Space v Place: Read before bedtime

You think I’m kidding. No really. I’m literally shouting out into the void here as I work out these ideas. The only reason any of you are going to read this is if you need to use some of this stuff in your future papers. That’s fine. Just throw me a shout out at some point.

So space versus place.

First let me start with definitions. Space is defined as a virtual location where people have defined, there is no way to pen point the location in a physical sense. Place is a physical location. Some places aren’t defined by their physical location can be spatially defined just by the groups that operate within them. Both are domains that we live. When thinking about the interactions that are possible in space verse place are different. The positive impacts that the internet has brought about is that it has made place feel closer together. So, as a participant in social media, I have access to people all over the world that I can quickly communicate with. In the past, when places had much most significance, if I wanted to talk to my friend in Costa Rica it would have been much more difficult. Now, I can have a live conversation with them, with little to no effort. The real question is, do interaction that occur in the virtual world actually count. With interactions like online dating and live internet games occurring more and more, the answer is seemingly yes. The interactions that we have with someone online can be seen as equally meaningful as interactions we have in the real world. So does that mean that place will soon become irrelevant?

In this case, I will use Twitter as an example. Social movements have used this as a platform for organizing and having live political discussions. The hashtag (#) is a function of Twitter used to allow members to receive any news, or “tweets” as they are more commonly known, in order to keep up with the discussion. If someone tweets a statement about an event they will use a hashtag that will allow others to respond and use that hashtag. There are many different spheres of Twitter where communities collectively follow each other in order to keep up with current events. One of those spheres is called Black Twitter, which has been known to produce a lot of backlash and stir up conversations around everything from political issues to pop culture. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, is a great example of this. People from all over the world were exposed to this hashtag and could weigh in on the topic as equally as someone in New York or Detroit. 

How does this apply to cities or urban areas? The same way in which we think about space v place we can think about urbanism and urbanization. In Urbanism As A Way of Life, Louis Wirth (1938) writes:

 “While urbanism, or that complex of traits which makes up characteristic mode of life in cities, and urbanization, which denotes the development and extensions of these factors, are thus not exclusively found in settlements which are cities in the physical and demographic sense, they do, nevertheless, find their most pronounced expression in such areas, especially metropolitan cities.” (7)

Now that the would is becoming more and more urban, urbanization may seemingly fade out as a less centralized issue within urban areas. The way in which spaces are developed and built will be less important than the perceptions of these existing neighborhoods and the way in which neighborhood residents way have already defined their spaces.

When thinking about a topic that deals with all four of these concepts gentrification is the best way to synthesize each. Gentrification basically is the process of making an area suitable to middle class taste. The physical characteristics of the way the middle class wish to picture their space and how they conceptualize using their place is manipulated out of the hand of the lower class or less wealthier residents. In fact, businesses can also be a great example or signifier that neighborhoods will experience a spatial change from a guarded area. Let’s think about cafes. The prices are generally aimed at people that can afford a five-dollar cup of coffee or tea. So their physical location and prices can be out of reach for low-income residents within their zones.

The contentious relationship between Pilsen and a new coffee shop is one example of this. When the Bow Truss Coffee Shop opened up in Pilsen, the owners and worker report having mostly received welcoming vides from the neighborhood, but local gentrification activist protested them and depicted them as invading their space. The signs included statements in English and Spanish. They included:

“Sabes donde estas? La raza vive aqui”

“Gentrification is not welcome here”

 “Racism and Classism smells like coffee”

“Sugar with your gentrification”

“Te gusta lucha con tu café? –No One”

Really the tension here is that this is seen as gentrification not because of the business itself being brought in be because of who the business with serve and benefit. In this tightly defined space, this type of change is seen as threatening to community member that know the risk of being displaced from their neighborhoods. 

If we reduce the issues of gentrification to the invasion of space by a different community, usually one with greater access to resources, than the contention becomes clear. To have business within a community space that is neither meant to serve or benefit the space it has invaded would be seen as threatening to that community. 

Are you sleep yet?

Pilson Link by the Chicago Eater

Female-Headed Household: Can Pop Culture Get it Right?

