Week 6 post: Sibley Love

This week I did go places...
But you won't be hearing about them in this blog post.
Instead I posted on Sara's blog about her connection between skid-row and Sibley's Mapping the Pure and the Defiled. I thought she made some great connections with the reading and had some great stories to boot.

 Here it is:

I was attracted to your blog post because of the story you told me as we left class one day; the one where that woman screamed all those obscenities to you. I thought it was a really interesting story and I wanted to see what the whole trip was like as a whole.

I’ve only been to the fashion district once but it was incredible impacting to me nonetheless. I felt like I was in a third world country; quite literally there were homeless people paving the sidewalks so most people had to walk in the streets to get from place to place. What slivers of sidewalks that were left attached themselves to the insides of storefronts where rack after rack of cheap, bulk cloth hung for people to “haggle” for—as you said.

I thought your comparison with rodeo drive was very interesting. I agree wholeheartedly with your comparison with Sibley’s Mapping the Pure and the Defiled. It hearkens back to a discussion we had in class where we talked about the construction of Beverly hills and how its one way in, one way out, uphill, sidewalk-less entrances are perfectly designed to keep out the poor and the homeless. Those with no cars cannot enter, and the proscenium-like archway separating Beverly Hills from the greater Westwood is intimidating in and of itself.

In the same way that city design in Beverly Hills contributes to social and class differentiation between the rich and the poor. The city in between west L.A. and Rodeo drive is a maze of inaccessible roadways on foot and access roads bisected by highways making on foot transportation between the two places almost impossible. Since there are no public services on Rodeo Dr. it wouldn’t make sense to go to West L.A. and stay there at risk of being profiled by the police strictures of affluent areas (granted you are a skit-row resident)

I really liked your post but I would have liked to see you go more in-depth with the Sibley article. More quotes would have been really nice and made your experience come full circle for me with the article. Also, the use of “colored” for describing African-Americans (or blacks as it were) offended me slightly. I would suggest choosing a different term of phrase and sticking with it throughout your post. Especially when talking about the disenfranchised and the “otherized”, using words like that can get problematic.