I've been taking pictures of myself in the library bathroom. Everyone's doing it.

Okay, I know I alluded to talking about race and how it's kind of a different--or maybe just more proximate--experience here, but it's just way too big to sort out, and I haven't really yet, and also I just don't feel like getting into it. I will mention this one thing that's going on on campus that's pretty interesting/strange:

So these, mostly white, students in one of the dorms held a party and called it "The Straight Thuggin' Ghetto Party'"--it was cleared with the residence heads and everything. A few other students, who were black, heard about the event and went to check it out but it was already over. Some student standing outside told them it was over and then said something like, "too bad it's over, you would have been the most thuggin' [other accounts say he said "ghetto"] guys there." When asked by the students why this might be, he responded: "I don't know, it just seems like the style you're going for based on the brand names on your clothing."

There's a big hubub about this now with all sorts of different campus organizations getting involved. And there were pictures that surfaced on some sort of online photo album thing of some students at the party wearing "sideways baseball caps, exposed underwear, bandanas" etc. So, omigod, there are actually students on this campus who basically veil their love of hip-hop by donning the 21st century equivalent of blackface. Or rather, there are people who think that whatever version of black culture they can get from TV is ripe for them to try on and wear just as they would neon bracelets to an "80s party" or teased hair and bullet belts to a "metal party." Not that this campus is a special case, I'm sure there are much worse displays of insensitivity across the US (and Canada probably), it's just that kids at the University of Chicago are supposed to be so smart (seriously, that's the reputation).

Totally just lost my train of thought, there were just two huge bangs outside and a puff of smoke, roommates poked heads and bodies out of their respective holes to see what was going on. Fireworks in the alley?

Anyway. Racism. Here's another story. Was over at a classmates house for a party the other night. She is black and a lot of her friends are too. We played this game called "Moods" in which a series of 10 or so cards with words like "embarassed," "annoyed," "seductive" etc are placed on the board. A player picks another card with a sentence on it (like, "That's a swimming pool?" and then has to, after a roll of dice, perform the sentence in a certain mood for other players to guess. One of the moods was "ghetto" (it didn't come with the game, someone had written it on a card in a previous game). Thank you to god that when it was my turn I didn't roll on "ghetto." Can you imagine? I'm sure everyone else was thankful too.

Someone had written ghetto on the Moods card from a previous party. It's clear that black kids play around with "ghetto" just like white kids do. There's a huge difference though. There's a difference between playing with something that's, for the most part, "yours" and appropriating something for play. Same thing goes for this whole "White trash" thing. It's distasteful and embarassing, and, in this case, managed to show that white kids still have the same kind of fun that they did in blackface.

This is getting way too big now, and I want to stop before I get over my head, but I'll just say this. There are tons of different people who are into rap and hiphop who don't feel the need to turn it into some over the top performance of racial stereotype (Hello, Big Primpin').

Okay, that's it. I don't even really feel qualified to fully analyse this, and actually I feel vaguely embarassed about using my blog as a soapbox (i.e. there are no built in filters to keeping me from being too offbase). Anyone who wants to wiegh in, please drop a line, I just wanted to let y'all know what was going on.

Here's a pic from the library. Its a creepy, empty place sometimes, but nice.