wandering, day #2: race and the room
Race and the Room:
The conference takes place in a small auditorium with a balcony seating area. The first thing I immediately notice is the racial segregation of the room - it seems that most of the minority scholars are sitting in the balcony section, while the bottom section is holding mostly white men (older white men at that - it was like a sea of gray hair.) It is not very strict, as a well known white sociologist is sitting right next to me on the top row, and a white foreign sociologist is next to him. And, I think a big part of the segregation is that mostly students are sitting on the top, and perhaps most of the students present are racial and ethnic minorities.
Related to the segregation: a panel was presented on culture and entertainment, and one of the panelists presented a paper on hip-hop. The paper was very interesting, although the presenter, a non-black male, used the N-word when quoting some of the aspiring rappers he was studying. Every time he said it, in the slangish linguistic patterns of these young black males, in the halting patter of someone trying to speak in the black vernacular who is not used to speaking that way, it made my skin crawl.
Related to the old white men: I had a question for the panel, and was sitting in the very front row of the balcony. Time and time again, I raised my hand, only to be ignored each time in favor of a white man. It seemed that the moderator was making a special effort not to call on me, because by the time it was time for the forth question, the white man sitting next to me also raised his hand. He and the moderator were from the same university, and he then called on him by name. There was almost a riot in the balcony, for questioning was finished after his question. At least 15 people sitting in the balcony approached me during the rest of the day to discuss the blatant racial and gender issue that was going on.
April 27, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Out of curiosity, I’m interested in how you think the non-black presenter of the hip-hop paper should have handled the quotes, assuming they were necessary to the presentation…put them up on power-point and have the audience read them to themselves? censor himself?
April 27, 2008 at 7:40 pm
re old white men, I felt so bad when I read this because it happens so often and I fear I do it some of the time — so easy to look to people you already know.
re the reading, I’m guessing that the bad accent was part of what bothered you? You said you thought it was generally a good paper.
April 28, 2008 at 6:07 am
@carly - I’m not sure. I don’t think he needed to right or speak the n-word in its entirety in order for us to understand what was going on. I also have an issue in ethnographic work were quotes are presented as if they are verbatim and then come to find out, they are not. Rather, they are as the researcher remembers them, which is what I think was going on in this case (many of the presenters were rather vague about their methods.)
@OW: Yes, I thought it was an interesting paper. But yes, the accent, in trying to be true to words (which I’m not sure her was, see above comment) we may, inadvertently, come off as condescending or further perpetuating the us ve. them mentality especially when it comes to linguistic patterns. Again, I’m not sure what to do about it, but I think it is a discussion ethnographers should have that they are not having.
April 30, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Hmmm, reflecting on this issue. I think that it is probably impossible to capture someone else’s dialect without caricaturing and stereotyping it, unless possibly if you are a trained linguist (and there I’m guessing you probably still need a tape to transcribe from). My own speech accurately transcribed would sound ignorant. We all THINK we speak the standard English we write, but in fact we speak informal regional dialects, which are more or less pronounced depending on how hard we work at it. So it is an issue about when to translate dialog into standard written English, and when to leave it in the ignorant-sounding spoken English. This issue would be there even if you are working from a tape and your dialect was accurately transcribed using the IPA. Bit if you are reconstructing the dialog from sketchy notes, you are inevitably filling in the diction yourself, and you have the question of when do you filling it in with your own way of talking, and when do you fill it in with your attempt to capture the dialect of the other? The former option makes everyone sound like you, but the latter option opens the door to stereotyping and caricature.
I realize this is pretty much what you said in your original post. I was just working through my own thoughts on it. I guess what I’m adding is that even a tape recorder does not eliminate the issue of whether to present the speech as it was actually spoken or to “translate” it into standard written English, and that there are probably a lot of social status issues involved in the choices researchers make in transcribing. I guess my instincts support your worry that the researcher was projecting stereotypes into the “quotes.” Of course, I wasn’t there.
I guess this was also about how much to use the n-word when the people being studied used it. And when to replace it with something else, as is often done for other vulgar words.
May 1, 2008 at 5:12 pm
You shouldve stood up and called him out on it- he knew what the hell he was doing!