyfriend, "Let's go."

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