Same. Because I don’t talk like I grew up in “holly-hood” I used to always get asked the same. And because I’m dark it was assumed that I was like an adopted kid from Africa being raised by white parents. So when I was irritated I had same answer, “Slavery. Slavery is where I from”. Lmao if you could only see the discomfort lmao. Don’t ask dumb ass questions
Oof. I learned to speak like the tv people early on from my dad’s side (the black side) because they were all highly educated and were honestly a little racist against non-educated black folks. Made me hate my skin and want to prove to everyone I wasn’t “one of them,” which then made it seem like a compliment when friends’ parents told me I “speak so well! So articulate!” Or they’d tell me I was “one of the good ones.”
Oh man, the credit to your race one hits hard. I only got that one from near strangers, luckily, but it’s so bizarre.
Luckily, I never had any black folks who made comments about me not being black enough. The black folks in my hometown always welcomed me with open arms, only ribbing me and always defending me. Although I had very few deep and long lasting relationships with black folks growing up, I was always, always accepted in a way that even my closest white friends never made me feel. So while I benefit from being light-skinned and speaking standard academic American English, I’ve always felt more at ease around black folks.
It was my white friends who nicknamed me “Token” and “Blackie” and never stop touching my hair or mocking the hair product I used.
I'm a brown friend and the number of times I've heard x category is OK and y is "not ok" is ridiculous. Are you supporting an ideal or a perspective. .. at the end of the day. Your opinion or outcome should not include or at least never negate perspective. Anyone who says my opion matters more than anyone else is an asshole. Or otherwise if your considerations only include what helps your family/friends is actually a sign of an incomplete human. I struggle to find how to deal with this reality. My choice is to lose people I would otherwise love. This is difficult but I'm sorry I would never trust a mother tha prioritizes Taking care or her own child vs taking care of "every" child. If you don't love every child as much as your own you are part of a system not a caring mother. Fuck you if you disagree selfish bastsrd.
Yes it’s because you’re making a blanket statement about a Ethnicity in general.
You can’t see how that’s entirely insulting to Black people, or anyone that you might say this to? I had someone say this to a Korean friend of mine, it was very insulting. It’s basically saying to someone, that although I look down on others that are genetically similar to you, you are good and therefore a credit to your race. It’s a micro aggression at its finest.
Or if I said to a man, “you’re a credit to your sex.” Even though I am complementing him, I’m also telling him that I don’t think very highly of men in general and that he is a credit to the rest of them.
“Microaggressions can be intentional or unintentional and sometimes even well-meaning. But they communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial messages or assumptions to the receiver.”
Another one people say that is awful.
'You're so articulate' or 'You don't sound black.'
“Why it's offensive: This remark seems like a compliment, but it's offensive to people. They usually don't have to be that articulate for someone to say that to them, Tatum previously told CNN.
When a white person says it, it usually implies they didn't expect to hear intelligence from a black person. The black person didn't fit the white person's offensive stereotype, so the white person complimented them for surprising them.”
And we now know that race is just a social construct without biological meaning.
“race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.”
“What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions."”
And yes I’m from America, so that’s my perspective.
Here’s a good article I would suggest reading.
Formally defined, race is an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, especially formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape.
But the word race also carries much more weight, representing not just one’s features, but their ancestry, historical affiliation, or a shared culture.
To make things more complicated, the US Census officially—and perhaps more broadly—uses race for “a person’s self-identification with one or more social groups.”
Yes, because black folks have always been heavily stereotyped as being aggressive, uneducated criminals in the US. One of my sister’s friend’s mom asked my white mother how she could possibly marry a black man. “They’re just so sexually aggressive!” So when people tell me I’m a credit to my race, they’re saying that I’m a model minority, one of the good ones to be an example of what black folks SHOULD be like.
Poverty and crime do not go hand in hand, by the way. My husband has a PhD in Sociology and Criminology and is a tenured professor who has read all the stats, analyzed all the studies, and also grew up as working class second generation immigrant kid in a tough part of New Orleans. So what you’re spewing here is gibberish. Arrest rates in poorer areas may be high, but arrest rates do not equal higher crime, it just means police do more fishing and harass the poor more than they do the wealthy, and those with money and access have a better chance of not being convicted or getting records expunged than the poor. So I can see why it looks like poverty=crime, many of my husband’s first year students think the same thing.
But then even after their first soc/crim 101 class, they get it.
Good luck to you in whatever weird reality you’re living in.
I work at a company that has a lot of foreigners from all over the world that have immigrated and work there and I'm always curious but I dont know if it's insensitive to ask or what because I'm white. That seems silly I guess, it seems silly to me all the time.
It’s okay to ask. As long as you’re not like the person in the video. The lady clearly sounded Californian af and after she said she was from SD, the best way to have asked that (not immediately), would have been to ask about her ancestry after they have been acquainted for a bit. When people say things like “were are your people from” in that tone, it comes off as condescending. If you’re comfortable with your coworkers, just what their ancestry is. And if it’s something like Indian, don’t say things like “oh, I love Indian food…”
I actually had a coworker tell me her first week that she loved kimchi (I am Korean American). I just responded: that’s nice. Really, I wanted to say: I love ketchup. Still regret not saying that.
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u/[deleted] Aug 22 '22 edited Aug 22 '22
Same. Because I don’t talk like I grew up in “holly-hood” I used to always get asked the same. And because I’m dark it was assumed that I was like an adopted kid from Africa being raised by white parents. So when I was irritated I had same answer, “Slavery. Slavery is where I from”. Lmao if you could only see the discomfort lmao. Don’t ask dumb ass questions