Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE CULTURAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE REGION
- PART TWO SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, SOCIAL ACTION
- PART THREE CONSTRUCTION OF AN INTRARACIAL IDENTITY
- 5 “What's Race Got To Do With It?”
- 6 It's a White “Thang”: Ethnic Identifiers and the Loss of Cultural Codes
- 7 The Final (Af)front: Space and the Black Public Sphere
- Conclusion
- Appendix A Lafayette County Population Chart
- Appendix B Proclamation Honoring Ole Miss Demonstrators
- Appendix C Chancellor's Statement of Commendation
- Appendix D Speech by Susie Marshall for Second Baptist Church Honoring Rev. Blind Jim Ivy
- Appendix E Susie Marshall's Unpublished Draft of Freedman Town Marker Dedication Speech Recounting July 4, 1867, Speech of Oxford Ex-slave
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - “What's Race Got To Do With It?”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE CULTURAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE REGION
- PART TWO SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, SOCIAL ACTION
- PART THREE CONSTRUCTION OF AN INTRARACIAL IDENTITY
- 5 “What's Race Got To Do With It?”
- 6 It's a White “Thang”: Ethnic Identifiers and the Loss of Cultural Codes
- 7 The Final (Af)front: Space and the Black Public Sphere
- Conclusion
- Appendix A Lafayette County Population Chart
- Appendix B Proclamation Honoring Ole Miss Demonstrators
- Appendix C Chancellor's Statement of Commendation
- Appendix D Speech by Susie Marshall for Second Baptist Church Honoring Rev. Blind Jim Ivy
- Appendix E Susie Marshall's Unpublished Draft of Freedman Town Marker Dedication Speech Recounting July 4, 1867, Speech of Oxford Ex-slave
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In cultural, community, and regional studies, the anthropological tendency to describe and construct the whole can often lead to glossing and misunderstanding the parts. This has been particularly the case in studies that focus on African Americans. Although anthropologists note the diversity of the population, little attention is paid to the significance of that diversity from an internal perspective. The descriptions in Chapter 3 of a number of Lafayette County's intimate culture groups identified various heterogeneous group identities existing within the Black community. The underlying reasons for the construction of such groups give insight into the importance of identifying and understanding such “heterogeneous identities.” This is more than ever the case when analyzing the cohesiveness of any regional culture, particularly one with group identities that cut across kinship, economic, spatial, educational, and political lines. These intraethnic/intraracial identities, for the most part, become key determiners of social behavior and perceptions.
The manner in which intraracial identities are constructed is important to understanding the meaning of “Blackness.” Cohen points out “that the simplified identity that a collectivity presents to the outside world … is informed by its internal intricacies” (1982:12). To understand African Americans in Oxford/Lafayette County or any other community, we cannot gloss over the complexity of “belonging” by simply conceptualizing them as a homogeneous group divisible only by such social phenomena as region, kin, and economy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'Stony the Road' to ChangeBlack Mississippians and the Culture of Social Relations, pp. 121 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004