Brown Faces in White Places doing science (and wearing hoodies)

[xchrom]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/2012/03/27/brown-faces-white-places-hoodies/


Me at my field site wearing a hoodie

I was having a Twitter conversation with @LeafWarbler about being a lone brown face in a research setting. I told him of my adventures in field research in rural Illinois (outside of Urbana-Champaign). I was trapping small mammals on corn fields just off of a rural road. It became common for law enforcement to show up and check me out. For each visit, I would have to explain that I had permission to be there (provide name of land owner), who I was, what I was doing (often having to show them the animals I had in hand to prove it), and wait. Wait for the call-in and confirmation.

After so many visits, one cop eventually said he’d leave a note with dispatch so that they would stop responding to calls about me.

LeafWarbler asked if I was wearing a hoodie (when the cops arrived while I was doing research); and I laughed because, yeah, I was.

[izquierdista]

1. The climate of fear

What if this happened 80 or 100 years ago? How would they be treated then? What happened to George Washington Carver and Alex Haley's father when they were out in the field collecting specimens?

If law enforcement or anyone else paid any attention, it would be more like "there's some crazy n!@@$% pickin' up mice in the cornfield", and they would chuckle and go on their way. Well, unless there was some recent and unsolved heinous crime they could accuse the person of. Under the institutional racism of the day, everyone was entitled to their own quirky habits in public, and oddballs, both black and white, could collect things of no obvious value in public places.

Even though the institutional racism is supposedly gone now, the individual fear (thanks, Repubs) has been stoked to such a high level -- fear of druggies, fear of terrorists, fear of crime, fear of aliens, fear of your own shadow -- that no one can just leave people be, they have to call it in and have it investigated. I know how it is myself, having been stopped when out collecting specimens. I'm just glad I didn't have to add "not being white" to what I was explaining.

[Aerows]

4. I know

I collected specimens, too. No one questioned why we were there, but I think it's because "not being white" wasn't the problem. I don't know that for a fact, but I suspect that nobody thought anything of it because we were both blond headed people dressed like the nerds we were.

[malaise]

2. Wow

Unbelievable

[Aerows]

3. The interesting thing is

I was doing this EXACT same research with a friend of mine, trapping small mammals and small snakes for a graduate study in Louisiana, and guess what? Not a single person called to inquire why we were there and I know that we were both dressed in not the best clothes we owned.

It really is sad that people are judged so harshly upon appearance .

[hootinholler]

5. That is a terrific article

Thank you for posting it!