Gilmore Girls is a critically acclaimed and Emmy Award winning comedy-drama that was created by Amy Sherman-Palladino. The series stars Lauren Graham, as Lorelai Gilmore[1], who plays the mother of Alexis Bledel, as Lorelai “Rory” Gilmore. The two live in a fictional small town known to viewers as Stars Hollow, which is said to be located somewhere in Connecticut. Lorelai Gilmore grew up with her wealthy, Ivy League parents Emily and Gilmore who both live in a mansion in Hartford Connecticut. At the age of 16 Lorelai and her childhood boyfriend Christopher Hayden become pregnant. Lorelai, who has felt suffocated and stifled by the prestigious life led by both of her parents, runs away from home to be taken in by an inn owner. Lorelai has Rory, continues working at the inn alongside the owner and builds a life for her self in her new town as a single mother. The show displays the struggle, tenacity and determination of Lorelai Gilmore as she raise Rory, who eventually attends an Ivy League herself after attending a prestigious high school, as she finishes her education and becomes the co-owner and manager of an inn herself.

The heart warming tale of the high school drop out, who later becomes a business owner, depicts all of the changes that our culture has made away from the out cry made by many scholars of the damaging of the female-headed household. When William Juilis Wilson wrote The Truly Disadvantaged[2], he even attributed the increasing number of out of wedlock births and single mother to ramifications of poverty. He writes “the increase in the proportion of extramarital births could be mainly a function of the increasing difficulty of finding a marriage partner with stable employment, or of changes in social values regarding out-of-wedlock births, or of increased economic independence afforded women by availability of income transfer payments” (Wilson 1987: 73). The question to ask is, why is this a social problem?

Society is constantly evolving, however, one of the benchmark North American values is that of the family. Many scholars and theorist have used the family as the smallest unit to which we can measure society. With this unit come and assumption that “the family” exist in a biological connection with a hetero-normative definitions of who constitutes which relationship. In other words, father are males, mothers are females, both fathers and mothers have to be included within the familial unit, and each sex and gender are meant to provide different cultural norms. Thankfully this is changing, slowly, but changing nonetheless. Many people within society are redefining the boundaries along gender, sex and number of adults.  At the center of this debate is the question, how does my family make up affect your family make-up? If we redefine the concept that we envision for what a family looks like, is the fear that the American values will be dismantled?

Patricia Hill Colins in her chapter on “Black Women and Motherhood”[3] discusses this very idea. She explores the centrality of motherhood to assumingly cis-gendered women within the Black community and how motherhood is a position that bring empowerment to their identity. She gives us three different types of family units and relationships that have been overlooked by previous scholars. Bloodmothers, or mothers, are women that have a biological connection to their children. Othermothers are women involved in a child’s life that do no have biological relationships. The women-center networks involved both of these types of mothers and relative women that are all involved in child-rearing. These relationships should be seen as “organized, resilient, women-centered networks of bloodmothers and othermothers are key in understanding this centrality. Grandmothers, sisters, aunts, or cousins act as othermothers by taking on child-care responsibilities for one another’s children. When needed, temporary childcare arrangements can turn into long-term care or informal adoption” (Collins:119-120). Quite frankly, in the absence of males and abundances of resources women just make it work.

That being said, we still have a long way to go. Obviously, the idea of a female-headed households and single motherhood still gains negative stigma in a society that only see both as lacking. TV shows like Gilmore Girls can help docile that stigma, but the representation within those shows is still problematic. As IVillage[4] compiled a top ten list of their favorite single mother, they demonstrate the spectrum of popular single mothers on television. Spoiler Alert, nine out of the ten are white women and the person of color that is featured is not a central character. This Huffingtonpost article[5] isn’t much better.  Now, that is not to say that this is at all an extensive list of single-mother representation in television, but the image that is built around women of color as single mothers is not a similar perspective that are held for white women.

This Altantic[6] article really tackles the topic in the best way. It’s starts by discussing the The Single Mom’s Club (shown in picture). The great thing that the film gets right is that it depicts these women as compassionate and stays away from usually “you are your worst problem” that many other shows and movie imply about their single status. The film isn’t perfect and there are still many problematic element in the film that need to be questioned, however, it is at least a step forward from the usual media representation. It would be dangerous to leave the narrative of any complex issue up to pop culture or the media, but there needs to be a call for all single parents to have their stories, struggles and success, displayed in a holistic way. 

