Not like “I went to school with one” but have had an actual friendship?
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently where people have confidently said things about the Black community that are ridiculously incorrect. The kind of shit where you can tell they grew up in a very white community and learned about Black history as a college freshman.
Disclaimer: I am white, but I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I was one of 3 white kids in my elementary school lol, including my brother.
But there are a huge number of black people in the country with a huge number of cultural backgrounds.
Depends on how you slice em. A white person from Minnesota is very different from a white person in NYC, but it’s often useful to group both of them as white to contrast with, say, Asian. In the same sense, Asian can mean Chinese, and Chinese can mean Taiwanese, etc
Grouping people based on similarities is not inherently bad.
It’s decidedly not useful to say they have the same culture, though, because they don’t. There are common elements, but they’re nowhere near the majority, especially comparing those common elements to the common elements they also share with most black Americans because they’re American.
Well that’s a ridiculous take. So it becomes impossible to discuss culture?
Black people from Chicago, St Louis, and Oakland have cultural similarities. If you refuse to acknowledge that, you’ve taken “I don’t see race” so far you’ve looped back around to racism. This is exactly what I was getting at with the question.
It’s perfectly possible to discuss culture. Race is a small part of their culture, and you talking about “you must not know black people if the black people you know are different than the ones from my neighborhood” is racist as fuck. You’re disqualifying a hell of a lot of black people from “really being black” with that shit.
Of course they do. Those are all urban environments. Most white people from the same neighborhoods will have mostly similar cultures, because, like I said, race is a small part of that culture.
Is it an important part? Absolutely. There are systemic issues that they are exposed to because of their minority status that white people in the same environment are not. But there are plenty of black people who aren’t from urban environments, and many of them are as different from black urban culture as they are from white urban culture.
Absolutely not true!
Wikipedia has an entire article on African-American Culture.
Is Wikipedia claiming that your black friends aren’t really black if they don’t match some arbitrary bullshit?
Descriptions of groups of people are not 100% binding to all members of that group. They are broad generalities.
Well that’s a ridiculous take. So it becomes impossible to discuss culture?
Black people from Chicago, St Louis, and Oakland have cultural similarities. If you refuse to acknowledge that, you’ve taken “I don’t see race” so far you’ve looped back around to racism. This is exactly what I was getting at with the question.
“White” is not a “similarity” - it’s a racial classification.
Splitting hairs
The supposed “racial commonality” proselytized by white supremacists is purely a product of “scientific racism.”
No… it’s not a question of splitting hairs.
I thought the last of you “race isn’t real lalala if I don’t acknowledge it it’s not real” people got shamed into silence decades ago.
You are confusing this with the “see no white supremacism, hear no white supremacism, speak no white supremacism” respectability politics that has been the default camouflage of liberal political establishments throughout the (so-called) “Cold War” up till today.
And no - they are still at it today.
Same thing.
“Race isn’t real” provides cover for less blatant forms of racism, especially institutional bias. Also, it’s an obviously stupid philosophy.
No, they are not. White supremacism is very real - if you exist in the colonized world (as both of us do) it’s so real that it literally dictates everything about your reality. That is why we say places like the US (and places like Canada, South Africa or Israel) is fundamentally white supremacist.
Race itself isn’t real and has never been - apart from a reasonable command of the English language and our place on the racialized caste system dictated by white supremacism, me and you have absolutely nothing in common. In our fundamentally white supremacist world, it’s the latter that is socially constructed as important in our respective societies. That doesn’t make our (supposed) “race” any more biologically real.