As a person with a devout Catholic, conservative, Afro-Caribbean family, I literally have heard them espouse the whole “We’re better than those working-class black Americans because our culture is different!” line of thinking on multiple occasions.
I mean it is myopic but I get how it arises. If a suburban Afro-Carribbean lady goes downtown and is sexually harassed by some overfamiliar black dude with “no home training” it will color her perceptions of working class black Americans in the same way it would shape a suburban white person’s perception. And for black immigrants to America and suburban black Americans things like code switching, having non-stereotypically-black hobbies or fraternizing with white/non-black people extensively are not inaccessible or taboo things, so such people more easily navigate spaces where jobs and opportunities for wealth are more plentiful.
It’s myopic to pin all this on Black American “culture” of course because Black Americans are a people who have never had sovereignty or been the stewards of their collective destiny, and most of the “negative” behaviors blamed on “culture” are downstream from generations of targeted segregation/economic deprivation. But I do think if the white liberal/leftist response when say, there is a viral video of a group of black kids beating on a white kid is only silence, apologism, or tiptoeing, then the angry conservative response even while racially charged is sometimes actually closer to what middle class black Americans/Black immigrants actually want to say about such an event and it’s participants.
There needs to be a frank but forward moving vision involving some sort of direct reparations and mending the faults caused by historical race riots/redlining, to actually resolve key issues surrounding “Foundational Black American” neighborhoods.
One thing I can most certainly tell you is that, when my internalized racism was at its peak, being “not stereotypically black” played a role in it. I felt like both black people and white people were so focused on my race that they forgot that I’m an individual.
I’d get called an “Oreo” and that kind of shit for something as harmless as liking metal. I couldn’t just be a metalhead who happens to be black. Nah, that must raise eyebrows. Having gone through such massive amounts of internalized racism, I definitely know some aspects of where it can come from.
It took a major paradigm shift in how I was perceiving being black in America for me to overcome it. The stereotypes were just one aspect of why my internalized racism got so bad, and it wasn’t even the biggest reason.
I also saw posts by reactionary queer people (think /lgbt/ types) that reinforced the notion that POC are more likely to be queerphobic. This effectively led me to think, “If I’m queer and black, then black people are my enemy, and I should hate them.”
Nowadays, my thinking has certainly changed. It’s no longer “Black people are more homophobic, so I should hate my own race because I’m queer.” It’s more “White people will be racist to me, even the queer ones, and cishet people will be queerphobic to me, even the black ones.” It seemed as if I was pinning black homo/transphobia on race instead of just the fact that it’s black cishet people in particular being this way, just as white cishet people often do. However, I never got any shit or any kind of infighting from my fellow black queer people. Even beyond racism, forms of gatekeeping like transmedicalism and enbyphobia in the trans community are things I’ve only seen white trans people commit.
Definitely based for acknowledging that class seems to trump race in these circumstances, even if people don’t realize it. There seems to be a real lack of awareness of how all of this shit ties together in the grand scheme of things. Myopic, as you said.
As a person with a devout Catholic, conservative, Afro-Caribbean family, I literally have heard them espouse the whole “We’re better than those working-class black Americans because our culture is different!” line of thinking on multiple occasions.
I mean it is myopic but I get how it arises. If a suburban Afro-Carribbean lady goes downtown and is sexually harassed by some overfamiliar black dude with “no home training” it will color her perceptions of working class black Americans in the same way it would shape a suburban white person’s perception. And for black immigrants to America and suburban black Americans things like code switching, having non-stereotypically-black hobbies or fraternizing with white/non-black people extensively are not inaccessible or taboo things, so such people more easily navigate spaces where jobs and opportunities for wealth are more plentiful.
It’s myopic to pin all this on Black American “culture” of course because Black Americans are a people who have never had sovereignty or been the stewards of their collective destiny, and most of the “negative” behaviors blamed on “culture” are downstream from generations of targeted segregation/economic deprivation. But I do think if the white liberal/leftist response when say, there is a viral video of a group of black kids beating on a white kid is only silence, apologism, or tiptoeing, then the angry conservative response even while racially charged is sometimes actually closer to what middle class black Americans/Black immigrants actually want to say about such an event and it’s participants.
There needs to be a frank but forward moving vision involving some sort of direct reparations and mending the faults caused by historical race riots/redlining, to actually resolve key issues surrounding “Foundational Black American” neighborhoods.
One thing I can most certainly tell you is that, when my internalized racism was at its peak, being “not stereotypically black” played a role in it. I felt like both black people and white people were so focused on my race that they forgot that I’m an individual.
I’d get called an “Oreo” and that kind of shit for something as harmless as liking metal. I couldn’t just be a metalhead who happens to be black. Nah, that must raise eyebrows. Having gone through such massive amounts of internalized racism, I definitely know some aspects of where it can come from.
It took a major paradigm shift in how I was perceiving being black in America for me to overcome it. The stereotypes were just one aspect of why my internalized racism got so bad, and it wasn’t even the biggest reason.
I also saw posts by reactionary queer people (think /lgbt/ types) that reinforced the notion that POC are more likely to be queerphobic. This effectively led me to think, “If I’m queer and black, then black people are my enemy, and I should hate them.”
Nowadays, my thinking has certainly changed. It’s no longer “Black people are more homophobic, so I should hate my own race because I’m queer.” It’s more “White people will be racist to me, even the queer ones, and cishet people will be queerphobic to me, even the black ones.” It seemed as if I was pinning black homo/transphobia on race instead of just the fact that it’s black cishet people in particular being this way, just as white cishet people often do. However, I never got any shit or any kind of infighting from my fellow black queer people. Even beyond racism, forms of gatekeeping like transmedicalism and enbyphobia in the trans community are things I’ve only seen white trans people commit.
Definitely based for acknowledging that class seems to trump race in these circumstances, even if people don’t realize it. There seems to be a real lack of awareness of how all of this shit ties together in the grand scheme of things. Myopic, as you said.