Good Samaritan

Today my Mom came down to Richmond to visit and catch up. We're both very avid thrift store shoppers, so it's almost obligatory that we hit up every thrift store we can think of. One of my favorites places, due to the amount of great things I find there, is Good Samaritan Thrift. I think it's fair to say I'm a bit of a regular there - I go pretty often and am on a familiar face basis with some of the employees.
Today was a bit different from my usual shopping experience - today I was suspected of shoplifting.
There was one particular woman who refused to leave me alone. After the first 10 minutes of being there, I noticed that she kept starring at me. And just out of habit, I starred back. I figured that made her a bit more suspicious, as if I was looking at her to make sure she wouldn't catch me in the act of something, but soon after, I realized that a few other employees were also following me around. Every isle I went to, there was someone there eyeing me. And after every rack of clothes I looked through, the racks were checked by someone else.
I felt extremely frustrated, wanting to confront someone, wondering what I could do to gain back that woman's trust, wanting to assure her she didn't need to be cautious of me, that I really wouldn't ever steal anything. But the minute she felt wary of me, I knew there was nothing I could do to change her mind.
I felt this one measly experience couldn't even be compared to what most African Americans go through everyday. That stereotype and presumption that is engrained in our society, doesn't give anyone a fighting chance. Once it's in thier heads, it's hard get out. I found this experience to be fitting for my current investigation of whiteness, even though the roles were reversed. I know I could never feel that I know where a black person is coming from, but I this small incident gave me a bit of incite to an ever present issue amoung our culture.

Whiteness vs. Stanford Prison Experiment

In Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, Maurice Berger talks about white people and thier mindset of white being the "norm." When interviewing people for research, he found that most white people believed that conversations about race were only for people of color.
After reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment in Paul's blog for Performance Imaging, I started to think about the role of whites being similar to the experiment in that there was an expected role to fulfill. Whether or not a white person considers themselves racist, there is an underlying knowledge that as a white person, you have the upperhand, greater opportunities, less things in which to conquer to be treated with the respect and kindness you deserve.
In the prison experiment, students began to unconciously take on the roles they were expected to play. They were rebellious as prisoners and overpowering as guards. Even though the students did not show signs of this type of behavior before the experiment, they were unable to control thier unknown desires to take on these roles.
Similarly, Whiteness deals with the same mentality - Ruth Frankenburg is quoted saying, "to speak of whiteness is to assign everyone a place in relations of racism."