Jamie Grace wrote this article.
I’d like to put forward the idea that by using surveillance and monitoring in our society as we progress through the Information Age we are creating new ‘information minorities’ – not those who are the least monitored and overwatched, those who are subject to the most surveillance and scrutiny, for whatever reason: state security, criminal justice, politics or ‘research.’
When minorities are accused of “acting White” by other minorities, tension and pain pierces both sides of that bloody coin of the cultural realm. Elijah Anderson presses that hot button in his excellent book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, published in 1991, where he dissects the “code differences” between “decent” Blacks and “street” Blacks:
….street oriented people can be said at times to mount a policing effort to keep their decent counterparts from “selling out” or “acting white,” that is, from leaving the community for one of higher socioeconomic status. This retaliation, which can sometimes be violent, against the upwardly mobile points to the deep alienation present in parts of the inner-city community. Many residents therefore work to maintain the status quo, and so the individual who tries to excel usually has a great deal to overcome.
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