(PDF) Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the America South Kindle

(PDF) Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and
Food in the America South Kindle

(PDF) Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the
America South Kindle
Description :
A people-driven ethnography that portrays how race, particularly Blackness, is
experienced and performed in different socioeconomic contexts in the
contemporary urban American South. There once was a time when Black
Americans up and down the socioeconomic ladder lived in and around the
same neighborhoods. Part of this was a consequence of racially discriminatory
federal, state, and city housing policies, such as exclusionary Federal Housing
Authority practices and racially restrictive deeds and covenants, which
prevented those who had the financial means from living anywhere else.
Today, many of these neighborhoods are now centers of concentrated
poverty. The ones who are able have left those who remain do so only with
others who are poor like them and are unable to leave. Getting Something to
Eat in Jackson, a people-driven ethnography, portrays how race, particularly
Blackness, is experienced and performed in different socioeconomic contexts
in the contemporary urban American South. The author argues that Black
American life is splintered along class lines, using using food and eating as a
thread as he is moving through the various socioeconomic groups. This book
8217 s overarching goal is to illustrate that there is a paradox in social mobility
for Black Americans. On the one hand, the upwardly mobile enjoy some
socioeconomic gains, but they never escape neighborhoods because their
very sense of self is tied to Blacks in poverty. On the other hand, the ones who
are left behind bear the harshest brunt of nearly all measures of inequality in
the country, but they retain the symbolisms of Blackness. The book challenges
persistent homogenizations of Blackness, draw out the consequences for
continuing to do so, and point to the usefulness of recognizing class variation
in Black American life.