First thing's first: KEEP. THIS. SHIT. CIVIL. If you can't talk about race without resorting to childish insults and rude generalizations or getting angry at people who don't see it your way, leave the thread.
With that said, I bring you to what can hopefully be the general thread about race.
First, a few starter questions.
- How, if at all, do you feel your race affects your everyday life?
- Do you believe that white people (or whatever the majority race in your area is) receive privileges simply because of the color of their skin. How much?
- Do you believe minorities are discriminated against for the same reason? How much?
- Do you believe that assimilation of cultures is better than people trying to keep their own?
- Affirmative Action. Yea, Nay? Why or why not?
Also, a personal question from me.
- Why (in my experience, not trying to generalize) do white people often try to insist that they aren't white? I can't count the number of times I've heard "I'm not white, I'm 1/4th English, 1/4th German, 1/4th Scandinavian 1/8th Cherokee, and 1/8th Russian," as though 4 of 5 of those things aren't considered "white" by the masses. Is it because you have pride for your ancestry, or an attempt to try and differentiate yourself from all those "other" white people? Or something else altogether?
edited 30th May '11 9:16:04 PM by Wulf
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But the thing is Alice is actively rejecting the culture, not being benignly indifferent to it like Charlie is.
edited 3rd Jun '11 5:29:59 AM by MRDA1981
Enjoy the Inferno...For the same reason they might want to work hard at school, learn good manners, try to figure out which kind of job they might want to do - because they want to succeed as adults. And if they don't know better, it's up to their parents, teachers and other adults to tell them that what makes them popular with other kids their age isn't the same as what will help them later on.
(Of course, not being black, I don't know how much being able to "speak white" actually helps, but I expect it can turn it useful at critical times like job interviews and dealing with the police or buying/renting a home in a non-black neighbourhood - "speak white" seems weird here, because the African Americans I know speak "normally", even among themselves; "Ebonics" is a bit of a foreign thing to me.)
edited 3rd Jun '11 6:13:10 AM by SlightlyEvilDoctor
Point that somewhere else, or I'll reengage the harmonic tachyon modulator.Ebonics is a slang. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with using slang, but using it in official situations makes you look stupid
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - Barkey^^
I like to think of Ebonics as halfway between standard English and a dialect. It makes sense, given the alteration to grammatical rules. After all, you could replace English with Japanese words and it would still essentially be English, just with codewords. Grammatical alterations are where languages begin to much more tangibly establish themselves as different.
This makes Ebonics a fair bit more interesting than slang, because slang is more or less the codewords concept from above. There's no real difference between UK English and Australian English, for instance. But Ebonics has a combination of grammatical alteration and slang that makes it unique.
If I was a linguist or philologist, it'd probably be a high-priority study.
Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — WatchIf the language you've speaken your whole life with friends and family is frowned upon by society, there's really two ways to go about it, you either conform to society and in extreme cases turn against said family and friends for not doing the same, or you decide society can go fuck itself if it's gonna tell you you're wrong.
As for "playing white", it can go seriously too far:
There's no such thing as cultural neutrality, though. Benign indifference is still a rejection of the culture, and when the dominant culture is one which is in several respects hostile to the culture in question, there's going to be a values clash there.
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffThere is a difference between negative and neutral feelings towards cultures. I'm neutral towards, for example, Spanish culture but I'm not hostile towards it
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyYes, of course... I'm not seeing how this is relevant to my point.
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffBlack person who doesn't want to follow ghetto culture but isn't actively fighting it is also at risk of ghetto dwellers acting hostile towards the said person.
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyWell, if that black person isn't following ghetto culture, what culture are they following? If it's one resembling the dominant American culture, then they will be adopting traits associated with those hostile towards said ghetto culture.
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffSo, getting education, not being violent and not using Ebonics is defined as hostility?
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyNo, having a negative attitude towards ghetto culture and associated values (e.g. anti-intellectualism, ebonics) is hostility towards that culture.
And said negative attitude is, I believe, common enough within white American culture for behaviours associated with said white American culture to be associated with said hostility.