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[1] Gilmore's Story 

[2] The Truly Disadvantaged on Amazon

[3] Collin's Black Feminist Thought

[4] IVillage: 10 single tv moms we love

[5] huffingtonpost: single moms o -tv

[6] The Atlantic: Why can't pop culture get single moms right?

Implicit Bias: A Quick View

Let’s talk Sports. Key and Peele[1], two comedians from Comedy Central, have a great skit demonstrating problematic commentary often seen in sports commentary. The two pose as sports commentators featuring another white commentator who is giving his opinion about different athletic ability for multiple players. Key and Peele, as the main commentators, begin to notice a pattern. In an attempt to demonstrate this, they continue to name more players, some black and some white, and asked the featured commentator to describe their athletic abilities. For the white athletes, they are described through their keen ability to demonstrate a highly strategic on the field. While black athletes are described a having gifts that were giving to them. One of the funniest (saddest) side-by-side comparisons, for example, is when describing the New England Patriots’ defensive end Rob Ninkovich. The commentator looks deeply in the camera and says he’s a “tactical master mind.” However, when describing the cornerback for the New York Jets, Darrelle Revis, the commentator perks up and says he has “magical powers [that] he learned from his grandma.” In you’re curious, which you should be, Russell Wilsons, which was Key’s character’s ace in the whole, is a “hybrid.” To clarify, he’s got brains, he’s got gift, thus he is a hybrid. (Insert hand motion in video)

Obviously this is satire, but any avid ESPN view can recognize that these sorts of comments do actually occur through the discussion of athletes and their bodies, but the underlying theme is a demonstration on an implicit bias held by the featured guest. Implicit bias is defined by the holy grail of universal knowledge, Stanford University[2], as “a positive or negative mental attitude towards a person, thing, or group that a person holds at an unconscious level. In contrast, an explicit bias is an attitude that somebody is consciously aware of having.” This is becoming increasingly important in the “new era” of race that we are entering. Now that we have all of these markers that construct the US identity as being pasted most of the “older ways” we would enact racism through policies and in social settings, we’re still having to address issues of race that are assumed to have been gotten rid of.

            How bad is it, Harry? Well let’s let these social experiments speak for themselves. The famous Doll Test first became famous in the 1930s when Mamie Clark tested a number of children asking them simple distinguishing questions to differentiate a black doll and a white doll. Since then, this experiment has been performed numerous times with different children from different regions. Still, after all of the changes society has made, black dolls are picked out as being ugly, bad, and less smart. In this video[3], you can see children from different races and ethnicities singling out black doll as the dolls with negative characteristics. Every time that I watch this video, I’m saddened a little more by the reality that little black boys and girls se reflections of themselves as being negative.

            Implicit Bias also affects our ideas about beauty and what the standards are. For women, hair is a centralized part of the body that can have a large part of the identity and how one expresses their femininity. Obviously, that’s a huge overstatement, but to put is simply for man women hair is huge! The natural hair debate is took a new swing in the last five years. The Tyra Banks Show[4] took on this controversial issue with a group of young girls to dive into the bias toward straighter hair. This issue and debate has moved forward a lot since this show, and had even resulted in what is now known as the “natural hair movement.” However, it is important to be aware of the struggle for people who have coarser hair have and question why we as a society have decided that their hair is less attractive.

            Using a gender example. Always took a right turn away from their usual lies about how happy a women’s period can be and decided get with a real issue concerning women’s bodies(sorry about the shade, but who the hell has happy periods). The #LikeAGirl[5] commercial aired during the

Superbowl, which was a strategic move on the part of the advertisers. It’s a touching view of the implicit bias different respondents have towards the “like a girl” derogatory saying that automatically makes athletic activities feeble and defective. The heart-warming and inspiring portion of the video is when the young girls are asked to perform the same activities and have the exact opposite reaction of the older participants.

