Baltimore foul

I snapped this photo on Maryland Avenue near 29th street. I couldn't believe that someone would use a car bra on a minivan. I guess it's ironic to me because car bras are associated with the upper class and minivans are associated with yuppie soccer mom types. I think car bras are completely ridiculous but in reality, they may have some technical function. The humor that I see in this photo says a lot about my social class.

How do you treat your vehicle? Do you bring it to the car wash? Do you prefer a valet, garage, or is street parking when you take it out? These all say a lot about our social class.

Ravinia

When I was in Chicago this summer for my cousin's wedding, we hung out with the other side of the family on Sunday evening. Ravinia is a venue for outdoor concerts. You can buy an expensive ticket and sit in seats or you can buy a less expensive ticket and lounge on the lawn. Guess which one my family did. We were among thousands of people on the lawn. You can't actually see the musicians from the lawn which I thought was strange.

This whole scene freaked me out. Everyone looked the same and acted the same. There was even guy hired to walk around with a large placard reminding people to be quiet while the music played. I wanted to kidnap that guy.

The big thing for people do to at Rivinia is to bring food and eat it on the lawn. Even though the concert was only 3 hours long (this time classical music but they also host rock concerts and stuff like that), there is a heavy emphasis on what you bring to listen to the music. I noticed that wine and cheese were extremely popular. My aunt and uncle brought white wine and KFC which was right up my alley.

There are many things that are social class markers in the photo, above, besides the food. What are they?

(Incidentally, you can see my mom in this photo.)

social class clues

I bike past this building every day I head up to school. It's got a very decorative vent cover. Hopkins has fancy vent covers as well. UNC-Chapel Hill, where I am getting my doctorate, does not have all of this pomp and circumstance surrounding their air vents. They get covered up by the typical horizontal flap vents like the one below.

This seems quite humorous to me. Such a mundane thing that has so much meaning. (At least I'm hypothesizing that it has this meaning...)

There are many other ways we signal class: hairstyles, the way we dress, organize our homes, the foods we eat, and the dialect we use.

the energy that moves the neighborhood

I was in Massachusetts at the beginning of August for the SSSP conference and got to spend some time with my mother as she lives in Andover, where I grew up. She asked me what I wanted to do and I wanted to go to Lawrence. I have been meaning to write about this trip and I think I will try to do so here.

Even though the downtown area of Lawrence is just a mile from the downtown of Andover, the two towns had completely different reputations in the late 20th century, when I was growing up. While Andover is mostly European American (I only knew one Black person in the public high school I attended), Lawrence is very diverse. The origins of this difference is complex. But one of the reasons is that the first textile mills in America were built in Lawrence and after a stint of encouraging young women from the farms to work in the mills and live in the company dormitories, immigrants and their families came to work. Italians, Irish, Syrians, Jewish, and Germans came to Lawrence and worked very long hours for not much pay. Lawrence never stopped being an immigrant town. Today it has the second largest population of Puerto Ricans in the country. Andover had textile mills also. But as those declined, core service organizations moved in. An IRS processing center is there as well as Raytheon, a government contractor. Consequently, Andover's public school system had a larger base of funds than Lawrence. It is one of the best school systems in Massachusetts. The Lawrence kids didn't fair so well. Stuck with old, cramped housing with no room for the city to grow, its tax base was less and stretched thin by a large population with diverse needs. When I was in high school, Lawrence had one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the country.

When I was growing up, just muttering the word Lawrence meant "danger". The kids from Andover never wanted to go into Lawrence. Granted, it was a post industrial town at the time and its street crime rate was much higher than Andovers'. Lawrence experienced an economic depression after businesses vacated the mills and this is a major contributing factor to the street crime that followed. I can say that without a doubt, crime and people of color became intertwined in our minds. Social class obscured racial and ethnic difference and vice versa. To get even more specific, I think that our ideas about drug use were intermingled here as well. As kids, we assumed that drug use was what bad people did. And if you lived in Lawrence, you must be bad. I grew up in this very self-segregated environment. (In later years, I came to understand that the Lawrence kids thought of us as stuck up snobs. Everyone was ignorant of each other.) The way we saw Lawrence was especially harmful because it meant that we stayed in our bubbles and failed to see how we played a part in the system.

Lawrence is where I first started thinking about social class, race, and ethnicity. I got to know a girl who was Puerto Rican and Black through Big Brothers Big Sisters so I got to see Lawrence through a different set of eyes. My first job outside of the home was also in Lawrence - in a renovated textile mill packaging books. I got to know some people that worked there, I ate there, and I began to see that Lawrence was not scary in the way that everyone thought. It was certainly not comfortable for someone like me, a White, middle class woman who had very strict ideas of how the world worked. But safety and comfort are two different things.

When I visited Lawrence last month, I saw a lot of changes. Where the downtown area used to be mostly comprised of boarded up businesses, now there small businesses (tiendas, five and dimes), local agencies (job training) and some chain stores (Rent-a-Center, Family Dollar). Most importantly, there were people around. Polartec fabrics is there, too, employing people.

Just outside of the downtown area, where the mill complex still stands, I snapped this photograph:



The billboard, an ad for Citgo, reads, "La energia que mueve al vecindario." "Citgo: energia Latina." Translation: "The energy that moves the neighborhood. Latin energy." Is Lawrence finally embracing its ethnicity? In the context of the global economy, where is Lawrence heading?

wearing black

Oof, it's hot in the house. Our block's cat is lounging in the best chair. We let her in most days. It is breezy outside.

