Well, I watched the first seven minutes or so of last week's episode, back on the night it aired. I had to turn it off when Carmen was in the hair salon. I mean, forget black and white, COMMON SENSE!?!? Memo to Carmen: shut up and listen.
Thank you very much.
I finished up the episode tonight, a week later, enough time for the horror of the hair salon thing to be repressed wear off.
Not sure I have any incisive comments here; I kind of got carried away with the story of Renee's new friendship and the (OMG) teen romance brewing (I really felt like I shouldn't be watching the unveiling of the tattoo; it was just too much the height of teen hormonal intimacy).
But dude, she went knitting! And said it was BORING! And it was something that "lots of white women do!"
Well, I could start pointing to non-white knitbloggers, but that would probably be, um, stupid. And while I have been well-schooled in how to be a stupid white person, both through personal experience and especially through watching this show, I'm going to try to avoid it. I have many avenues for displaying stupidity, and I don't really need this to be a primary one. But anyway, I wonder what any black knitters who saw that thought.
ETA: (this is a slightly differnt topic; less a matter of 'knitting is a white activity" and more a matter of "yarn shop owners are racist"--and a friend had such an experience with a yarn store--not the big one--here in my town about a decade ago--but I read this post today and it burst my rather poorly-inflated white-girl bubble. Verily, I say unto thee, o racist yarn store workers and owners: "what the fuck?" I will also say that I want to know if this happens anywhere I frequent, because I will stop with the frequency, as I did with the local place a decade ago. That's all.)
Anyway, I was saying. Does anyone else wonder if Renee's friend was like "of course you're black," in the sense of "of course you have some black ancestry." Because, to me at least, in makeup she looks like a light-skinned black woman who has frosted hair. I suppose the blue contacts wouldn't quite fit. And I wasn't sure how to read the reaction. I almost got the sense she was going to say, "and...?"
This sounds kind of dorky, but I sort of feel like the relationship with Renee and her friend (sorry, I'm really bad with names) was facilitated by the fact that the friend didn't feel self-conscious and hypervigilant, and that Renee didn't feel vulnerable to racist attitudes, because she was in white makeup. I mean, this suffers a bit from a bad case of obviousness (and a nice dollop of "why can't we all just get along"), but I think if they had met without the makeup, racism would have gotten in the way. Not the racism of any individual, but the sheer existence of racism would have prevented their friendship from forming in the same way. I could be wrong, maybe it would have been just the same. But I kind of doubt it. And hey, if there was any lack of personal examples of racism, drunk sweaty white guy took care of that.
And there's always Bruno.
Next week...finale. I'm hoping there will be some follow-up, in the press or something, because I'd love to hear a debriefing.
I just stumpled across this post after doing a google search beause I was curious about attitudes/racial differences when it comes to people of color and knitting.
I too watched this episode (however many months ago) and had to laugh when the African American woman made her comments about knitting being a white woman's activity. Stereotypically, she's right. Unless you live in New York City or Los Angeles, I highly doubt you'll come across a large number of African American women or male knitters. Let alone Asian, Latina, etc., etc. knitters. Though I think her comment was laden with a good amount of stereotype, statistically, it's fairly accurate (me being the only African American member of my Stitch 'n Bitch, Chicks with Sticks, and local knitting guild), and I'm fairly sure a good chunk of the small numbers of African American knitters can verify that.
Anywho, as for the friendship that was created, I do see your points. It's sad to say in 2006, but racial issues do get in the way of what may have been/become a fantastic friendship. How we go about changing this remains to be seen.
Posted by: Anna | November 22, 2006 at 01:12 PM