            Will there ever be an end to the Implicit Bias? Who knows. But in the meantime, questioning why we’ve built such socially constructed concepts of beauty, intelligence and good natured human beings based on symbols of their bodies will hopefully prevent us from passing them unknowingly.

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[1] Key and Peele(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogUTMs5Z3ko)

[2] http://med.stanford.edu/diversity/FAQ_REDE.html

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkpUyB2xgTM

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6_y_PACDhs (start at 3:00)

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs

Entitled to Benefits

            In William Julius Wilson’s book,The truly Disadvantaged , the identifies the social inequalities many urban communities are faced with today. He argues that the increase in poverty in the United States is not due to racial constraints, but rather because of individual beliefs shifting to create a culture not centered on community progress. Other analyses of inner city problems danced around the issue of racial discrimination for fear of being criticized. Previous studies referred to an “underclass” that had increases in crime, higher poverty rates, and different individual mentalities.  Regardless of the racial composition of residents the living conditions in urban ghettos were declining at rapid rates.  Many who resided in these areas were recipients of welfare benefits in order to survive. While the welfare program was created to help individuals in temporary situations, as time went on the amount of individuals receiving welfare increased.

            This increase in the amount of individuals receiving welfare caused the change in neighborhood culture.  When the first generation was raised in an area with an overwhelming amount of individuals receiving welfare they became socialized to believe receiving welfare is an acceptable form of income. As this generation came into adulthood they developed a dependency on the welfare system, and the behaviors of their everyday life display their dependency.  Those dependent on receiving welfare are typically unemployed, more likely to be involved in criminal activities, and less likely to positively impact their community. A community with a dependency on welfare can have an extremely negative effect on its residents. According to Robert Sampson the effects of a neighborhood can greatly determine an individual’s likeliness to contribute positively to their surrounding area.

Community dependence on welfare creates a culture that negatively impacts all residents regardless of the specific neighborhood they reside in. As I stated before the welfare system was created to provide assistance to individuals who have fallen on hard times due to some extenuating circumstance in their life. “The institutionalized program was set up to be an offset measure for those in need, not a complete replacement of income and benefits.” (Welfareinfo.org) The federal government defined the minimum needs a family with no income has. “The needs standard includes food, clothing, recreation, personal incidentals, fuel for heating, cooking and water heating, electricity for refrigeration and lights, household supplies, medical chest supplies and shelter.” (Welfareinfo.org) It is supposed to provide a minimum amount of money for only those who desperately need to meet the minimum standard of living. When large amounts of individuals receive welfare benefits, the amount of individuals receiving the help they desperately need is decreased. The government can only provide so much funding into these programs and when individuals begin to take advantage of the system it becomes ineffective.  In the case that a person makes the conscious decision to receive welfare instead of being employed it is no surprise that they do not spend their day being as productive as they could be. The ability for individuals like this to receive welfare contributes to a culture of laziness. Younger generations develop the belief that they are also entitled to the same benefits in life.

Recent changes to welfare systems have allowed these programs to become more effective than they originally were. The in statement of food stamps ensures that individuals are spending the money allocated for food actually on food. Applications for this aspect of the welfare program is processed the quickest to allow individuals to eat. There have also been changes to how poor individuals receive tax benefits from government funds. In order to receive these funds individuals must prove employment. This requirement of employment forces individuals who want to receive benefits to join an institution where they are positively contributing to society. There are also checks on one’s criminal backgrounds in order for them to receive welfare allowances. This measure safeguards the system from being flooded with criminals wanting to receive a cash handout. At the most a family of four can receive up to $900 a month through welfare benefits and individuals can receive up to $300 a month. (Welfareinfo.org) The most amount of money a family can receive is not enough to provide for a family of four, but it is enough to make sure some of their financial strain is lifted. $300 a month does not seem like enough for an individual to live off of, but if they choose residency in an area with cheap housing this $300 may be enough to make ends meet to some extent. In order to ensure the success of modern welfare programs more stipulations on employment need to be put into place. There is nothing wrong with individuals needing help from time to time to make ends meet, but this should be a transitional period in their life. Welfare has never meant to be sustainable income for anyone.

Welfare statistics found at: http://www.welfareinfo.org/payments/