Introduction
One of the largest imagined communities in our nation-state, the United States of America, has culminated throughout history to now identify 72.4% of our current population (“State and County QuickFacts”). Whiteness, America’s largely imagined identity, is considered to be both a class and a racial identifier. Its “culture”, like all cultures, is highly dynamic and varies across space and time. I aim to either falsify or buttress the stereotypical norm of white, southern culture and their assumed adoration of western wear, country music and beer. To do so, I studied the community that frequents the establishment, Midnight Rodeo, a country western dance hall and bar.
Throughout the course, we have been presented with representations of both native and outsider anthropological practices through lecture presentations and outside readings of assigned ethnographies. When selecting my topic and research site, I took both these processes into consideration and aimed to do a combination of the two. I chose to research the idealized norm of whiteness in the southern United States and theorize this “unmarked” category in terms of its culturally constructed ideas of race, gender, and social stratification. As a “racially” categorized “white” that owns a pair of cowboy boots, I was able to study white southern culture under the perception as an insider. However, being raised in the north and merely being taught, through research, the ins and outs of “southern culture”, I experienced the hindrances and advantages of being a cultural outsider. I was able to practice objectivity while receiving insider information, but may have lost certain insights by not being brought up in the culture and having certain aspects of idi...
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...norms for this specific community, including a general love of country music, dancing and beer, however what varies is their experiences based on individuals’ intersectionality of race, class, and gender.
Works Cited
Bensaddi, Judith. “A Tale.” The Southern Literary Messenger. Ed. White. Richmond: White, 1839. 469-501. Print.
Charles, James. Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Print.
Gregory, James. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. United States of America: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Print.
Shanklin, Eugenia. Antrhopology & Race. United States of America: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1994. Print.
“State & County QuickFacts.” Census.gov. U.S. Census Bureau, 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2011.
In the essay “Mixed-Blood Stew”, Jewell Parker Rhodes describes her mixed colored lineage and the penetrable makeup of all people along the color line. Rhodes recounts her childhood and shows how her family acknowledge each other of being more than just black and talk of all the race their blood consists of. She argues how people sees a black person; as black. She explains that black is not just black. Richard Rodriguez, author of “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans” talks about how racial classifications, e.g. black, white, Hispanic, etc. should be discarded for they misrepresent the cultural and ethnic realities of today’s America (140). Rodriguez explains how culture has nothing to do with race and how certain labels (black, Hispanic)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended racial segregation in the USA. Since then, America has begun to learn that, no matter the skin tone, we accept all races and become one united nation. Elijah Anderson analyzes certain areas in the big city of Philadelphia and observes how different races and people act and acknowledge one another in the same environment. He describes certain places called “cosmopolitan canopies” where the display of public acceptance by all of all is intense and is a setting where a mix of people can feel comfortable (3). Anderson does a worthy job of backing up his argument with the different evidence he brings to light throughout his article. Although his argument covers how while we might have these cosmopolitan canopies we still have races that are considered “out of place” and how the black people and men in specifically, are seen in the society. For my class observation, I visited Dilworth Park Ice Rink and my reflection at the rink agreed with Anderson’s argument considering that the rink provided a cosmopolitan environment although his argument is now outdated.
They portray these men and cultural group as an inferior white race. The media degrades them they depict them as, poor, rural white men as dumb and languid, racist drunks who are poorly educated, and they have no jobs and have violent tendencies when drunk. Finally, how they embrace and glorify the meaning of redneck and of their culture. They embrace their culture through being what the media says they are and using the confederate flag to symbolize the past white supremacy and manhood. They celebrate and glorify their culture through drinking and acting violent. By singing song about that stuff. These articles address how they have developed their lives to be centered this culture and how they ‘live the life’ of a southerner till the day that they
The third key principle of race, ethnicity and post-colonial analysis centers on a group’s culture being erased in order to adapt to the “new” dominant culture (Hall 269-271). The group being affected may try to hold on to established traditions but may face a divide in their ranks. The older generations are more likely to cling on to established cultural traditions but the new generations will try to adapt to the new ones society presents to them. Ellison gives examples of the divide in the African American community. “He was brought up along with the members of a country quartet to sing what the officials called “their primitive spirituals” when we assembled in the chapel on Sunday evenings” (Ellison 47). The older generation, that Trueblood
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
In Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, readers truly get the impression that the south is defined by one thing: race. Although modern southerners know that the South is made up of and worth far more than its racial past, race does define many aspects of southern society, including memory, sense of place, the taste of the South, the voices of the South, and expressions of power.
