Successful Black Prejudice

Originally posted by HarlemHottie
My use of the word 'originally' does not imply 'no longer.'

I know. Let me be more clear and say that I consider Judaism ONLY a religion.

There are Jews of every race

Originally posted by HarlemHottie
Who said anything about their race?

You did:

Originally posted by HarlemHottie
The same thing happened to Judaism, originally a religion, now a race, a nationality and, I think, a political stance.

Tell me, if black is considered a political stance (by blacks) is white also?

Originally posted by HarlemHottie
I hadn't given it any thought.

I wonder if you would give it some thought. I'm trying desperately to understand your culture/race. While you don't owe me any explanation and it's not necessary that I understand, I'm trying. If I knew whether or not many black people think of "white" as a political stance, it would help to sort out my opinions on the matter. I know you can't speak for all black people, but you can speak for yourself.

Originally posted by FlyersFan
Perhaps the people who do that are actually anti-white racists and that they are jealous of the people who are successful and therefore call them the lowest name they can think of ... white.

It could be any of a hundred reasons. Someone had a good point about calling their white classmates nerds because they're so smart. Sure, it's not a racist remark, but it seems that race is so much a part of minorities' lives (in general) that it would be natural, if a person was jealous or envious of someone who did better than they, to call them a racial name.

It seems to me that some black people who are very successful (Oprah, for example) are seen as 'abandoning' their race by many middle- or lower-class black people and others (50 cent) are not. I'd like to know the difference. (If anyone has the answer)...

Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
I know. Let me be more clear and say that I consider Judaism ONLY a religion.

That's debatable. I think the line has been blurred a bit lately... but this is off-topic, so I won't be discussing it here any further.

You did:

My bad, I guess I'm getting sloppy because I'm getting annoyed. That's why I try not to let it happen too often.

I wonder if you would give it some thought...I know you can't speak for all black people, but you can speak for yourself.

Try reading my initial thoughts instead of telling me what I'm not doing. I did say something.

I'd like to know the difference. (If anyone has the answer)...

I told you what I thought in a u2u, remember?

And I don't think anyone could give you 'the' answer. You're more likely to get someone's best guess.

Originally posted by whaaa
It's just a thinly disguised forum to bash "Libs" ....

You don't know the political leanings of all the people posting here. If you did, you'd see how funny your statement was.

Fact is that this is NOT a 'stereotype'. It's a real phenomenon. Some black people are predjudice against those blacks who become successful. Some folks just don't like the fact that a spotlight is shining on that ugly truth.

I thought perhaps the reason for this phenomenon was probably something very simple - Jealousy of someone successful, with anti-white bigotry the reason for the particula name calling. But HH says that she highly doubts that is the case. So perhaps it's something more complex.

At any rate, the author of this thread asked .. why does this happen? And it DOES happen.

OH ... btw .. whaaaa, I don't listen to Rush. I think he's an idiot.

Originally posted by HarlemHottie
You're more likely to get someone's best guess.

Which is what I gave. My best guess and I said it was just a guess. The only way for the person who authored this thread to get a good answer would be to dig up some sociologists/psychologists who can give professional input. Otherwise, we are all just guessing.

This thread kind of points out to me just how far as a culture we still have to go in the US.

Personally, I consider Rice and Gonzales and Bush and Cheney and most of the current adminstration to be miserable failures and a disgrace to my country.

I have plenty of criticism for all of them. But none of it is based on their race or gender or religion or any other irrelevancy.

For anyone, of any color, to include this kind of nonsense in a criticism of any of these clowns is, in my opinion, stupid. Just as stupid as it is to criticize Barack Obama because his middle name is Hussein, or maybe his daddy's name was Baracka. What could be possibly less important than that? (I do not support Obama either, just btw).

Race, gender and religion are possibly the three LEAST important factors that determine the quality of a person, or how well they do their job or serve our country.

Whoever created the Aunt Jemima box of Rice should be ashamed. And while I fully support their right to have their opinion, and express it in the manner that seems most appropriate to them, I am embarrassed to share citizenship with people who cannot express such criticism without stooping to stupid and childish irrelevancies to do so.

Originally posted by HarlemHottie
I told you what I thought in a u2u, remember?

I hadn't read the entire U2U when I posted here. I have now. Thanks.

Interesting take on the subject ....

