Don't read this post, it's private

Because I'm supernerd with a socially unacceptable supernerd focus on things like economic demography, I sometimes (OK, I lied, sometimes actually means, like, all the time) develop my own theories about sociology and anthropology for fun. Hey, I'm the girl who purchased and actually reads The Statistical Abstract of the United States 2008 to relax, so this is perfectly normal behavior.

So anyway, one day Dan, Dan's mom, and I were all hanging out in the Chinatown in Manhattan. And just so you know, the Manhattan Chinatown is the White People Chinatown, so don't go there if you want to experience duck blood tofu stir fry or peruse the phones at questionably-legal T-Mobl outlets in huge four-story Asian malls. The Asian People Chinatown is in Queens, although according to Dan, this Chinatown is rapidly becoming diluted through the efforts of opportunistic Cantonese businessmen who have realized that White People love to blow money at the Habachi Grill and Buffett, not to be confused with the Hibachi Grill and Buffet.

But back to my original point. It was around six in the evening and I was probably freaking out because it was too loud, too crazy, too cold, and too late. We were walking down the sidewalk with hordes of White People looking for a place to eat. We passed a hole-in-the-wall that smelled funny and had lots of Cantonese people yelling, so we figured it was a pretty good place. Before we tried to shove our way in, I happened to glance over to the front of the building. There, right in the middle of all the hub-bub, was one of the cooks at the restaurant. He was squatting on the sidewalk between the sewer and an empty Orange Julius cup and happily consuming his dinner of noodles and tripe. (Tripe is the nice way of saying cow stomach, and although I'll eat it on occasion, I'm not fond of it; it tends to be pretty gamey and hard to chew.) It was then that I had my Sociological Revelation.

The human conception of privacy is totally subjective.

This guy didn't give a hoot about where he ate his dinner. He didn't need no table or chair or even a wall to lean on. He also didn't care if he was intruding on the rights of others to use the sidewalk, walk over the sewer, or squash the Orange Julius cup. He didn't need privacy to eat.

I know for an incredibly shy person like Yours Truly, it's really hard to eat in public, because people might try to talk to me or something. I'll go out of my way to find a chair or a table or something so I can eat in relative peace and quiet. I've been known to avoid restaurants because I can see through the windows and notice that (gasp!) I would have to sit next to someone else to eat my food.

Most of us, I think, conceive of privacy as the ways that we can isolate ourselves, our families, our friends, or our other social groups from the outside world. When we eat out, chances are that most people like to eat at their own tables (there is family style too, of course, but that's a horror beyond imagination). We park our cars in our own garages; if not, we try to carve out "our" parking space on the street. At night we close our doors and lock our windows. We live in our own houses, not in a boardinghouse of multi-family flats like those of early 20th-century New York. We tend to like being by ourselves, because ya know, it would be incredibly awkward to dance in our underwear in most public areas. However, as I was enlightened, not everyone has this conception of privacy, as illustrated by the Chinese chef.

Which brings us to an explanation of a slur against African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans who live in poorer areas. Please remember that I am trying to explain why this might have come about, not actually well, using the slur.

Wikipedia tells me that a porch monkey is an ethnic slur for someone who hangs out on "front porches or steps of urban apartment complexes in US cities". Although I've rarely heard this particular term used, I've heard plenty of people talking about how unsettling it is to drive through certain areas of a city and see all the sofas on the porch, and depressing it is to see all the people hanging out on the corner doing absolutely nothing with their lives. At first glance, yeah, maybe this is disturbing.

But privacy is subjective. Different groups have their own conceptions of privacy. I'm not sure if this phenomenon is an ethnic thing or a socioeconomic thing, but just because it's easier to make my point I'm going to go for the socioeconomic reasons. Let's say you're part of a lower-income family living in an urban area. You spend a big chunk of your paycheck every month on your rent for an apartment that gets you one floor of a circa-1910 row home. There's barely enough room for you, your wife, and your two kids. There are too many people in too small a space, so there's really no privacy in your apartment. There's no privacy in a public area, either. But heck, who needs privacy, anyway? You and your buddies still get along wherever you hang out, which is usually not your tiny apartment. The least you can do is make you and your family and friends all comfy on a sofa on your front porch. It's a place where you can talk, eat, drink, or whatever in relative comfort. You could also go hang out in front of the corner store, so you can still talk, eat, drink, or whatever, but there's the extra bonus of never being more than a few steps away from a very large bottle of Mountain Dew and a couple of bags of chips. You've got all you need.

Perhaps some groups hang out in public spaces because they don't have much access to private spaces. Or perhaps they don't feel the need for a private space. For the Chinese chef, it was probably a little bit of both; he didn't have much access to a private space but he probably could have found something a little more private if he really wanted it, maybe a step somewhere or a stool in the back room of the restaurant.

I think a lot of middle-class and upper-class Americans look at the sofas on the porch and inwardly cringe at how the neighborhood they grew up in is starting to look like a real dump. Why the heck can't the current residents stick the couch inside? Don't they know that sofas are for your home? Are they just that uncivilized?

Nope, just a different way of doing things, just a different conception of privacy.

So that's my theory. And about a year ago I read a book about the sociology of suburbanization (shut up, I hear you laughing from over here) which theorized my theory, just with fancier words and more data. Also, the author had a doctorate, but we don't talk about that.