Elijah Anderson on the burden of being Black in white spaces
Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, discusses his latest book, “Black in White Space,” which documents the unique challenges facing Black people as they navigate overwhelmingly white settings and struggle to overcome stereotypes that continue to stigmatize them.
The pressures to be cohesive and acculturated in micro-social interactions and the indirect institutional manifestations and decorum have created the friction that E. Anderson expounds upon. The lack of a nuanced, intimate empathy by most non-minority, white students to the ethos of Black people who are descendants of their ante-Bellum-to-Jim Crow progenitors and the ethos they developed as a reactive, coping mechanism to those environments that were repressive and terroristic to Black life has its latter-day modified, evolved, coping forms of non-minority attitudes of today.
Even with more integrative and pluralistic interactions that allow more latitude in the micro-interactions, the macro-scenes resistance to Critical Race Theory doctrine, per se, and other contemporary progressive (but short of hype-sensitive and over-the-top, so-called "wokeness") aspirations reveals the present nuanced distinctions of friction between Black and non-minority culture.
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