"THINK BLACK"

[BlondGirl]

Re: Acting White (Or Black)

You cannot possibly act white. You ARE WHITE OR BLACK

Hhmmm... As the mother of a biracial child, it has been interresting to see the responses his color gets us.
In the winter, his color fades and no one really looks at us. But it is not winter now and he has spent every day in the pool for the last 2 months and is mighty dark. Since he is olive skinned to begin with, it gets noticed.
Interrestingly enough, I never get racist comments from white folks--it is generally black people who feel it is acceptable to make racist remarks. (Mexicans and Asians do not make cracks to us either--it has been strictly black people who are derogatory.)
Occassionally, people will ask (his ethnicity is not obvious--he appears to have features of every race, so people do wonder.) My son identifies himself as the race that is the origin of his color--but he lives in a white family and it is apparent in the way he speaks. (Yep, we have a bit of a Southern drawl.)

Oh, and my son is does not identify himself as either white or black. There are other races out there and it is very, very egotistic to automatically discount them.
Being "colored" did not only refer to people who were black. There are many variations of "non-white".
(Why does this remind me of the discussion of "vanilla" as a category as opposed to "Non-BDSM"?.....)

 

[Ally C]

Originally posted by Mischka the first thing I'd do is ban all neutral car colors. Tan, in all its bland shades, contributes to the downward spiral of our society. If we have to spend as much time as we do in cars, then I want to be surrounded by vivid colors.[/B]

"You can have any colour as long as it's black" has now been superceded by "you can have any colour as long as it's vivid".

I think there's no harm in celebrating our respective origins and keeping alive a sense of community and culture. There are always some who politicise difference and draw attention away from the fact that lots of 'races' are quite capable of getting on with one another. The myth that any collection of people has any common ground or divine goal based on [and even beyond] the fact of skin colour is often overlooked by idiotic recourse to biased reinforcement of historical differences; as if these ought to suggest more of the same in the future. Relegating the argument to either / or [e.g. 'black' or 'white'] can't hold any appeal for anyone with the slightest trace of intelligence.

Yes, there are a lot of complex societal issues bound up within ideas of 'race', but these are never any excuse to discriminate against others. The fact that some choose to do so proves that a problem still exists. If we could remove extremists and extreme views from the equation, we'd probably still be left with a rather unfair situation. This is because we are all ingrained to varying degrees with racial preconceptions; how we respond to these is entirely up to ourselves. It just so happens that the extremists generate a lot more 'front page' news which doesn't have any bearing on the importance of their views or organisations, and which publicises what are relatively small (and unwelcome) ideological groupings. Such extremists are very much outnumbered and don't deserve to make the headlines, but this subject matter will continue to make the news because of its shock value if nothing else. The least we can do is to use such outbursts to take the chance to re-evaluate our own positions and beliefs, and to remind ourselves of how much more civilised we are.

 

[Angel]

BlondeGirl

I wasn't talking about actual race. I was talking about accusing others of ACTING black or white (Or hispanic or whatever)

Which is ridiculous.

I'm talking about a white boy listening to 2Pac and people telling him to "Quit acting black"

One of my friends in High School was a very sweet, nice intelligent guy who loved heavy metal music. We used to hang out on the beach at night and blast the radio. He was black, and all four years of school, other black students would harass him for *Acting too white*.

Shit like that irks me.