“The Sid Cartwright incident and more”: An African American male's interpretive narrative of interracial encounters at the University of Chicago

Abstract

In this narrative I capture part of my first year experience in the doctoral sociology program at the University of Chicago. I analyze entries from my U of C journal, recorded during the 1992–93 academic year, paying special attention to discussions regarding race and interracial interactions. I focus on “The Sid Cartwright Incident”—a negative encounter with a white professor —to elucidate ways in which race penetrated my everyday existence and pressed me to define sometimes ambiguous interracial interactions as unpleasant racial encounters. I reveal the complex and contradictory ways that my past experiences with racism and discrimination may have distorted my thinking about interracial encounters and at the same time invigorated my determination to move beyond those encounters. I conclude with a discussion of the cumulative impact of negative interracial encounters on African Americans.

Citation

Buford May, R.A. (2001), "“The Sid Cartwright incident and more”: An African American male's interpretive narrative of interracial encounters at the University of Chicago", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 24), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 75-100. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(01)80032-6