"Talk to the People on the Streets, NOT the People in the Suites": Reflections on Collaborations with "Mr. Black"

Talk to the people on the streets, NOT thepeople in the suites.The people in the suites have forgotten that they are human too.Also, that they are people too.For they seem to think that they are more special than the rest of the human race,or the rest of the world.It is these kind of people that always seem to be surprised when they find out that they have the ability to bleed blood just like the rest of us,that their bloods just as red as any other human being,NOT green like money.

Some even have the nerve to tell you that they knew this already.However,they still act like they don't know this little fact.Actions still speak louder than words,last I heard . . .

Until we can get people who are on their high horses off,and that includes the wannabe people that are or want to be high society,until we can get them off their high horses too,

get everybody down to the same level of understanding and communication,which would be the first step,it'd be a major step in getting people to communicate with each other and really help each other.

To understand the needs of others is to understand yourself better too.It is a way,you know,in giving real help to other people,giving them the kind of help that they really need.¹

-Mr. Black

This article describes a collaborative project that first developed between a homeless man, E. L. Thomas-Smith-hereafter referred to as Mr. Black, for reasons that will unfold-and me (Micah) between August and December of 2006. The project has continued intermittently to the present. It took place in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and where, in the context of a graduate seminar in public anthropology, I initiated a research and writing partnership with Mr. Black. Our project began as a proposal that developed into the co-authoring of two articles for the newspaper StreetPulse: Homeless Cooperative Newspaper (for which Mr. Black is a columnist); evolved into a term paper I wrote for the graduate seminar, eventually becoming a conference paper; and ends here (at this stage, at least) with this journal article.² Though written in the first person and presumably for a mostly academic audience interested in the issues of collaboration in anthropology, the article is co-authored with E. L. Thomas-Smith/Mr. Black for reasons that will become clear.

At the start of our project Mr. Black had been homeless for roughly two years. In January of 2007, however, he was finally approved for and moved into low-cost assistance public housing on the immediate outskirts of downtown Madison, where he continues to reside. Mr. Black adds:

Since that time I've also been blessed to have the opportunity to obtain a full, on-line educational program through which I'll be able to obtain a bachelor of arts in the field of social science with a concentration in Black History. Also, now that I have improved my status of living, although it's very modest, I am no longer considered one of the homeless ones by the homeless. They seem to feel that I have crossed over to being one of them, one of the haves as opposed to being one of the have-nots.

My motivations for collaborating with Mr. Black were academic and personal; scholarly and activist. On one level I was seeking to engage with "the public" as a way of bridging what some consider a growing gap between anthropology and the general public (Eriksen 2006). I also wanted to learn more about homelessness.³ My immediate goal was to enter into a dialogue with Mr. Black in order to learn more about his everyday life, perceptions, and history. Mr. Black's motivations were professional, personal, and activist oriented, as he...