Cobb

Maybe I disagree, but I'm not sure. To me, America is a melting pot; the problems are solely with the speed with which the ingredients appear to melt, not whether they actually do. Note that those who have appeared to melt the fastest have had the most economic success.

I think it's because we humans have an entire set of valid responses called zenophobia -- fear of the other tribe. When you meet someone, the first thing you notice are differences to yourself. In my case, I'll notice skin color, gender, type of clothing, jewelry, hair, body piercings, speech patterns, etc. These all serve to inform me as an initial indication as to whether or not I'm dealing with someone in my tribe. They aren't the final indications, or even in the actual order I may use, but I've noticed that if any are different, they give me pause.

I'm a pretty conservative whitefolk, and I'm surprised sometimes at how quickly I determine that someone is in my tribe even when from outward appearances they aren't. One of my co-workers, a black female, dresses conservatively and talks to everyone in speech patterns which are definitely cultured LA anglo. When she first arrived on the job, I immediately put her in my tribe -- talks clearly, at ease with the people around her, technically competent. I listened to her talk to another black female in another group and her entire lingo changed to something I would definitely feel uncomfortable with if she talked to me that way constantly. What changed was the language forms, not her sentiments, which remain constant no matter who she talks to (translation: she's honest). After thinking on it a bit, I realized she learned something on the way to becoming an uber-programmer. She has appeared to melt without melting. I then realized I had done the same thing at some point in my life; the kids here in LA picked on me constantly (would not let me be in the tribe) until I finally lost that Buffalo accent. When I go back to visit my relatives, I immediately get it back, and lose it again the moment I'm back in LA. If that's what you mean by salad, then I understand.

I can't remember exactly what the context was - I've never liked 'diversity' but have always been pro-integration, but from a black nationalist standpoint. That's a difficult position to recognize unless we're deeply talkiing about such cultural and identity matters.

What your friend is doing is codeswitching, a well-understood phenomenon among blackfolks. It's more necessary to our economic survival than that of whitefolks. Interestingly enough, I think blackfolks think whitefolks codeswitch more than whitefolks actually do. Here's an example.

Way back when I had time to burn, I joined an amateur theatre group in Venice on the bleeding edge of multiculturality. So we were going around doing your standard creative stuff, when our instructor asked us to eyeball our 'opposite' and say out loud what we believed about them. I said of a white woman that I believed she could dye her hair blond, get a boob job, hang out in Beverly Hills and go shopping for rich guys anytime she felt like it. Then she could rip her jeans, die her hair black and be a Dixie Chick if she wanted. That basically she could switch white chick identities and all the makeup stores in America were designed so she could do just that.

It was a degree of freedom that she never even thought of using, and yet it is what many blackfolks percieve whitefolks to do - that they can blend into any crowd they feel like, whereas blackfolks always stick out and somebody is always challenging our right to be where ever it is we happen to be.

I believe most African Americans, specifically those who haven't lived and worked in various parts of the country with various sorts and classes of whitefolks tend to believe that, but blacks are trapped. This is why those same blackfolks spend an extraordinary amount of effort cultivating a positive image of the multicultural bucket we happen to occupy. I think that's understandable, but it indicates a failure of faith in America, and a multicultural America is something of an improper utopia.

So I find myself getting along well with whitefolks who tend to come from small towns who have overcome the (unstated) prejudices against them in the large metros. Whitefolks have their own ghettoes to escape, except I think they codeswitch in front of blackfolks. When put on the defensive, whitefolks will say, yeah well I'm from a small town where dey tawk lak theis.. but most of the time they wear the mask.

This is a class problem mixed in with a race problem, but primarily class. We are not negotiating well the six or seven socioeconomic classes of Americans and a lot of people are frontin'. It will get better but first we have to kill Katie Couric.

Well, I was amazed as how well she did it. I think you underestimate us whitefolk, though. It isn't a mask (a mask implies a form of duplicity), it's still what you call codeswitching. It took me a bit to figure out that my clipped fast every-syllable-heard speech was annoying the people, and I had to get rid of it. So I started speaking in a Texas drawl (or, rather, what a Buffalonian would guess was a western drawl). The idea was to be a Slow Talker of America. And it worked. I lived in Venice for a while in the '70s. 417 Ocean Front Walk; my apartment now rents for $1400 a week, which means rents in the area have outpaced my enhanced earning power. My question now is: did your "white chick" opposite ever do any of the things you suggested? And I do believe that the fashion areas are designed to let women (I never thought it had anything to do about race, but rather gender) do exactly what you said -- I call that area of any department store the Stench Factory and avoid it like the plague; some things are better left unknown.

No she didn't do any of that, and she seemed amazed that I believed that of her. She was as provincial as anyone and didn't believe she could fool anyone. So in essence I taught her a power of whiteness that she never thought she had. Now I don't believe that the kind of social mobility I'm talking about is strictly racially enabled although it may be racially coded.