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.

  • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • masquenox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Grouping people based on similarities is not inherently bad.

      “White” is not a “similarity” - it’s a racial classification.

      • BakedGoods
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        5 months ago

        Which is completely useless because it has no scientific basis.

        • masquenox@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The supposed “racial commonality” proselytized by white supremacists is purely a product of “scientific racism.”

          No… it’s not a question of splitting hairs.

          • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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            5 months ago

            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.

            • masquenox@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I thought the last of you

              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.

              • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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                5 months ago

                Same thing.

                “Race isn’t real” provides cover for less blatant forms of racism, especially institutional bias. Also, it’s an obviously stupid philosophy.

                • masquenox@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Same thing.

                  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.

                  • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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                    5 months ago

                    colonized world

                    lol

                    I can’t imagine the mindset of someone so divorced from reality. It must be like living in a cult.

    • conciselyverbose
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • conciselyverbose
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          5 months ago

          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.

          Black people from Chicago, St Louis, and Oakland have cultural similarities.

          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.

          • robdrimmie@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            Wikipedia has an entire article on African-American Culture.

            African-American culture,[1][2] also known as Black American culture or Black culture in American English,[3][4][5][6][7] refers to the cultural expressions of African Americans, either as part of or distinct from mainstream American culture. African-American culture has been influential on American and global worldwide culture as a whole.[8][9][10]

            • conciselyverbose
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              5 months ago

              Is Wikipedia claiming that your black friends aren’t really black if they don’t match some arbitrary bullshit?

              • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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                5 months ago

                Descriptions of groups of people are not 100% binding to all members of that group. They are broad generalities.

          • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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            5 months ago

            Most white people from the same neighborhoods will have mostly similar cultures

            Absolutely not true!