Chapter 9

Race and Peeing on Sixth Avenue

Mitchell Duneier

There are few topics about which there is less frank talk than race and
racism. On Sixth Avenue, one of them was peeing. On a fall afternoon,
I sat in my office on the eighth floor of the Social Science Building at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had stolen a few minutes be-
tween office hours and the upcoming noon department meeting to fin-
ish listening to one of the many tapes I had made while working as a
vendor of scavenged written matter with unhoused and rehoused black
men during the previous summer in New York City’s Greenwich Vil-
lage.1 As I listened to the tape, I squirmed in my seat, for I had been
putting off peeing (“holding it in”) so I could get to the end of the tape
before the start of the noon meeting.
I came across a dialogue between two unhoused men—Mudrick
telling Keith that the Assistant Manager kicked him out of McDonald’s
for not being a “customer” when he tried to use the bathroom. A com-
parison I did not plan to make was suddenly evident: Mudrick is an un-
housed vendor. He works on the street. I am a professor. I work in an
office building. The unhoused vendor, a fifty-seven-year-old black man,
has just relied on the goodwill of a teenage black boy with the title “As-
sistant Manager” to let him use the bathroom. I, by contrast, use the
bathroom of the social science building whenever I please.
We are told by the methods literature to ask questions that will en-
able us to dialogue with theory, that are important in the real world,
or make some contribution to the literature. What we are not told is
how to overcome blinders that may derive from differences between
ourselves and the people we write about. These blinders influence the

215
216 mitchell duneier

conception of questions, and the determination that certain topics

should be noticed in the first place.
On my way to the faculty meeting I stopped in the eighth floor men’s
room. As I stood in front of the urinal, I thought of Mudrick’s not hav-
ing the same opportunity on the sidewalk. Where did Mudrick pee? My
mind wandered to Sixth Avenue and here is the image I saw: Unhoused
black men—Mudrick, Keith, Ron, and others—their backs to me,
standing urinating against the wall of the elite Washington Square
Court condominium or in a large trash container rented by the Gap. It
was a scene I had observed often during my years working as a vendor,
but one which had never registered as important enough to jot on a
note pad, or think about twice. It was so much part of my taken-for-
granted reality that it did not bear note. I had probably assumed that
the men who were peeing against the side of the Washington Square
Court condiminium were just lazy, and no different, by the way, from
all my upper-middle-class male friends who do the same thing when
they are in the middle of the golf course and are too lazy to go back to
the clubhouse to take a piss. This is the kind of male behavior I have
taken for granted throughout my life. And the things we take for
granted often do not end up in our field jottings.
On the tape I had just listened to, I was confronted with a single
conversation that posed a challenge to my taken-for-granted assump-
tions. Mudrick had been excluded from the McDonald’s bathroom. As
an unhoused man he was not peeing against the condominium out of
the same kind of laziness I had observed in my upper-middle-class
white friends on the golf course.

Racial Insights, Class Locations

But why, if I had been working out on the street every day and night
with these men, had I not understood this to be a problem? How was it
that while working with the housed and rehoused vendors I had not
noticed this basic aspect of their lives, let alone conceived of it as a re-
search issue?
As an upper-middle-class white male, I had skin and class privileges
that the men I was working with did not have. As I thought back to the
previous summer on these blocks, I thought of the hundreds of times I
 Race and Peeing on Sixth Avenue 217

