On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (37 page)

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People have asked how I “negotiated my privilege” while conducting fieldwork. Given
that I am a white woman who comes from an educated and well-off family, this is a
good question. In fact, I had more privi
lege than whiteness, education, and wealth: my father was a prominent sociologist
and fieldworker. Though he died when I was an infant, his ideas hung in the air of
my childhood household, and I had read some of his books by the time I entered college.
My mother and adopted father were also professors and devoted fieldworkers: my mother
an anthropologist turned sociolinguist who had conducted studies in Papua New Guinea
and Montreal, and my second father a well-known linguist who had done studies in Harlem
and other parts of Manhattan as well as Martha’s Vineyard and Philadelphia. Not only
did my parents give substantial financial support, they understood what I was trying
to do and brought their own experience to bear on the project I was undertaking.

This peculiar background may have given me the confidence and the resources to embark
on this research as an undergraduate, and consequently the years to get established
and take it in various directions. The shadow of my late father may have pushed me
to go further than was safe or expected. Perhaps my background, and the extra knowledge
and confidence it gave me, also contributed to professors encouraging the work and
devoting their time so freely to my education. It may have also grounded me and kept
me going in the face of the profound discomfort that accompanies a new social milieu.

None of these advantages seemed to translate into what sociologist Randall Collins
refers to as situational dominance, or at least not very often.
⁹
On 6th Street I often felt like an idiot, an outsider, and at times a powerless young
woman. The act of doing fieldwork is a humbling one, particularly when you’re trying
to understand a community or a job or a life that’s far away from who you are and
what you know.
¹⁰
In many situations, my lack of knowledge put me at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
I hung out on 6th Street at the pleasure of Mike and Chuck, along with their friends
and neighbors and family. They knew exactly what I was doing and what I had on the
line; whether I got to stay or go was entirely up to them.

Gaining a Basic Working Knowledge

My initial efforts to describe what was happening for Mike and his friends were at
first greatly hampered by a lack of knowledge about the neighborhood, the police and
the courts, the local drug trade, and rela
tions between men and women. My confusion in these early months cannot be overstated;
I couldn’t seem to follow events and conversations, and people were often too busy
or frustrated to explain things to me when I asked. My sense of stupidity wasn’t just
internal—people would openly express their frustration and bafflement at how slow
I was to grasp the meaning of what was going on.

In part, I was struggling to overcome a language barrier. Mike and Chuck used what
linguists have called African American Vernacular English, and unlike Aisha’s mother
and aunt, they didn’t shift their speech much for my benefit. They also employed more
slang than Aisha and her girlfriends did. I had to work hard to learn the grammar
and vocabulary they were using.

From a late night on Chuck’s back porch in the summer of 2005:

There are a few cars that drive by, and when they do, Chuck and Steve discuss the
clandestine doings of these neighbors. Chuck says to Steve, “You see Lamar creeping?
He probably came home, came right back out.” They both laugh.

“Yo, you know who your young-boy, you know who your young-boy?” Chuck says. “The boy
Lamar your young-boy.”

“No he not!” Steve says, laughing and protesting. “I put all these niggas on, A,”
he tells me.

Steve leaves to see his girlfriend, saying, “I’m out, A. I’m ’bout to go get me some
cock.” I ask Anthony about this, and he confirms that the word
cock
can mean sex with a woman as well as male genitalia. In the discussions about the
neighbors’ late-night activities, I also learn four new words for orgasm: to bust
(buss), to yam, to chuck, and to nut.

The confusion ran deeper than this language barrier: I didn’t understand the significance
of events as they occurred, misinterpreting people’s gestures and actions.

Once I saw Ronny in a fistfight with some other boys, and along with two young men
standing nearby, I went over and tried to break up the fight. Only I was pulling Ronny
away from another young man who was also trying to break up the fight, thinking he
was the one Ronny was fighting. One of the other guys started shouting, “Not him!
Not him!”

What a fucking idiot, I thought. I can’t even tell which person is fighting and which
person is pulling the fighters away from each other. The looks I got that afternoon
humiliated me further.

Dealing with Difference

Some ethnographers maintain that their difference is an asset to the research: their
distinct background, gender, or race allows them to see what the locals or natives
cannot; their foreign identity gives them some special status or opens certain doors;
their situation as an outsider prompts people to explain things that would otherwise
go unsaid; their novice mistakes and blunders reveal the social fabric that would
otherwise remain obscured.
¹¹

I didn’t take this approach. Or rather, I didn’t have this experience. In some ways
my identity was an encumbrance, and one I had to invest significant time and effort
to overcome. Particularly in the early months on 6th Street, the presence of a white
young woman seemed to make people uneasy if not outright angry or visibly threatened.
My lack of familiarity with what sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton
referred to as the lower shadies of the Black community, my lack of familiarity with
the neighborhood, and my wholly different family background meant that I didn’t understand
what was going on much of the time, and so had to work hard just to keep up. My concern
about how my strange presence was changing the scene and my efforts to reduce its
impact became preoccupations in their own right, distracting me from understanding
what daily life was like for Mike and his friends and neighbors. If it is indeed true
that an ethnographer’s mistakes are revealing, I could not afford to make them. Here
an extra word during a police stop could cost a man his freedom.

Like many outsiders have done, I learned to defuse tension by making a joke out of
my difference. Though in practice I was steadily adopting more and more of Mike and
Chuck’s attitudes and ways of doing things, I learned to give verbal credence to expectations
about my white, college-educated preferences, like whiny rock music and sushi and
cut-up vegetables with no dressing. With those young men around 6th Street who seemed
interested in flirting with me, I learned how to negotiate a joking sexual banter,
to strike a delicate balance of them
wanting me around without feeling like they could approach me directly about a romantic
relationship.

