You can call me ‘Mo’.
I’ve been a little gun-shy, these days, when it comes to posting about fieldwork. It progresses, but very slowly. Something crazy, happened last week, though, which has jack-all to do with the lives of the people I’m interviewing, but which might be related to my work:
Tuesday, I ran three blocks down the street to do an errand. On the way back, one guy among a group sitting on a stoop called out ‘Hey, Mo!’ I stopped.
‘You and I need to talk about party favours, man… Party favours.’
‘Ah, no thanks.’ said I.
‘I know. I know: You got your people, I got mine. You got your shit, I got mine. But maybe we can work something out. We can trade. I’ll smoke a little of your weed, and you can smoke some of mine.’
Wait a minute… Did this pot dealer just mistake me for a colleague? ‘I don’t have anything.’
‘We can work out a deal.’
‘No, seriously. I got nothin’, man.’
He threw up his palms. ‘All right. All right.’
In such circumstances (which occur with some frequency in San Francisco — at least if you’re me, which, I suppose, none of you are), I usually try to allay doubts by whitening my speech — usually Wisconsin style: ‘Take care of yourself, now. You be well!’ He waved non-committally.
A few thoughts:
- Is ‘party favours’ a normal term for pot? I had thought it referred to E.
- Why would someone get the impression that I was a drug dealer? One person I talk to was formerly a dealer, but I believe he’s widely known to be clean, now. Other homeless people in my neighbourhood are not, to my knowledge, involved in drugs any less licit than open containers.
- ‘Mo’ is an awesome nickname for a person with a mohawk.
- Apparently, at least some people in my neighbourhood now recognise me. This neighbourhood has a long-standing but diminishing black base, and a more recent, ever-changing, ever-growing white and Asian population. There is a stark division between these groups — the black population is a neighbourhood: people greet one another, they know one another by name across generations; the newer mixed population is isolated in the way that the urban middle class so often is: we speak neither to each other nor to other classes or cultures in our neighbourhood. Maybe all us new-comers get recognised by long-term residents, but I suppose I assume that’s not the case. What does it mean that a pot dealer recognised me and apparently thought I was in his line of work? Do other people recognise me and think the same thing, or did he just make a crazy assumption? Did he even recognise me, or was I doing something at the very moment which made him think? Or was he “doing” something at the very moment which made him think?
- Why do I fake that variety of cultural whiteness in such situations? I’ve watched myself do the same thing when I want women to think I’m not sexually predatory, or when I want men to think that I’m not a threat (either a potential aggressor, or queer). It’s race-related, but not purely racial.