Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life
Autor Elijah Andersonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 mar 2023
Acest manual de sociologie urbană și studii etnice, semnat de Elijah Anderson, propune o analiză riguroasă a barierelor rasiale persistente în societatea contemporană. Remarcăm modul în care autorul transformă observația etnografică într-un instrument de demontare a „rasismului simbolic” — acea prejudecată subconștientă care asociază identitatea de culoare cu mediul ghetto-ului, indiferent de statutul socio-economic al individului. Considerăm că forța volumului rezidă în capacitatea de a explica de ce acțiuni cotidiene, precum joggingul sau vizita la o cafenea, devin acte de vulnerabilitate atunci când sunt desfășurate în ceea ce Anderson numește „white space”.
Structura cărții urmărește o progresie logică, de la contextul istoric al rasismului în America, până la micro-sociologia spațiilor publice. Capitolele dedicate „deficitului de credibilitate” (Capitolul 3) și „economiei de ghetto” (Capitolul 7) oferă o perspectivă structurală asupra modului în care prejudecățile sunt menținute prin instituții și interacțiuni sociale. Analiza se extinde și asupra mobilității sociale, explorând tensiunile resimțite de clasa de mijloc de culoare care navighează între „două lumi”.
Black in White Space completează perspectiva oferită de Dangerous Spaces de D. Marvin Jones. În timp ce Jones se concentrează pe mecanismele juridice și pe profilarea rasială sistemică, Anderson aduce o dimensiune umană, intimă, bazată pe decenii de muncă de teren. Lucrarea se ancorează organic în opera anterioară a autorului, continuând temele din Code of the Street, dar mutând focusul de la dinamica străzii către modul în care spațiile majoritar albe reacționează la prezența diversității. Este o resursă esențială pentru înțelegerea mecanismelor de excluziune care funcționează adesea sub pragul conștientului.
Preț: 105.03 lei
Carte disponibilă
Livrare economică 19 august-02 septembrie
Livrare express 05-11 august pentru 57.04 lei
Specificații
ISBN-10: 0226826414
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această carte cercetătorilor în științe sociale și studenților la sociologie care doresc să înțeleagă dinamica rasială dincolo de statistici. Cititorul câștigă un cadru conceptual clar pentru a descifra micro-agresiunile și barierele invizibile din spațiile urbane moderne. Este o lectură fundamentală pentru oricine studiază modul în care stereotipurile istorice continuă să modeleze interacțiunile umane și politicile de ordine publică în secolul XXI.
Despre autor
Elijah Anderson deține catedra William K. Lanman, Jr. în Sociologie la Yale University, unde conduce Urban Ethnography Project. Este unul dintre cei mai respectați etnografi contemporani, premiat pentru capacitatea de a documenta viața urbană și structurile sociale complexe. Printre lucrările sale de referință se numără Code of the Street și Streetwise, volume care au redefinit studiul comunităților marginalizate. Expertiza sa este fundamentată pe ani de observație directă în orașe precum Philadelphia și New Haven, oferind o voce autoritară în conversația națională despre rasă și clasă în Statele Unite.
Descriere scurtă
A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces.
In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “white space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country.
An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America.
Notă biografică
Extras
Her family members were sharecroppers, so she went to the field each day to pick cotton, as did my grandmother and my father. In those days, when crops needed to be planted or harvested, school would let out because that work took priority. My father attended school only to the fourth grade, but in World War II he drove a supply truck in the US Army in England and then in France. After returning from the war, he felt he could no longer live as a second-class citizen in the South. He believed he would encounter trouble there, and a better life in the North beckoned.
The factory jobs of the North were a magnet for rural southerners, both Black and White. My uncles had already migrated to South Bend, Indiana, and my family followed them there. Once in South Bend, my mother worked as a domestic, working “days” in the homes of well-to-do Whites, and my father, like my uncles, found a job at the (now-defunct) Studebaker automobile factory. For many years he worked in the foundry there. And at age seventy-one, after breathing soot and metallic dust over decades, my father died of lung cancer, though he’d never smoked...
Eventually my family moved into an apartment in a segregated part of the city. When I started public school at age five, I was one of only a handful of Black students at the excellent Oliver School, the result of a racially gerrymandered school district. By contrast, later, when we moved into our own home in an “integrated” neighborhood that was in effect transitioning from White to Black, I entered a segregated Black school. By the time I graduated from high school, the neighborhood was totally Black...