Alexie, a Native American himself, was able to illustrate conflicts in a very honest way. One of the central conflicts in the novel is the community’s devotion to maintaining their rich and cherished culture, while trying to keep up with the modern world. Young and guarded white readers most likely have little understanding of what it means to have a desire to keep old traditions alive, but are educated on that topic through this novel. In Reservation Blues, younger generations were greatly influenced by mainstream media with little acknowledgement of their ancestor’s old traditions. Contrary to the younger generations, the older generations showed a great desire for the upkeep of these old traditions. The young band in the novel is greatly influenced by media and yearns to keep up with popular culture. They get caught up in the fame and fortune and realize that they have the potential to do big things. Alexie foreshadowed this event when he wrote, “For the rest of our lives, all we can hear are our names chanted over and over, until we are deaf to everything else” (1995, p. 212). They forget their own culture’s teachings and the idea that music has a purpose of healing the soul. Their elders look down on those who neglect to acknowledge the beauty in their traditions and view it as a demise of their beautiful culture. White Americans haven’t necessarily been too heavily exposed to experiences like this. The United States is so young that it’s traditions are being formed now, as opposed to other countries and cultures who have dated back hundreds, if not thousands of years. The value in reading Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues is that story provides readers with the understanding that their are older cultures out there that might not want to form to the
The Great Migration was the movement of two million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1910 and 1940. In 1900, about ninety percent of African Americans resided in formed slave holding states in the South. Beginning in 1910, the African American population increased by nearly twenty percent in Northern states, mostly in the biggest cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland. African Americans left the rural south because they believed they could escape the discrimination and racial segregation of Jim Crow laws by seeking refuge in the North. Some examples of Jim Crow laws include the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks (“The History of Jim Crow). In addition, economic depression due to the boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 forced many sharecroppers to look for other emplo...
In our current generation, the year 2016, one may think racism would be diminished but it has yet to be acknowledged. Most people would have thought discrimination ended with the time of slavery, but it continues to exist in indirect ways. When people think Native Americans, they think about how they were the true Americans and how they aided Columbus’s settlement into the Early Americas. Native Americans experience discrimination to this day, yet nothing has been said about the Indian’s existence and rights. In Kimberly Roppolo’s essay, “Symbolism, Racism, History, and Reality: The Real Problem with Indian Mascots,” constructs the reason and gives us an idea on why this type of racism still exists and why people continue to unknowingly discriminate
Percival Everett’s “The Appropriation of Cultures” (2004), demonstrates the power of a symbol and the meanings that it can carry. In the story, Daniel Barkley is a highly accomplished African American man who graduated from Brown and frequently plays guitar near the campus of The University of South Carolina. From the beginning of the story, Barkley exposes a distinct independent personality that isn’t afraid to break stereotypes or labels. The first scene describes an instance in a bar where white fraternity boys were challenging Barkley to play ‘Dixie’ for them. Instead of refusing, like most would have done, he instead begins to play and take ownership of the song. Later in the story, Barkley decides to purchase a truck with a giant confederate flag decal in the back. Despite the strange stares and confusion
In the short essay, “Black Men in Public Space” written by Brent Staples, discusses his own experiences on how he is stereotyped because he is an African American and looks intimidated in “public places” (Staples 225). Staples, an intelligent man that is a graduate student at University of Chicago. Due to his skin complexity, he is not treated fairly and always being discriminated against. On one of his usual nightly walks he encountered a white woman. She took a couple glances at him and soon began to walk faster and avoided him that night. He decided to change his appearance so others would not be frightened by his skin color. He changed the way he looked and walked. Staples dressed sophisticated to look more professional so no one would expect him to be a mugger. Whistling classical music was referred to the “cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country”(Staples 226). The cowbell is used to protect hikers from bears. But in Staples case, it was to not be stereotyped and show that he is harmless. The general purpose of Staples essay was to inform the readers that stereotypes could affect African Americans and any other races.
Royal Melendy writes about a rising social culture taking place at the turn of the twentieth century. He depicts this culture as the ambiance emitted in early Chicago saloons. “Saloons served many roles for the working-class during this period of American history, and were labeled as the poor man’s social clubs” (summary of saloon culture, pg. 76).
Beginning in the 1919 and lasting through about 1926 thousands of Blacks began to migrate from the southern United States to the North; an estimated 1 million people participated in what has come to be called the Great Migration.[1] The reasons for this mass movement are complicated and numerous, but they include search for better work, which was fueled by a new demand for labor in the North (particularly from the railroad industry) and the destruction of many cotton harvests by the infectious boll weevil ...
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
Cowboy boots have been represented continuously in cultural history dating back to the 1860's. Since then an evolving american culture has shaped what cowboy boots represent, as well as our perception of what mean within culture. The perception of cowboy boots has changed since the 1860's, within the limitations and boundaries in a specific culture.Therefore I consider how have the patterns and rituals of attending/competing in rodeos become associated with the consumption of cowboy boots? How does this consumption generate an ideology? Rituals and patterns in rodeos can be associated with cowboy boots in the process of understanding that they have a similar relationship within modern culture. Both are no longer required for means of living (e.g. Cowboy boots for horseback which used to be a main source of transportation, and Rodeos as a form of income or employment) yet both still remain influential in culture today. How can a product from past culture remain so influential throughout culture today? In order to dissect cowboy boots among popular culture, I will first look at them through cultural theorists, Raymond Williams and F.R. Leavis.