had crossed the street and darted to the back of Pizzeria Uno without
once wondering if anyone would deny me entrance. Though we were
occupying the same physical space and engaging in common activities
out on the street, my experience of urinating (and, I would later learn,
of defecating), had been radically different from that of the men I
worked with. This is part of the reason I did not perceive it as a re-
search topic. The fact that I did finally consider it, that I did ultimately
recognize a research issue, came from a constellation of lucky circum-
stances, one of which being that while listening to the tape in my office
far away I happened to have been squirming in my seat, holding it in,
which made me particularly sensitive to the issue of peeing when I
heard that five-second snippet of tape that might have otherwise run by
unnoticed.
Now here is a question. What if I had not belonged to a more privi-
leged social position than my subjects? What if, instead, I was poor and
black and similarly excluded? I would surely have understood this to
be an aspect of daily life, but would I have understood it to be a topic?
I don’t know the answer, but one possibility is that being excluded
from public bathrooms is so taken for granted on the street that it is
rarely discussed. I never heard discussions about it during the previous
summer, and the discussion I did hear on the tape was hardly a discus-
sion, more like a reference to an incident that did not deserve elabora-
tion. I do not believe that someone from the same social position as the
vendors would necessarily have seen exclusion from bathrooms as a re-
search topic, any more than my colleagues at the university would see
the circumstances of bathroom use on the eighth floor of the social sci-
ence building as an interesting research issue.
I suspect that a black male professional researcher might have had
less difficulty than these men gaining access to local public bathrooms,
but I cannot be certain. Researching race usually entails researching
class and it is often difficult for researchers to know if they are being
treated differently from the people they write about due to skin, class,
gender privileges, or by some interaction between them. Despite the so-
cial differences between us, it is possible that I would have arrived at an
understanding of this situation if the men had talked about it. They did
not. I remain uncertain as to how to interpret their silence. Did they
simply find this to be an unremarkable aspect of their struggles as un-
housed men, since this form of exclusion was so routine? Or did that
218 mitchell duneier

want to protect me (and themselves) from further humiliation and em-

barrassment by not discussing my own racial and class privileges as a
white upper-class academic? I have routinely noted that people who ex-
perience race and class discrimination tend to be quite sensitive toward
the feelings of those who do not share their experiences. In fact, in my
experience neither blacks nor whites in the United States talk honestly
about race in the other’s presence.

Further Uncertainties: Rapport and Acceptance

When one of the differences that separates me from the people I write
about is race, there can be much uncertainty as to whether I am hearing
what I need to hear or know what I think I know. (Of course, this also
applies to issues of class and gender.)
Consider an event that occurred one time when I appeared on Sixth
Avenue at approximately 6:00 a.m. for my first day of work as a ven-
dor.2 Within minutes of my arrival that first day, I knew that it would
be difficult for me to gain the trust of the men. Not only was I sepa-
rated from them by racial privilege, but the social class, religious, eth-
nic, and educational gulf between me and them was significant. How
could I expect them to trust me?
The men were wondering the same thing. One conversation cap-
tured on my tape recorder illustrates this. I had been interviewing one
of the men, who had been holding my tape recorder, when I got called
away.
While listening to the tapes a few months later, I came across the en-
suing conversation. The participants have asked me to conceal their
identities here.

“What you think he’s doing to benefit you?” X asked.

“A regular black person who’s got something on the ball should
do this, I would think,” said Y.
“He’s not doing anything to benefit us, Y.”
“I’m not saying it’s to benefit us,” said Y. “It’s for focus.”
“No. It’s more for them, the white people.”
“You think so?” said Y.
 Race and Peeing on Sixth Avenue 219

“Yeah. My conversations with him just now, I already figured it

out. It’s mostly for them. They want to know, why there’s so much
homeless people into selling books. . . . I told him because Giuliani
came in and he said nobody could panhandle no more. Then the re-
cycling law came in. People voted on it.”
“Case in point,” said Y. “You see, I knew he had to talk to you. I
can’t tell him a lot of things cause I’m not a talker.”
“I told him, in California, there’s people doing the same thing that
we’re doing. They doing it on a much more higher level. They are
white people. You understand?”
“Yeah.”
“They have yard sales.”
“Yeah.”
“They put the shit right out there in their yard. He knows. Some
of them make a million dollars a year. But what they put in their
yard, these are people that put sculptures. They put expensive vases.
These are peoples that drives in their cars. All week long, all they do
is shop.”
“Looking for stuff.” said Y. “Like we go hunting, they go shop-
ping.”
“Right. Very expensive stuff. They bring it and they put it in their
yard and sell it. And they do it every weekend. Every Saturday. Every
Sunday. So they making thousands. He’s not questioning them: How
come they can do it? He’s questioning us! He want to know how did
the homeless people get to do it. That’s his whole main concern. Not
really trying to help us. He’s trying to figure out, how did the home-
less people get a lock on something that he consider lucrative.”
“Good point,” said Y.
“You gotta remember, he’s a Jew, you know. They used to taking
over. They used to taking over no matter where they go. When they
went to Israel. When they went to Germany. Why do you think in
World War II they got punished so much? Because they owned the
whole of Germany. So when the regular white people took over, came
to power, they said, ‘We tired of these Jews running everything.’”
“But throughout time, the Jewish people have always been busi-
ness people.”
“But they love to take over.”
Y laughed.
220 mitchell duneier

