It sounds to me like your disdain is for certain characteristics that happen to be clustered around the ideal-yet-nonexistent view of 'what black is'.Shroom Man 777 wrote:I hate that crap. I don't have any problem with a black person who does not act degenerate. And I loath people who try to act 'black'. The only reason why I tolerate bits of that crap is because sometimes they come off as stupidly humorous.
So, does this make me a racist? My disdain for 'Black Culture', I mean. What say you?
I.e. making and playing music that might strike you as obnoxiously self-aggrandizing and cliquish, people conforming to a stereotypical image through clothing and adornments, participation in criminal gangs, sexism and treating women as possessions, illegal firearm possession/use, drug use and valuing predisposition to violence/abuse ('toughness') and the uneducation that is typical of being poor.
These aren't good things, and you're right to be repelled by them. The problem is the fact that they are associated with black people. I don't doubt that if a white guy did all the things above (without any trace of 'blackness' eg musicians) you wouldn't think any more of him.
I think the great ambiguities come from the fact that tribalism is an underlying human trait. Any particular 'image' or set of stylistic memes or 'subculture' that appeals to people will feed back to itself and grow, even without conscious adoption. Ideally they shouldn't exist, but various stereotypes of the 'ideal member of a subculture' arise, split, recombine, fall and transform. People feel compelled to rally to the security given by being a part of such a 'tribe', eventually being born and raised a part of it. Skin colour and particular sets of characteristics should not be generally clustered together, but it's a fundamental drive to find others like you and change yourself to approach the ideals of that group. Eventually, to both 'insiders' and 'outsiders' a subculture grows big enough for the set of valued characteristics to be linked together into a single stereotype, even if there are other examples where they aren't associated (e.g. Damien's friend with the characteristic of 'dark skin' without the others in the 'black' stereotype.)
Australian aboriginals are dark-skinned, but were never African immigrants. Yet they see the subcultures available around them while growing up (we get nearly all American shows/movies) and are drawn to those features they can identify with. One of the most obvious is that of dark skin and hence the African-American subculture. So you have aborigines with all the characterics of American black gangstas as a result of race, but not predetermined by it.
He talks about being in criminal gangs, treating women as 'hoes', doing drugs and prizing a lack of education, etc, ie 'acting degenerate'. If he has none of those characteristics and would like to see more people without them, i don't see a problem with that.RedImperator wrote:I like black people as long as they act exactly like me!I hate that crap. I don't have any problem with a black person who does not act degenerate. And I loath people who try to act 'black'.
