(no subject)

[novapsyche]

I know it's silly of me to continue to watch the thread over at MSNBC over the Imus controversy. It's degenerated even from where it was two days ago. I think I read it because like a train wreck it is so grotesque you can't look away.

There are people who chastise Black people for being "thin-skinned" and overly sensitive. "It's just a word! Get over it!" Or, "I haven't seen you chained and picking cotton lately." As greeneyedkzin said over in ginmar's journal, "Once again, we have a demonstration of how 'cancha take a joke' is asking less-privileged people to be complicit in their own denigration."

Then you have people who switch roles and claim victim status. Someone actually said, "It has become a social stigma to be a white person." Someone else stated that while Blacks are allowed to call each other the N-word, if a White person says something racial then "they" (Blacks) want to kill them. Kill them.

Remember, this controversy started out by a celebrity, who happens to be a Caucasian male, saying denigrating things about basketball players, who happen to be black and female. But somehow, the conversation (if you want to call it that) has drifted into Blacks wanting to kill Whites.

Then you have people who equate racism with a fad, like bellbottoms. "People of my generation have gotten over racism." "It's so 1990s."

I really fear for the future of my country.

Comments

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

black people in particular (and Native Americans) are very EXclusive rather than inclusive... that needs to be dissolved from both sides, not just one, if AS A RACE black people want to be treated as equals... Things like ebonics, the so-called pimp-limp, BUFU clothes, and many others serve only to emphasize differences... As long as you have an in-group/out-group dynamic it's bound to go both ways.

This is also a function of class, and to a lesser extent, age and gender. Every young black man I've ever seen in Hamtramck seems to behave as you describe, along with a lot of the women (I'm not sure it's as exclusionary as you think, though -- they're pretty nasty to each other, too). My son's school, on the other hand, is majority black (or maybe biracial), and none of the parents or teachers are like that at all.