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

A Black Man Labeled As White

I don't think it is a matter of acting black and acting white. I think it is environmental. So based on one's socioeconomic foundation, those are the cultural and social norms that one will be privy to. I grew up with nothing but white folks when I was young so obviously I became immersed in their culture and their environment, but I don't call it acting white. I just call it being a part of another culture. Of course people said I acted white because I spoke with articulation and I wore certain clothes and idolized Larry Bird, but they were kids that didn't know any better. I was foreign to them so they perceived me as not being black enough. I think it is pretty ignorant to think in those lines. I was persona non grata for the longest because I felt I had to conform to those norms because when I moved to a proedominantly black neighborhood Iwas percieved as acting white. Some people accepted me and some people alienated me. People are people and we should embrace different cultures and different types of persons, regardless. If I like Phil Collins, I don't like white music, I like a certain genre of music.

-Andre Davis
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