MLK Day: the left's National Day of Victimhood
It appears that Democrats and liberals have turned today's remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into an anti-war protest. Look no farther than today's Tennessean, which features a news story on Rev. Dr. James M. Lawson, who used a Nashville pulpit yesterday to denounce the war. (How is it that liberals can use the pulpit for political aim, but conservatives can't?) The editorial board also carries the water by noting that "Four days before America would pause today to officially honor the life and achievements of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the 22nd time, thousands of Americans rallied against President Bush's plan to send 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq at more than 500 sites across the nation."

A separate editorial by Dr. Lewis V. Baldwin, "Dream deferred - but it is not too late," picks up the mantra of victimhood:

Racism and segregation are still evident in churches at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning, in the configuration of our residential areas, and in our shift from busing to neighborhood schools. The culture of economic injustice, poverty and homelessness has become so institutionalized that it is difficult to reconcile with King's idea of the American dream.


While I agree with Dr. Baldwin's Sunday morning assertion, the rest of his lamentations reveal an inability to grasp the reality that the promised land Dr. King saw from the mountaintop has largely been realized. Today, blacks enjoy opportunities that civil rights-era blacks could only dream. Yes, racism does still exist, but people of all races are guilty of it. Indeed, one of the widest barriers to a colorblind society has been erected by liberals, whose affirmative action programs, worship of racial and ethnic diversity, and adherence to multiculturalism have put the focus back on skin color and not character content. Yes, there is a crisis in the black family, but it is more the result of liberal social programs than institutionalized racism.

In much the same way they turned the funeral of Coretta Scott King into a Bush hatefest less than a year ago, some on the left are using the opportunity of MLK's birthday to once again slam the President and wallow in victimhood rather than reflect on the legacy of the man and enjoy a dream that has been captured.
markarose.com...

Semper

Another good article from a Black Author on the subject.. (On Topic)

This is a very long article...

Here is the Article... (This is a PDF Document, anyone having trouble reading it let me know and I will convert it for you.)

www.manhattan-institute.org...

Here are some excerpts ...

Well, forgive me: this collective portrait of degradation bears so little resemblance to my own experience, or the experience of my friends and acquaintances, that I can only throw up my hands.
Certainly, my friends and I can cite unpleasant and possibly racially tinged incidents here and there in the course of our lifetimes. But for none of us are
these the anecdotes we come home with on a weekly, monthly, or even annual basis. Not once to date have I had a nasty, intrusive run-in with the police, despite being no stranger to nightlife in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Oakland, and despite having driven a beat-up car in tony white neighborhoods on a regular basis when, as a graduate student,
I earned extra money playing piano at parties.

I have been condescendingly assured by some connoisseurs of victimhood that I am an exception— “not the type the cops look for”—and that I have a
“straight” appearance. But as for appearance, I am hardly given to the bowtie look, and in any case the going wisdom is that police harassment is as likely to befall the black lawyer in a Lexus as a teenaged boy in the ’hood. Nor do my black male friends who are darker-complected than I, burlier in build, or less middle-class in speech and demeanor have tales to
tell of racist abuse by the pigs.

