Let's Get Our Act Together: How Racial Discourses Disrupt Neighborhood Activism

Abstract

Discusses racial interactions in two low-income, racially mixed neighborhoods in Philadelphia, PA, arguing that local government strategies, based on oversimplified national-level models, exacerbate racial tensions rather than achieving interracial cooperation. Fourteen anthropologists between 1988 & 1990 conducted fieldwork in the two neighborhoods of differing political-economic trajectories & racial & class compositions. They observed everyday activities, school, & shopping as well as activist campaigns, neighborhood celebrations, & healing events after tragedies, & they interviewed 50+ community leaders & household members. The political activism encouraged by Philadelphia's Changing Relations Project to improve local conditions reflects state use of conflicting unrealistic discourses of multiculturalism, with identities remaining racialized, stereotyped, & divisive. Economic restructuring has brought neighborhood decline that has hardened racial, ethnic, & class boundaries, effectively disrupting common class-based political subjectivity. L. A. Hoffman