Fets and I went to Ivy City via bus, as also required by the assignment--to ride a good distance of our transportation on the bus. While riding the bus, I also discovered I like more than the Metro, not only because it is cheaper, but because you see the city while riding around. And there is a bus that goes straight from Tenleytown to Brookland, so that was beneficial.
We arrive around noon, and we walked around a group of townhouses, realizing that although it was a good example of the residential area, it would take a long time to write down notes for every town house--there was a new one every twenty feet. Yet the details still remain figured in my mind. There were nice town houses, with well kept patches of lawn. There were townhouses with messes in their front yard. There were some with mulch, and some with flower beds, there were some with over grown decorational plants, and some with piles of dirt. There were townhouses with roof decks, and some with well-painted outer walls. Some were in desperate need of a new paint job. On the block we observed, there were two empty, abandoned, townhouse that were boarded up. We looked at the signs posted on the door, and it seemed that they refused to clean up their front yard area, and perhaps the inside looked similar. We walked around the back alley and looked at the townhouses from behind. There were some with decks and garages that took up the entire backyard, which made me sad. Don't these people need green in their lives? Not just plants for decoration? We proceeded onward, asking a lady for directions to the Capital City Market, which she declared she didn't know where it was, which sounded bad. But she looked at the address, gave us directions, and we headed off in the direction of Burger King, and 3rd.
Once we got to fourth, we saw it--bunches and bunches of random markets, selling meats of all kinds--cowskin, oxtail, beef tripe, among regular meats. There were Carribbean markets, Oriental, Chinese, and Asian Markets (not sure how to distinguish between these), a farmer's market, and everything. We saw all kinds of people. Some homeless, some shoppers, some workers, it was a site to see. Fetsum said that it reminded him of the Indonesian Markets that he went to when he was in Indonesia with the SALT program. If I had been in a car, it would have been really chaotic.
We kept walking, and food stores started becoming merchandise stores--cell phones, accessories, anything you could ever want. We had entered the Funky Fleamarket. It was run by African Americans, and bought by African Americans. We were given statistics for the area, and it said that it was 92% African Americans, next is a small 3% of white people, and then there was less Hispanic and other ethinicities. There was a greater ratio of Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern people in the market than the stats mapped out. What I didn't realize it until we left, though, was that I was the only white girl in the market. Not only that, but I was the only white girl writing down things about the market, instead of shopping. It was like I was a snitch, undercover (but badly done), making notes of possible stolen goods. Which was not happenin'. We were freaking mappin' out our block.
We past this one woman's block, who had jewelry, and other things and such, and came up to me, while talking on her cell phone, and asked me what I was doing, and I told her it was an assignment for school--to map out a block with anthropological reasoning. She walked away, and I thought we were okay, until another man came up to us, he was the manager of the place and asked us the same question. We said the same thing, he gave us his card, and was rather polite to us, but he also said that we needed to inform all the vendors of what we were doing, so he told us to go over to the DJ who was playing music, and ask him to make an announcement that we were doing it for school.
I'm white. Caucasian, whatever you want to call it. But it doesn't matter to me. I love people the same. There is appeal in every type of person, skin color unrelated. I'm an outgoing person, thus, whoever I'm around, whenever I'm around them, I just want to get to know them, find a connection with them. But I am met with racism, though slight, in this city. Though my skin could be green and purple tye-dyed nad I wouldn't care, because of the way that I look to the neighborhood I'm in, I'm a stereotype. I'm the uppity white girl up to no good in this market.
At that point, I was so discouraged by this stereotype that I'd been labeled by that Fets and I decided to leave. That was the first time I ever wished I was a black girl. Which was when I realized that I had been the only white girl there. Now I know what it feels like to be a minority. And to be stereotyped. And it doesn't feel good.We walked out the market and across the street to the Gallaudet University, which was on our list to visit while we were in the neighborhood. There was a parking garage in between the two things, and as we walked past it, we were enveloped in silence, as there was a peace about this place. There were no students on campus, but we looked at a couple of the buildings, and soon figured out why we had never heard of the Gallaudet University. It's a School for the Deaf, Mute, and those Hard of Hearing. It threw me off, but I thought it was way awesome, there are teachers who teach and give classes with sign language. I find it completely awesome. The only problem was that Fets and I were becoming very quickly paranoid to the idea of security coming up to us and asking us what we were doing. (Which they didn't) We walked back to the Metro and got on the Red Line to Tenleytown. There were only a few people on the platform to the metro, and there was this guy singing his heart out to some Jackson 5. It was so bad, I couldn't stop smiling, partly because of the great passion you could hear in his voice.
We rode to Tenleytown and then got off, took notes of the residential neighborhood, and left on the H4 bus with out anymore drama. The neighborhood was much more welcoming to children--there were lawns and space for sports. There was also less traffic on the road, and there were bigger houses for families. Some of them were nicer than others. Now I'm relaxing in my room. Thinking about sleep, real life hardships like finances, as I just received a letter from my mother along with my social security card. Unless I become famous for writing an astonishing blog or something, I am going to need more experience and a degree of some sort to support myself in the future. And I have no idea what I want to be doing with this life of mine. and usually, one has to have a degree in something they at least are interested in to find a job that they are interested in, and being impatient kind of screws you over.
So yep.
That's where I am.
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