Marable, for instance,
simply regurgitates the story about an epidemic of black church burnings in the South in the mid- 1990’s—an epidemic, it has been decisively and repeatedly shown, that never happened. He decries the reduction in minority admissions at Berkeley after Proposition 209, ignoring the fact not only
that minority admissions rose at most of the other University of California campuses, but that they have since risen annually at both Berkeley and
UCLA, the two elite institutions. He repeats the myth (propagated by Jonathan Kozol) that innercity schools are undone by insufficient funding,
when a vast body of research has demonstrated that such discrepancies have been exaggerated or are nonexistent, and that untold numbers of schools excel on shoestring budgets. He then sees this alleged
disparity as justifying lowered admissions standards to college for all black students, ignoring the mountain of studies and books (including mine)
showing that even middle-class black students at fine schools lag behind in performance.
Ishmael Reed is so caught up in his battle at “the
front” that he often simply fabricates.4 “The only black opinion-makers with any visibility are those who serve as mind doubles for their neoconservative
or right-wing bosses,” he asserts, requiring us to classify as obscurities writers like Bob Herbert and Brent Staples of the New York Times and, for that matter, Marable and Reed himself.

~~~~~~~

[John H. McWhorter]


When I got my doctorate in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993, the furthest thing imaginable to me was that, ten years later, I would be in the midst of a second career as a pundit on race issues, let alone find myself classed as a black conservative. True, in college and graduate school, I had felt frustrated and dismayed whenever a successful black of my acquaintance would go out of his way to adopt the pose of a victim of
American “racism.” But to me this sort of angry display was of merely passing interest. My own life was built around writing academic papers, making the rounds of linguistics conferences, and playing piano and performing on stage as a hobby. In 1995 I took my place as a professor of linguistics at Berkeley with little expectation that life would
change much thereafter.

Semper

For the sake of both sides of the story being told, here are a few more articles to get people thinking:

john mcwhorter: talking android

Would you have any idea who John H. McWhorter was if, instead of being black, he was white?

The answer is obviously, unequivocally "no." McWhorter is an able linguist (The Missing Spanish Creoles is a nifty piece of work) but his entire portfolio as a racial pundit springs rather specifically from the combination (novel to some; useful to others) of his blackness and his neo-conservative inclinations. Without blackness to authorize his critiques of his brethren, McWhorter would be just another white neo-con competing with the already-entrenched Marty Peretz's of the world for the privilege of castigating the coloreds for fun and profit. Instead, the relatively young linguist has published a number of books, appears regularly in various media, and has landed a perch at the Manhattan Institute (the same think tank that initially sponsored, then thought better of, Charles Murray), from which he publishes largely self-evident books and newspaper essays.

[...]

Typical of the talking android, McWhorter both rejects blackness and relies on blackness (or at least relies his biological association with it) to guarantee him professionally. Extra-planetary or no, at the end of the day McWhorter's only professional qualification is that he's a black man who can be relied upon to write about his people to the satisfaction of certain classes of white folks, his race validating an endless stream of negative anecdotes at the level of accuracy.

[...]

This would all be problem enough, but in editorial environments where McWhorter is likely (and no doubt profitably) the only black man in the room, his ignorance becomes practically impossible to address. Setting aside the intuition that most of these essays are acts of politically-motivated hackery, the editors of City Journal or The Sun imported McWhorter to interpret black talk for them in the first place, so they can't be expected to meaningfully assess the merits of his interpretations beyond how well they conform to general conservative principles. Take away the epidermal guarantor of McWhorter's blackness, though, and the above essays would fall apart even for their editors, crumbling to dust like undead things exposed to sunlight.

(This was written by a black author. Notice that there were no words ascribing to "Uncle Tom" and "Oreo" used within the text.)



[edit on 29-1-2007 by ceci2006]

Well ceci, semper's post is written by a black man speaking his firsthand experience and yours is written by someone having an opinion of another. Two very different things. One is a man's own take, and the other is someone slagging someone because they think just like you. You haven't shed any new light here. You just showed us that someone else shares your opinion, which is understood.

[edit on 29-1-2007 by rocknroll]

This is written by Earl Ofari Hutchinson. This is an interesting piece that points out some of the motivations behind some of the sources presented:

No Requiem for a Black Conservative

Conservatives desperately need blacks such as [Claude]Allen to maintain the public illusion that black conservatives have real clout and a popular following in black communities. Their great value is that they promote the myth that a big segment of blacks support political conservative principles. In the last presidential election, Bush, Republican National Committee head Ken Mehlman and strategist Karl Rove spent millions on outreach efforts to attract African-American voters. Mehlman has since barnstormed the country in tow with conservative blacks to primp the GOP's message to black groups. Allen and a handful of other blacks have relentlessly pumped Bush's policies on TV and radio talk shows, in op-ed columns and in debates with civil rights leaders and liberal Democrats.

The young black conservative political activists such as Allen spin, prime and defend administration policies on affirmative action, welfare, laissez-faire capitalism and anti-government regulations with the best of white conservatives. Bush's controversial federal court appeals nominee, black California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, once brashly claimed that she was "one of the few conservatives left in America." Allen did not make the same bold claim, but he is every bit the conservative ideologue as Brown.

