![]() This performance can be as deliberate as dressing well and speaking in an educated way or as simple as producing an ID or a driver’s license in situations in which this would never be demanded of white people. ![]() How do anonymous Black people try to overcome “the negative presumption” they often encounter upon entering white spaces?Įlijah Anderson: In my study, I found that this negative presumption may be minimized or tentatively overcome by a performance, a negotiation, or what some Black people refer to derisively as a “dance,” through which individual Blacks may be inclined to show white people and others that ghetto stereotypes do not apply to them personally in effect, they may feel the need to perform for credibility or for acceptance. The interview has been edited and condensed. Thus, such a Black person is often burdened with a negative presumption he or she must disprove before being able to establish trusting relations with others.”Īnderson recently spoke with Yale News about the lived experience of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America. “In these circumstances, almost any Black person can experience such distance, especially a young Black male - not as a measure of his merit as a person but because of his Black skin and its indication of ‘outsider’ status in the white space. Stereotypes can rule perceptions, creating a situation that can estrange the Black person. “When an unfamiliar Black person enters the ‘white space,’ often the people there immediately try to make sense of him or her - to determine ‘who that is,’ or to figure out the nature of the person’s business and whether they need to be concerned. “White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence,” Anderson said. He explained that despite the growth of an enormous Black middle class, many whites assume that the natural Black space is what he calls the “iconic ghetto” - the symbol of that destitute and fearsome locality so commonly featured in the media. In the book, Anderson documents the unique challenges facing Black people as they navigate “white space” - a perceptual category, defined by the overwhelming presence of white people and the relative absence of Blacks - and their struggle to overcome stereotypes that continue to stigmatize them. The challenges Black people face while navigating white spaces are the subject of Anderson’s latest book, “ Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life,” (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which draws on his 40-some years of qualitative fieldwork, including many interviews with local Black and white people, his previous four distinguished books of urban ethnography on race relations, as well as his lifetime of experiences as a Black man in America. Blacks perceive such settings as the “white space,” which they often consider to be informally “off limits” to them, said Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale and winner of the 2021 Stockholm Prize, the world’s most prestigious prize in the field of criminology. ![]() Many neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, universities, and other public spaces remain overwhelmingly white. Since the end of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, large numbers of Black people have made their way into settings previously occupied exclusively by whites.
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