You'll note that I'm not actually advocating or expressing approval of anti-intellectualism or violence, here.
edited 3rd Jun '11 10:59:50 AM by BobbyG
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffSo, basically, just not acceptin this culture means that their hostility towards you is some kind of justified revenge? I don't get it. If this is hostility, then this kind of hostility should be positive - it's Stop Being Stereotypical, it's exceeding excpectations, it's the most effective proof of the theory that black people are not stupid
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyBut that's defining "stupid" in terms of the intellectual type of intelligence valued by mainstream Western culture. As in, who gives a shit, right?
To which I expect you'd say, "wrong". Because their values are not your values. The people you are complaining about do not have the same values as you. Or me, for that matter.
(Where our values apparently differ is that I consider Stop Being Stereotypical to be utter bollocks. It's one of the most insulting tropes there is.)
edited 3rd Jun '11 11:03:12 AM by BobbyG
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffSo, if you are black, then anti-intellectualism and violence are a good thing? That sounds racist
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyNo, if you belong to a specific type of ghetto culture stereotypically associated with black people but not actually synonymous with African-American culture, anti-intellectualism is a good thing and violence is under some circumstances acceptable or even laudable.
I'm talking about what is very likely a minority within African-American culture here. Quite possibly a minority within ghetto culture, even, though I don't know the statistics.
This is not something exclusive to black culture, either. The British insult "chav" carries similar connotations, and is typically directed at white people.
edited 3rd Jun '11 11:08:04 AM by BobbyG
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffWhich pretty much means that this particular culture is wrong. While I believe that cultures should coexist, some things should be never treated equally - violence, racism and crime aren't justified just because everyone around you does it
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyIt means that the culture is not something which can coexist peacefully with mainstream American culture. By the values of mainstream American culture, it is wrong.
However, to attempt to counter this problem by attacking all African-American culture is not only short-sighted and bigoted, it's potentially horribly counter-productive.
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffFirst of all, I don't care about mainstream American culture because I'm not even American. I just tend to have values. And I don't attack whole black culture, just the ghetto part
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyWhat, specifically, is wrong with Ebonics?
We are discussing a specifically American subculture here, so American culture is entirely relevant.
edited 3rd Jun '11 11:13:37 AM by BobbyG
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffNothing is really wrong with Ebonics other than it's just a slang - with only difference being that users want it treated the same way as language. I just don't think there is much difference between Ebonics and, say, Netspeak or Cockney Rhyming Slang.
What is IMHO wrong with ghetto culture is its materialism, glorification of violence and gang membership, racism (mostly against whites, Asians and Hispanics) and anti-intellectualism
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - BarkeyEbonics is not a slang, as has already been mentioned. It has its own grammatical structure, which makes it a dialect. Furthermore, it is considerably more enduring than most slang lexicons, which tend to be fads.
I have mixed feelings about materialism. I agree that the other things you listed are problematic, and society would be better off without those.
edited 3rd Jun '11 11:20:51 AM by BobbyG
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The StaffI don't know, it just sounds like the same rehashed excuse over and over again about why Blacks aren't succeeding in life. Jimmy crack corn cuz he don't care. These days it is Blacks that don't want to go to school.
You know the root problem is opportunities in life. If you go to a garbage school, you've no prospects for academic success and it shuts out all the highest paying jobs. Then drug running makes you money when you're basically 8 years old, by the time someone is 14 years old (high school age), they've been in the drug culture for 6 years. Especially at that age, it's a really really long time.
Until the government spends the same per capita on them as they do everyone else, I'm not going to believe that opportunities are anywhere close to equal between ethnic groups.

There are schools where all students speak Ebonics, as well as many teachers. I went to a public school in the richest part of Philadelphia, and I barely got any grammar education there. The public schools that many Ebonics speaking children go to are extremely poor, financially and academically. The poorest children don't have TV's, and languages are not primarily acquired from television; they are acquired from the childrens' actual surroundings. Plus, why would a Black child who grows up around Ebonics want to study and emulate the way that White people on television speak? An immigrant who manages to learn perfectly proper English has had many more resources, spending all of those years getting a proper education, than those that poor Black children in the ghetto have.
Yes, there are people, in the present day, who can only speak Ebonics.
edited 3rd Jun '11 5:35:13 AM by Grain
Anime geemu wo shinasai!