On Monday evenings in South Bend, the downtown businesses remained open until 8:30 rather than closing at 5:30. As I canvassed the downtown, I spotted Mr. Forbes, a heavyset middle-aged White man, alone inside his typewriter store. I went in and asked him for a job. “You need some help?” I asked. “What can you do?” “I can do whatever these other boys do,” I said.
I’d passed the store many times and noticed a few older boys, both White and Black, working around the shop. After seeing them, I thought I might have a chance...
After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, Mr. Forbes agreed to hire me. “Well, I can start you off at fifty cents an hour.” “Can you make that seventy-five?”
“Naw, you’ll need to work your way up.” “Okay,” I said, “when can I start?” “You can start tomorrow,” he said. I shook his hand...
Over the next weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes would come to know and trust me, and I would come to know them. I would run errands for them like shopping for Mrs. Forbes’s groceries, picking up chop suey from the local Chinese restaurant or fetching sandwiches at lunchtime, and on occasion depositing checks and cash in the local bank. Much later, after I’d gotten my driver’s license, I even delivered typewriters in Mr. Forbes’s new Ford...
A sensitive man from a small town in Illinois, Mr. Forbes treated me well; he genuinely liked me and became almost like a father to me. He and his wife even included me on family trips to their cottage by a beautiful Michigan lake. I’d do chores around the cottage, swim in the lake, and eat dinner at their picnic table like a member of their family. As the only Black person at that lake community, I was fascinated by this White world, and I noticed what Mrs. Forbes cooked and how their family ate.
Since I worked in Mr. Forbes’s shop from age twelve until I graduated from high school, I had several years to observe that privileged world. Of course the customers who visited the store were usually White, as were Mr. Forbes’s friends, who would sometimes stop by to talk and socialize. I’d watch the constant traffic in and out of the store and eavesdrop on the conversations. Mrs. Forbes would sit at her desk and do the bookkeeping while the other boys and I would take typewriters apart, soak them in a cleaning solution, wash them down, and reassemble or repair them.
This was in the late 1950s and 1960s; the civil rights movement was going on, and by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, it was in full swing...
This was how I became aware of what race meant to him. This is the context in which I began to learn how he felt about Black people and their struggles for racial equality: that they were a funny, lowly, and distant people who had strange diseases and were different from Whites. Yet at the same time he was friendly to me...
On occasion Mr. Forbes sent me to other office buildings around the downtown to change typewriter ribbons, giving me an entrée to a host of entirely White establishments. But my real initiation into this White world began in Mr. Forbes’s store and through the experiences that job afforded me.
Then one day my coworker Jim said to me, “Eli, guess what Forbes told me.” I was curious.
“He told me I shouldn’t hang out with the colored boy so much.”
“No, he didn’t say that.”
“Yes, I swear he did!”
I was incredulous and continued to argue with Jim about whether Mr. Forbes actually told him, a White boy, not to hang out with me so much.
Mr. Forbes had been my mentor since he hired me at age twelve. Not only had he taught me how to take apart any typewriter, fix it, and put it back together, he also had absorbed me into the life of the store and his downtown office building where he worked and lived. I ran errands for him and Mrs. Forbes, and I knew not only Richard but his wife, Irene, and their young daughter, Beth...
After my conversation with Jim, however, I started to watch Mr. Forbes more closely and noticed racial issues I’d previously ignored. I began to see that while Mr. Forbes trusted me, even loved me, and would do almost anything for me, he placed limits on our relationship. In the caste-like system of South Bend, in which Black people were considered the lowliest, he wanted to protect Jim from my status. In effect, he taught me what it means to be Black in the White world.
Cuprins
Introduction: A Brief History of Anti-Black Racism in America
Prologue
Chapter 1: The White Space
Chapter 2: The Iconic Ghetto
Chapter 3: Living While Black: The Deficit of Credibility
Chapter 4: A History of the Ghetto
Chapter 5: A Portrait of the Ghetto
Chapter 6: The Car Wash: A Racial Advertisement
Chapter 7: The Ghetto Economy
Chapter 8: Policing the Iconic Ghetto
Chapter 9: The Black Class Structure
Chapter 10: The Workplace: Of “Tokens,” “Toms,” and “the HNIC”
Chapter 11: Social Mobility: A Foot in Two Worlds
Chapter 12: Gentrification: Whites in Black Space
Chapter 13: The Gym as a Staging Area
Postscript: What Black Folk Know
Notes
References
Index