“Of course” X laughed, hysterically. “That’s what he’s doing his

research on, now. He’s trying to figure out how did these guys got it.
How come we didn’t get it?”
Y laughed.
X continued laughing, hysterically, unable to finish his next sen-
tence.
“I don’t think so,” said Y.
“But he’s not interested in trying to help us out.”
“I’m not saying that, X. I’m saying he’s trying to focus on the
point.”
“I told him that, too,” said X. “Everyone he talk to, they’re gonna
talk to him on the level like he’s gonna help them against the police
or something like that. They’re gonna look to him to advocate their
rights.”
“No. I don’t think that, either. I think it’s more or less to state the
truth about what’s going on. So people can understand that people
like you and I are not criminals. We’re not horrible people. Just like
what you said, what happens if we couldn’t do this? What would you
do if you couldn’t sell books right now?”

Hearing those stereotypical, ignorant, and possibly anti-Jewish

words many months after I had been on the street, brought it home to
me that—conventional wisdom to the contrary—participant observers
need not be fully accepted or trusted in order to learn many things. I
had no idea that X harbored any suspicions toward me, yet I had gone
about my work on the blocks throughout the summer that preceded my
listening to this tape. In this sense, fieldwork is very much like life it-
self. We may feel fully trusted and accepted by colleagues and
“friends,” but full acceptance is difficult to measure by objective stan-
dards and a rarity in any case. If we cannot expect such acceptance in
our everyday lives, it is probably unrealistic to make it the standard for
successful fieldwork.
At the same time, participant observers like myself who do cross-
race fieldwork should be aware that there are a range of things mem-
bers who belong to different racial groups may not say in the presence
of someone they consider a racial outsider. For blacks in the United
States, it has been necessary as a survival mechanism to “wear the
mask,” to quote the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote:
 Race and Peeing on Sixth Avenue 221

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our
eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties. (Dunbar 1967: 167)3

Dunbar’s words are no less relevant today, and it would have been
a methodological error for me, a white researcher, to assume that ap-
parent rapport is real trust, or that the poor blacks I was writing
about would always feel comfortable taking off the mask in my pres-
ence. I assume that the tone and content changes when whites are in
the room.
Indeed, there are a range of things that I might have never heard,
simply because I am a white man. For example, if a vendor had a neg-
ative experience dealing with a white customer, it is likely that he
would not have made an antiwhite or anti-Semitic statement in my
presence. But the fact that such utterances never occurred in my pres-
ence does not mean that they did not occur at all. My particular job
as a social scientist is to look for answers to research questions based
on the data a white, upper-middle-class Jewish scholar can be ex-
pected to collect, and to avoid research questions that I cannot possi-
bly answer reliably, given the influence of my social characteristics on
what I can expect to see and hear. Although it is impossible to know
all the questions that I can or cannot expect to answer, I try to avoid
research questions that assume I will be privy to openness from
blacks, especially about whites.
This does not mean that I don’t sometimes find out about things I
hadn’t expected to. I learned how to do fieldwork from Howard S.
Becker, and one of the things he taught me is that most social processes
have a structure that comes close to insuring that a certain set of situa-
tions will arise over time. In practice these situations require people to
do or say certain things because there are other things going on that re-
quire them to do that, things that are more influential than the social
condition of a fieldworker being present. Most of the things in a ven-
dor’s day—from setting up his magazines, to going on “hunts” for
magazines, to urinating—are structured. This is why investigators like
myself can sometimes learn about a social world even though we did
222 mitchell duneier

not have the rapport we thought we had, and although we occupy so-
cial positions quite distinct from the persons we write about.
As my research came to its conclusion, some of the vendors allowed
me to work on their sidewalk because they understood the purpose of my
research the way I did, others wanted to have me around as a source of
small change and loans,4 while others may have decided they would tol-
erate my presence because they were accustomed to tolerating lots of
things they did not trust on the sidewalk. However, it would be naive for
me to think that I knew what they thought, or that they trusted or ac-
cepted me fully. And most importantly for the purposes of the present dis-
cussion, I recognize that I will never be certain how the details of their
lives were not visible to me due to my social position.

