OLDER BLACK MEN PLAYING DOMINOES: TALKING SHIT AND CREATING BLACK PLACE

The authors explore how a group of older Black men employ social, discursive, and semiotic practices to transform an ordinary room into a Black sense of place. These men have come to the same recreation center for decades to play dominoes and engage in talking shit-trading discursively clever and often uncensored remarks. More than a linguistic system, talking shit is a stylized expressive system of Black culture, of individual and collective identity. Talking shit is performed as play, which is not the name of an action but the name of a frame for action, and central to the construction of this Black place. Drawing upon five years of ethnographic research, we explore how the men's creation of a play frame promotes a spirit-like bonding of intimacy. Rich ethnographic scenes demonstrate the African-centered essence at the heart of a Black place that many whites would likely dismiss as insignificant, if not disreputable.