Today I thought about women wearing black. I went to the family run mini mart a couple blocks down the street and bought some paneer, an onion, jalapeno, mayo, and white bread for some meals. I needed ginger root but didn't see it in its usual place. The woman behind the plexiglass was on the phone so I asked her daughter to whom I've never spoken. I've seen her in the store before, a place that has grown 3 times in the year we have been here. (Like a pregnant woman!) :)

Anyway, I found it strange but I felt very comfortable asking this girl for help. See, I'm shy and usually I wouldn't go to such measures to ask for help as I was pretty sure they were out of ginger. But I really needed it for this recipe and I figured that there was a possibility that someone could get ginger for me as it is a small shop and they have many things in storage. (They even sell parakeets from the back of the store - it's that type of curious amalgum of things.)

The girl was short but is probably 10 or 11. Maybe even older. Like her mother, she wears a long black scarf around her head and shoulders and is very pretty. She indicated the shelf in the refrigerator where the ginger should be and we visited it together. She pointed but because she is small, she needed me to look and I didn't see any. So she went up to get some "upstairs".

On Thursday, Notre Dame participated in the Peace Path which is run by Women in Black of Baltimore. Everyone wears black and stands along Charles Street in solidarity for peace.

I have a friend, a sociologist, who only wears black and white and no other colors. I have never asked him why he does this and I've known him for 12 years. I assume it reflects his political beliefs but really, I'm not sure.

In the first example, black indicates modesty. At funerals and at the Peace Path, black indicates mourning. I think I used to associate black with sorrow until I met my friend. So it is a little surprising to see a little girl wearing a black scarf. But I know it has different meaning for her.

Meanings are funny things. They are collectively constructed. Sometimes it is very easy to understand someone's reality and constructed meanings. Sometimes it takes much longer to understand why someone believes something. Why?

I think I know. And I like the answer. Do you wear black? If not, would you? What are your concerns?

color blindness

As I was searching for photos to put in my initial post, I found many photos of people sewing: women, men, and children around the globe, for many different reasons. I'd like to see some of these "designers" meet some of the people who will be constructing their garments when they are produced in factories. Some of the workers should be judges on Project Runway. Would their definitions of "expensive" be different from Michael Kors?

Anyway, I wanted to write down some thoughts on color blindness. Back in the Spring, I was discussing race, class and gender with a friend of mine. In the context of this conversation, she told me that she didn't "see color". This person is very intelligent and kind so this was surprising to me. She didn't mean that she was medically color blind and I doubt that she meant that she could not tell the difference between someone that was Black and someone that was White or Latino or Eskimo or Asian or whatever. I guess she meant that race didn't factor into the way that she treated people. I wish that was the way the world works! Ha!

As I saw in the first part of the Race ("the power of an illusion") documentary (from Tuesday), there is no biological basis to race. Race is a pure construction, and one of the most powerful in the world, a true testament to the power of belief systems. So if we lived in my friend's world, I think that would be great. I wish that no one took color into account when they interacted with another person. I bet that as a White person, I would be treated very differently than I am treated now. (For example, I bet people would be more skeptical of me and my ideas and actions.)

The problem is that even if there was a way to not see color, the fact is that in the past, color (and sex and gender and social class) has been a way to assign people to certain types of work, lands, and statuses. Remember that the meaning of difference initially depended on one's religion or nationality in the New World (from yesterday's episode of the same documentary). When the European settlers of America realized that they would need more labor in order to work all of the crops that were being planted, they started importing people from Africa. Now a person's skin color meant something - what work they did. Poor and working class Europeans in new America started to associate themselves with the European aristocracy and that is when "whiteness" evolved. It seems like social class was obscured by racial categories at the very beginning of our history as a country.

Because life chances have been and are still unequally distributed along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender and social class, we have to pay attention. One of the goals of this class is to tune into the ways we reproduce difference in our daily lives. One thing I want to tune into is the ways I confuse race and ethnicity with social class. (In the very popular blog, Stuff White People Like, I see this). For example, I need to watch out in assuming that all people of color are of the working class or only work certain types of jobs. But I want to come up with a more precise example of this happening. I will try to and return to this post.

Thomas and me

When I was previewing the documentary that we’re going to see in SOC 209 today, I thought a lot about Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson helped to write the part of the Declaration of Independence which says that “all men are created equal” but at the same time, he owned over 100 slaves and wrote “Notes on the State of Virginia” which justified slavery. This is hard for me to swallow. I studied Thomas Jefferson in first grade and even dressed up like him and gave a speech as him. My mom sewed special pants for me. There was a contest to see who could give the greatest Thomas Jefferson speech and whoever won got to be him in a play. I think Holly Clark won. My mom said that I would be good to play Thomas Jefferson because I had red hair. I think it’s interesting that I felt a personal connection to Jefferson. When I rethink this now it seems like more of a racial connection than anything else. I was proud to be in front of my class, impersonating a famous man. What a strange, privileged position that I was in.

Anyway, I really dug the “all men are equal” thing when I was young and I knew Jefferson had a slave mistress so it must be okay. He justified his beliefs that all White men were equal by believing that the color of a person’s skin meant something…. that there was a natural order. The word natural is very dangerous, I feel. What is not “natural”? Many people use the word natural when describing the differences between men and women, for example, even today. For example, many people believe that women are naturally better with children. Aside from having the ability to lactate, I do not see the justification.