Access to Racist Statements

While I may be disadvantaged when conducting cross-class and cross-

racial research in public, my access to specific forms of information
about how racism operates is facilitated by my position as an upper-
class white male researcher. For instance, I was able to gain access to
uncensored antiblack sentiments. After I had completed my research, I
began having discussions about my findings with Nolan Zail, an archi-
tect from Australia on the frontiers of designing innovative housing al-
ternatives for unhoused persons in New York City. One of the issues
we discussed concerned the difficulty some unhoused men had in mov-
ing their magazines and personal belongings around, as well as the
complaint made by Business Improvement Districts and police officers
that the presence of these vendors was unsightly and frustrating be-
cause their merchandise and belongings were strewn on the pavement
below their tables. I asked Zail whether he could design a vending cart
which could address some of these concerns.
Here was a potential opportunity for us to use what we knew to
make a small if practical contribution to improve conditions of Sixth
Avenue. Surely this was not the same as helping to transform the larger
structural conditions which brought about these problems, but it might
make a difference in the day-to-day lives of some of the men, one of
whom was Ishmael Walker. First, though, it was necessary to find out if
Ishmael wanted such a cart, and how he would feel about such an ef-
fort on his behalf. I could not ignore the fact that both Zail and I are
 Race and Peeing on Sixth Avenue 223

white, and that Ishmael had described being treated in patronizing

ways by many whites throughout his life.
Zail suggested that we meet with Ishmael to try to establish what
kind of functional characteristics he was looking for in a vending cart.
There on the sidewalk, Zail spent time with Ishmael trying to under-
stand how his table functions within his business and life routine as an
unhoused vendor. He told Ishmael that he would be happy to assist him
with the design and development of the cart.
Ishmael responded by describing a number of needs surrounding his
desire to display written matter in a way that his experience as a ven-
dor had taught him would maximize sales. He described his need for
sufficient storage space to safely hold his merchandise and personal be-
longings. He also said that it would be useful if the design could make
provision for a separate lightweight carriage which he could use for his
hunts and that could be attached to the vending cart.
Zail designed a cart and presented drawings to Ishmael on several
occasions to get his further input and reaction, after which he modified
the designs to incorporate these further suggestions. In one of these
later meetings, Ishmael expressed his desire to pay back the costs of
manufacturing the cart with installment payments. The issue of money
had not yet come up (I knew it would in due time), and we agreed that
this would be a good way to do it. In the meantime, I received permis-
sion from Ishmael to try to raise the money to initially pay for the man-
ufacture of the cart through donations.
When Ishmael was satisfied with the design of the potential product,
Zail and I scheduled an appointment with one of the largest manufac-
turers of steel and aluminum food carts to ask him to fabricate the
metal vending cart. The manufacturer was already making a food cart
pretty similar to the one we would ask him to make for us. His reaction
to our ideas, and the difficulty we had getting the cart built, became an-
other kind of “data” for me, showing how much prejudice there is
against the destitute and unhoused.

