This article delved into a particular categorization of cross-road interaction, Hooks described this as "eating the other". Though it harkens back to an indigenous practice of sacrificially consuming another to take on their spiritual embodiment, Hooks literally means that another race takes characteristics of another group that it desires.
This brought up a frustration of mine, that comes up on the regular and is linked to this concept of stereotyping. Especially in the city, people are accused of dressing either "white" or "black" with their style. I get that a lot, people see fitted baseball cap, brightly colored basketball shoes, and earring and then BOOM! I'm suddenly posing as an african american man. But what makes us say that a brand is "white" or black"? How do we take stereotypes and use brands as agents to dictate what we are. Is it not socially acceptable for a black man to wear polo or a white man to wear timberland boots and a hoody?
To me those companies are just organizations, the image they project is what we consume and in fact when we eat "others" often times we are consuming a company's image and products. Do you feel what you wear validates or conflicts with stereotypes people may have about you? Why or Why not?
So this begs the question... is race endemic to an individual or is it an act of performance (or something else). Many scholars would argue that we 'do race' in the same way that we 'do gender'. (Remember our article on doing gender from 103?). If race is performative and an action rather than a salient identity, we each engage in doing our race daily. So we would draw a parallel to West and Zimmerman's distinction between sex, sex category and gender.
ReplyDeleteSex was a determination through socially shared ideas of biological difference. Sex Category was the assumed biological difference, and gender was the action taken each day to make our sex category match our sex. Is there a similar construct for race?