Notting Hill Carnival: Community or Cultural Tourism?

Since I have known my beau, he has been raving about Notting Hill Street Carnival. He described it as a huge street party, lots of reggae music and goat curry- basically, my idea of purgatory. I do not like reggae music- I know, its a sin being from Santa Cruz, California- more like I DO NOT LIKE white trustafarians who seem to populate reggae events.

So we made a deal- I would go with him to Knotting Hell (I have such an open mind!) if he would accompany me to Virgina Wolf's house AND the Jane Austen Home in Winchester (two outings which I am sure he finds equally stomach turning).
On the day of the event, I was overwhelmed with seeing actual, live, in your face sound systems.

However, what troubled me was the seeming cultural tourism of the crowd. Notting Hill is the same 'hood populated by Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in the film with the same name. It is a mix of council flats and extremely expensive and manicured properties. This contrast raged throughout the carnival- white hipsters seemed to be trying on commodified blackness for the day, as they noshed on jerk chicken and uncomfortably grooved to dread-locked MCs. My boyfriend pointed out how many different people were attending the event, and what a great example of communities coming together under the mantel of music. I agree on this hypothesis- or at least its veneer. As I scratched a bit deeper, it seemed the black folk were doing most of the serving while the predominantly white revelers drank, drugged and took a walk on the exotic side of mechanized blackness. I wanted to take a cross section of the audience, and ask them what the yellow, black, green and red that they adorned themselves with meant - besides a watered down, commodified image. In light of the recent violence and riots in London, I wondered aloud how many of the carnival's visitors actually would think about the plight of those who lived in the area invaded for the weekend, those lacking the £250 designer jeans and carefully tatooed exterior. The piles of trash littering the street seemed an apt parallel to the group putting on the event- thrown to the side until they could again be of use to the greater populace.
Cameras clicked everywhere, as people attempted to document the partying. The most distriburbing amatuer paparazzi was an asian guy in zipping around the crowd on roller blades, openly snapping pics. This summed up the day for me- the voyeristic snap shot into "how the other side lives," to be taken home as a trinket of red, green, yellow and black.