“Okay, let’s see what you got,” he said, as we began the meeting.
“This is an example of what we have in mind,” I said, as Zail
placed the architectural drawings in front of him.
“Did you show this to X?” [X was a powerful man in New York
real estate who the manufacturer asserted was an enemy of sidewalk
vending.]
224 mitchell duneier

“No,” I replied.
“Well then, forget about it!” he said.
“He doesn’t have any say about what goes on in Greenwich Vil-
lage,” I said.
“Mitch, please! They own everything that’s happening. The real
estate board controls New York City. They are the real estate board.
You’re gonna show them this? Are you kidding? They want to get rid
of these people!”
“Part of their argument for getting rid of these guys is that it looks
so bad,” I responded.
“It’s not a question that we can’t make something,” he said. “It’s
the opposition. If we go out there with one of these carts, they would
crucify us. They would nail me to the cross.”
“Nail you?”
“Look! You know what started all this? Really simple. They want
to get all the Niggers off the street. They told me: ‘We want them off.
They’re bad for business!’ You want to put them on, Mitch! Why you
making so much trouble, Mitch? You’re spitting in their face with
this!”
“What we are saying,” Zail interjected, “is that this is what you
can do to improve the image. . . . It’s actually not too dissimilar from
the cart you have there.”
“So how does this help the homeless?”
“Well, for several reasons,” Zail continued. “One, is that it allows
storage. Two is display. It can be displayed in a professional manner,
rather than strewn all over. Now he can actually display it neatly. In a
sense it’s a more professional way and more aesthetically pleasing.”
“All we’re asking is for you to make one of these for us on an ex-
perimental basis,” I said. If it worked for Ishmael, we would likely
order more.”
“I’ll make anything you want,” the manufacturer replied. “If
that’s what you’re telling me to do. But there is nothing that will
change their appearance!”
“It will increase the aesthetic of this type of vending,” I said.
“What about him, the homeless person?” he asked.

We seemed destined to go around in circles.

A few weeks later, Zail called to confirm a subsequent meeting with
the manufacturer, but he said he had changed his mind. He wouldn’t
 Race and Peeing on Sixth Avenue 225

have any part of our project. He didn’t want to do anything to make

the “homeless” vendors look more like the food vendors who consti-
tuted the real market for his carts. He said he was also concerned about
antagonizing the real estate interests of the city, who he said were al-
ready trying to eliminate food vendors on public sidewalks. (In fact,
one year later Mayor Giuliani tried to eliminate food vendors from
hundreds of locations in lower Manhattan and Midtown, but changed
his mind in response to a public outpouring of support for the food
vendors.)
It stands to reason that the white food-cart manufacturer felt com-
fortable employing racist language in our presence because he viewed
Zail and me as racial insiders. This final insight is not, of course, new
to researchers. When Drake and Cayton wrote about the attitudes of
white tavern owners in their classic study, Black Metropolis (1945),
they used quotations culled from interviews conducted by white re-
search assistants. Like the research assistants whose data became inte-
gral to Black Metropolis, it is unlikely that we would have ever been
privy to such data had we been black. It is likely that the white cart
manufacturer would have been less willing to openly express his atti-
tudes in the presence of a U.S. black researcher. This is consistent with
a pattern that I have witnessed in my everyday life whereby the conver-
sations among whites change in response to the presence or absence of
black people.

notes
I would like to thank France Winddance Twine and Jonathan Warren for their in-
sightful editorial guidance and Hakim Hason for many helpful conversations.

1. Manhattan’s Greenwich Village is an urban space characterized by ex-

tremes of wealth and poverty as well as marked ethnic and racial hierarchies.
My knowledge of the Village is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, pri-
marily on three adjacent blocks along Sixth Avenue, from Eighth Street and
Greenwich Avenue to Washington Place, over the period September 1992 to
October 1998, with daily observation from September 1992 to June 1993 and
complete immersion during the summer months of 1996 and 1997 (for more
details, see Duneier 1999). Taking advantage of a New York ordinance that
makes special allowance for the street sale of printed matter, the vendors sell
books (mainly used) and magazines from tables they set up on the public side-
walks.
226 mitchell duneier

2. A full account of the circumstances which led me to meet these men and
to begin working on the street can be found in the methodological appendix to
my book Sidewalk (1999).
3. I thank Aldon Morris for bringing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem to my
attention.
4. See Sidewalk (Duneier 1999) for a detailed discussion of this issue.

references
Drake, St. Clair, and Horace Cayton. 1945. Black Metropolis. New York: Har-
court, Brace, and World.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. 1967. “We Wear the Mask.” In Lyrics of Lowly Life
(Seacaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997.
Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.