Week Eight: Commenting on a Blog

This week, I'm writing about Mitchell Beacom's Week Two blog post.  He chose to go to Compton, which I respect after seeing few people branch out that far from the Westwood bubble.

First off, this post was great in its exploration of Durkheim's understanding of differentiation in the context of an infamously low-income, high-crime neighborhood. Having been through Compton on the bus, I've been able to check out the visual exterior of the area but never the inside of one of the businesses. I'm impressed with the information he gathered by actually visiting a resident of the neighborhood and checkin gout his living room! (And let's be real--who wouldn't be impressed by a purple shag carpet and gold stripper pole... in the home?) I really enjoyed reading about his conversation with this middle-aged man who was Compton born and raised.

Now that we've read and learned a lot more (seeing as this post was from second week, Durkheim was really the only lens for analysis), I'd like to take another perspective on his post. After reading Elliot and Pais's study on race and class in Hurricane Katrina and learning a little bit more about race from Stuart Hall, I think the "racial" aspect of Compton that looms so unavoidably in discussions of the area is important to his experience. He discusses the man's living room decor as "a clear sign of cultural differentiation," and I find that assessment true. Other people, however, would make arguments about the man's race and social class as they impact his decor choices. Those could also be valid, but the fact that they have to be made irritates me. Some people, upon hearing his story, would laugh and say "only a BLACK guy would have a purple rug AND a gold stripper pole IN HIS HOUSE" (read: things my roommates say). To me, however, his choices are minimally impacted by his race. The culture he grew up in, which admittedly was probably at some point racially determined, has much more of an impact on that choice than his skin color. A Nigerian immigrant to America would be as unlikely to match those two things together as one from Taiwan or Peru or Ireland--so this man's choice was much more likely influenced by his culture and not by his race.

Thomas's video posts were helpful in his post because they underscored the cultural idea over the racial one. He demonstrated that Compton has a very unique and very strong culture that includes unsavory aspects like gang violence, and he showed us the way in which that culture is propagated. Overall, I found his post valuable for its insight into the life of a resident of the area he observed and I think his observations and conclusions apply to lessons learned in class beyond the limits of our early readings.

Cheers!

Amy


UPDATE 12/9: Woops! Didn't realize until today that I should have posted it on the original blog. Fixed!