In his study of street vendors in Greenwich Village, Mitch Duneier notes that his
status as a white and middle-class Jewish man wasn’t fixed but became more or less
salient depending on the circumstance.
¹²
Likewise, my gender seemed to come into and out of focus depending on what was going
on. Sometimes my status as a woman seemed in the forefront of people’s consciousness,
like when the police had to call a female cop to the scene in order to search me.
But there were many other times when it seemed I was taken almost as an honorary man,
permitted to hang around when men spoke about shootouts and drug deals and robberies,
or about romantic escapades with women other than their main partner.

That I was Jewish, or rather, half-Jewish on my father’s side, didn’t seem to register
very much, perhaps because last names were so little used. Reggie complained to me
once about another guy who wouldn’t share his profits after a gambling win, saying
that the guy was “acting like a Jew.”

“Do you know any Jews?” I asked.

“No. It’s a fucking expression.”

“You know I’m Jewish, right?”

“You ain’t a Jew. You white.”

“I’m half-Jewish, Reggie, swear to god.”

“Where’s your beard?” he laughed.

If my Jewish identity wasn’t readily recognized, certainly my whiteness was. Though
I have little way of proving it, I am fairly confident that Mike and his friends and
family spoke more about race, and about the racial politics of policing and imprisonment,
when I wasn’t around. Sometimes they discussed these topics when I was with them,
but not, I believe, as freely or as frequently as they did in my absence.

If my being white was a permanent fact that nobody ever forgot, it, too, seemed to
come into and out of focus, as if my whiteness were a property of the situation or
interaction in play, not merely a trait I possessed.

One winter, a pair of white female police officers began appearing around 6th Street,
chasing young men in cars, stopping people on the street and running their names,
and searching houses. In a week they’d
taken eleven young neighborhood men into custody on new arrests or old warrants. Mike,
Chuck, and their friends began referring to them as The White Bitches, with a small
apology to me after they did so.

ALEX: Just seen the White Bitches come through—no offense, A.

ALICE: None taken. Where’d they go?

After a while the apologies stopped, and my being the same color and gender as these
most hated officers seemed to move further down in people’s consciousness.

Though I never exactly blended in on 6th Street, by showing up every day, month after
month, I became an expected part of the scene. The Puerto Rican family who ran the
corner grocery store began affectionately calling me Vanilla, which they eventually
shortened to Nil. After about a year, young men in the group began referring to me
as their sister, cousin, or “our homie” who “goes way back.” As Howard Becker has
pointed out, it’s virtually impossible for people to continue to take special notice
of something or someone they see day in and day out.
¹³

Yet even after people had gotten used to me, my whiteness became problematic during
certain occasions, at certain locations, and among certain groups of people.

Prison and jail visiting rooms were among the easiest public places for me, once I’d
gotten the hang of them. The guards have seen it all and don’t bat an eye when a white
woman comes to visit a Black man. In fact, many women coming to visit Black men in
state prison are white; even in county jail, my sense is that there are more interracial
couples than what would be found in public in Black or white neighborhoods. I often
figured this was because a community’s interracial couples have learned how to hide
in public—for example, by going to the grocery store late at night—but in a visiting
room this is impossible. Or perhaps inmates have more interracial relationships than
their communities do as a whole.

Courtrooms, bail offices, and probation offices were other public spaces in which
Mike and I tended to feel more at ease, at least those located in downtown Philadelphia
and in the district. Perhaps the shared legal woes and the collective fear of jail
time helped forge some
bond between the white and Black people on the defendants’ side of the courtroom.
The easy conversations across racial lines might even qualify these courtroom seating
areas as what Elijah Anderson has referred to as a Cosmopolitan Canopy—a place where
many kinds of people come together and keep their ethnocentric opinions in check,
treating one another decently.
¹⁴

Venturing out together into white neighborhoods or into various other buildings in
Center City besides the courthouse could be difficult. As any interracial couple knows,
the simple act of appearing together in public can create a level of tension that
is difficult to bear. Often, people would be so thrown off when Mike and I showed
up together that we learned to walk some distance apart from each other on the sidewalk,
so that passersby wouldn’t necessarily know we were together. We’d often enter a store
or bar or restaurant separately, so that clerks and hostesses and security guards
wouldn’t have to address us simultaneously.

When Chuck, Mike, or Reggie and I went into the city’s white neighborhoods, those
which Anderson refers to as more ethnocentric,
¹⁵
sometimes people were openly rude, or would tell us that the kitchen was closed or
that we couldn’t enter. Sometimes we got the impression that we were catching people
on a very bad day. Beyond our skin color, our ages and apparent class differences
helped make these interactions highly charged, though it was hard to know if these
reactions stemmed from the sight of Black young men with a white young woman, a middle-class
white woman with Black men who appeared decidedly “ghetto,” or Black men in white
spaces, period.

In addition to public spaces and white ethnic neighborhoods, large social gatherings
on 6th Street remained tense for me. In seven years I attended nineteen funerals for
young neighborhood men who’d been killed by gunfire, as well as three funerals for
older people. I learned to dread these occasions, along with the far rarer event:
weddings. Inevitably, these occasions brought in strangers and relatives I’d never
met before, who demanded to know who I was and how exactly I was connected to the
deceased or the bridal couple. Large gatherings also involved special activities or
behaviors I hadn’t learned, and the chance to screw them up before a large audience.
And they involved the mixing of many audiences; the public display of private relationships.

Methodologically, my task was not to let my comfort level guide
the inquiry. That is, I tried to be careful not to give greater weight to the places
and situations where I was most at ease, or to the people or places that gave an easier
time to the biracial group that the 6th Street Boys and I became whenever I was present.