-
The Magic Negro, The Gay/Effeminate Psychopath, The Latina Maid, The Mighty Non-Whitey, The Wise, Old, Asian Asshole, The Cowardly/Incompetent Black Sidekick
-
“Then he told the whites in the room something I’d never really considered before. “If you woke up black tomorrow, you’d put a bullet in your head by the time the 6 o’clock news came on.”
-
“The Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has put out a press release condemning the media attacks against retired pastor Jeremiah Wright as an attack upon the whole African-American religious tradition and its place in black culture.”
-
“sadly, researchers found blacks once again hardest hit by a health problem: A whopping half of African American teens in the study had an STI.”
-
“More than a thousand people turned out Sunday to remember the victims of one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1968, members of Charlie Company killed as many as 504 villagers, nearly all of them unarmed children, women and
-
“With disappointing ratings across the board in a number of key regions, comedy drama Cashmere Mafia will be axed with only seven episodes ever being produced according to reports from the Washington Post.”
-
“These stories may then reaffirm white audiences’ perception of black dysfunction and allow them to use blacks as a negative counterpoint for their own images of normalcy and to affirm their sense of superiority.”
-
“Two teenagers pummeled a Latino man as he left a convenience store in Boulder Tuesday night, accusing him of “stealing our jobs,” according to Boulder police.”
-
“Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren’t racists. That’s because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps Mein Kampf in his back pocket.”
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
bradski wrote:
If find it sad that young white people who have learned and natural “black” linguistic or cultural tendencies are lampooned. It says so much about what is wrong in our society.
The other day, I was in K-Mart and a young white guy was helping me. If I were to close, my eyes I would have thought he was a young African-American because of the cadence of speech. The store clerk spoke the same way to everyone.
Later that same week, I met a young Latino with the same speech pattern.
I think there’s a difference between cultural appropriation that we see where rich whites pretend to be the other for coolness versus those who grew up as part of a community. They didn’t adopt an affectation; they are who they are.
If it’s non-whites who grow up in a majority white neighborhood learn the speech patterns of their peers and it’s accepted, then the same should be for young whites.
When I listen to Eminen or Kid Rock speak, I know that they are pretending. That is who they are. It’s not an act.
Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 2:00 pm ¶
Aaron wrote:
From AverageBro: “Race has been a constant topic in the news this year, mainly because a black(ish) man is running for President…”
(Sigh…) Here’s the same comment I left there:
Well, I’m ethnically and racially mixed: my dad is white, and my mom is a latina of mestiza race.
What does everyday racism look like for me? Well, I have to admit, I can pretty easily “pass”. I really don’t know whether most people assume I might be latino or not. I don’t feel that I am slighted on a particularly regular basis. But one of the most common, and painful, ways that I feel it is peoples’ whole attitude and perceptions surrounding mixed people.
First: “what are you?” Nuf said.
Next, people generally just don’t get it, at all. Some of that is not their fault. But I do think people hold the idea that mixed people make up a much less common portion of the population than they actually do. The worst is that nearly everybody seems to assume that you aren’t mixed, and identify as just one race or ethnicity, unless you say otherwise. They generally aren’t too shocked. But it still hurts that people act like mixed people don’t exist. I exist.
And worst of all, by far, is that everyone wants to define others’ racial and ethnic identities themselves. Look, society has created the definitions and ideas we have about race and ethnicity. And these definitions are not sufficient. As explained above, the average american conception of race just does not include mixed people. To me, that means that I hold an exclusive, unalienable monopoly on defining my own racial and ethnic identity, until society recognizes that not everyone fits neatly into just one category. And that goes individually for each and every mixed person. If someone I would think of as mixed identifies and black, that’s entirely their own business. If Tiger Woods wants to invent the word “cablanasian” for his race, good for him. Nobody gets to tell me what race I am. And nobody gets to refer derisively to Barack Obama as a black(ish) man, when he’s gone on the record as identifying as a “black american of mixed ancestry” if I remember correctly.
So that’s my daily experience with racism. People think they have the right to define others’ identity because they don’t fit neatly into the categories society has made for us. We’re told to choose a side. We’re told only one parent counts. We’re categorized however benefits others the most, rather based on our own identities.
Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 2:21 pm ¶