Ingrid Banks

Ingrid Banks, Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will analyze ethnographic data from five U.S. cities to write a book looking at black-owned beauty salons. While a great deal of research has examined black-white cultural contact in work settings where the races are compelled to interact, this work will focus on an area that is less well-documented: interaction in black-dominated settings that whites choose to enter. Banks' early results indicate that blacks welcome integration of these primarily homogenous environments.