So, I'm sitting in my favorite burrito place gnoshing on my chicken burrito with mango and hot sauce and sipping on a nutella smoothie, and thinking about my hot brainstorm yesterday. I mean, really people, does it get much better? No.
So, I'm actually going to blog about my work. Radical, I know.
Hmm. How to write about this without writing about it. So, several of the projects that I'm dealing with right now are about race. Actually, they all are. But, that aside, they talk about how people of different races react differently under different situations, and they all talk about it as though the effect were cultural (people with bad eyesight place a high cultural value on carrots) or an in group effect (so, for example, people who have bad eyesight will give more carrots away to people, not because they themselves have ever needed a carrot, but because they can imagine themselves or people like them needing a carrot (thanks, Weezy). But none of them talk about the contexts or different social experiences that different groups have. Maybe Blacks react differently not because they *are* different, but because of, you know, that whole set of experiences with racism in white America that they and their ancestors have had to deal with -- something that's hard to quantify.
The trick: Find two groups of people are the same now, but for one group their ancestors were white when the immigrated to the US and for the other group they were not white. Like cohorts of whiteness. Then you could show that they react differently based on the different "minority experiences" they had instead of some other dimension. Think about the history of immigration and whiteness.
That was my hot brainstorm yesterday.
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In the u.s. the effects of slavery persist at least into my generation. Y have heard womyn with enslaved gyncestors describe two patterns that common sense would attribute to behaviors learned 200 or 300 or more years back.
The first is a family pattern of picking family members (usually children) up from their beds at night with no warning and moving them to a new home (sometimes to a 'new' family). A varient is to take children to a new home and sneak away, leaving the children with no explaination.
The second one is more dicey, given the universal-patriarchal penchant for violence against anyone percieved as subordinate.
The difference is in the way some african-american mothers defend this practice: whipping. As an example, Y once saw Queen Latifa, on her old daytime talk show, proclaim to wild cheering that an obviously (to Me) traumatized, acting-out pubescent brown boy just needed to be beaten. Only, she used a culturally familiar description. Since we know her to be intelligent, the advice she gave can't be attributed to her thought process. And the reaction of the audience was frightening to behold.Y wonder how many kids got it extra-good that day after school.
Obviously, my remarks are based on the perpetually disparaged anecdotal 'evidence'. Doesn't mean it's not so.
The fly in the ointment when trying to compare a similar euro-american group is that many of them during the period in question were indentured servants (slaves with hope) or sharecroppers, miners, etc. who suffered so similarly.
Well, Corrine, good luck with your project. Hope your brain keeps on stormin'!
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