But none of their efforts touting GOP policies have helped much. Bush still got only a marginal bump up overall in the black vote in 2004, and with his Katrina bumble his poll ratings are stuck even deeper in the tank with blacks. Still, Republicans have done everything possible to ease the way up the political ladder for their bevy of black conservatives. Allen's career is a textbook example of that. He was barely out of the University of North Carolina when he became the spokesmen for Sen. Jesse Helms' re-election campaign in 1982. He moved from there to work for Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He then bagged a prize clerkship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Next, he was appointed counsel for Virginia's Attorney General, and then he became Virginia's deputy attorney general and later secretary of health and human services. When his nomination for appeals court judge didn't pan out, Bush made him his top domestic policy advisor.

Originally posted by rocknroll
Well ceci, semper's post is written by a black man speaking his firsthand experience and yours is written by someone having an opinion of another. Two very different things. One is a man's own take, and the other is someone slagging someone because they think just like you. You haven't shed any new light here. You just showed us that someone else shares your opinion, which is understood.

Yes, my first source is written by a Black man who has a critical opinion of another Black man. And you're right. This source also proves that Black people can have a critical analysis of other Blacks without resorting to name calling or exhibiting a sense of envy about another's success.

My second source is from a Black man who provides a critical analysis of Blacks without resorting to name calling or demonstrating envy of their success.

And, you know what that means? Somehow that a stereotype in the wrong hands does a lot of damage--especially when it is collateral.

In other words, this thread is not humanistic in any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it is only used as a place to get someone to support the warped policies presented by not only the Black neo-cons, but also the GOP in general.

Black people from all stripes are rather successful in their own right. And if the author of the thread was truly altruistic about Black achievement, he would not only post the "success stories" of Blacks in the GOP; he would also try to find sources from all over the political spectrum of Black people who are similarly attributed.

It's not enough to praise someone for being successful and intelligent; you have to examine what their motivations, personal history and endeavors in society mean.


[edit on 29-1-2007 by ceci2006]

Originally posted by ceci2006
In other words, this thread is not humanistic in any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it is only used as a place to get someone to support the warped policies presented by not only the Black neo-cons, but also the GOP in general.

I don't view people as Black neo-cons or whatever. I hate politics. I just view people as human. We are different races. Different people. Different problems.
Ceci, please give me your definition of a black neo-con?

And if the author of the thread was truly altruistic about Black achievement, he would not only post the "success stories" of Blacks in the GOP; he would also try to find sources from all over the political spectrum of Black people who are similarly attributed.

????????

Confusing and obviously misinterpreted... NO WHERE did I espouse any attempt towards altruism in regards to anything...
So, End result..

NOT TRUE

Instead, it is only used as a place to get someone to support the warped policies presented by not only the Black neo-cons, but also the GOP in general.

Are the BLACK Neocon's not members of the Black race? Are they then deserving of less respect because they disagree with your politics?

Your use of the vernacular Neocon, is patently representative of a lack of respect for those that disagree with you...

Interesting...

How far is Oreo and Uncle Tom from Neocon? Is the only separation, the color of their skin?

Semper

Originally posted by semperfortis
Your use of the vernacular Neocon, is patently representative of a lack of respect for those that disagree with you...Interesting...How far is Oreo and Uncle Tom from Neocon? Is the only separation, the color of their skin?

LOL, I'm failing to see the separation.
This is the way I'm reading it also.
Is there a difference between an Uncle Tom and a black neo-con?
And why is being an Uncle Tom bad?
What is a black neo-con?
I need enlightenment.........

Originally posted by ceci2006
It's not enough to praise someone for being successful and intelligent; you have to examine what their motivations, personal history and endeavors in society mean.

Sometimes their motivations are very personal and a nothing but a strong expression of their personal values. Intruding upon, and presuming to know, their motivations, is both presumptuous and an invasion of their personal privacy.

How funny it is that the "invasion of privacy" issue comes up when questioning the motivations of those who favor the dominant culture.

There are some posters who don't take the "privacy issue" into account when describing in their diatribes what they think the Black Community ought to do.

You can't have it both ways.

[edit on 30-1-2007 by ceci2006]

Originally posted by ceci2006
There are some posters who don't take the "privacy issue" into account when describing in their diatribes what they think the Black Community ought to do.
You can't have it both ways.

But obviously you can, huh?
There's that doublestandard again.

On the contrary.

It is a serious matter when those from the dominant culture purport to know all they can about people of color, state discrepancies about them and have others take this as gospel.

Since some from the dominant culture have no regard for the privacy of some groups of color, is it quite fair for a member of color to cross those boundaries in order to do research and critically analyze those from the dominant culture and their supporters? Is it also fair for a person of color not to have any regard for the feelings of someone from the dominant culture when they do such a critical analysis?

Otherwise, why do some members of the dominant culture have no regard for a person of color when they spread these stereotypes nonchalantly and deliberately? Do those from the dominant culture solely have the power to "critically analyze" who and what they want because they can "violate the privacy of all others" without being chided for it?

This issue most definitely needs to be explored in this thread, especially when it has to do with the emission of such stereotypes as purported in the OP.


[edit on 30-1-2007 by ceci2006]

Originally posted by FlyersFan
Which is what I gave. My best guess and I said it was just a guess.

Why are you being so defensive? That wasn't, like, sneakily directed at you, you know.

The only way for the person who authored this thread to get a good answer would be to dig up some sociologists/psychologists who can give professional input. Otherwise, we are all just guessing.

I've stopped quoting experts because people tend not to read them, or at least, respond to them. It's a huge waste of time for me... but, since you asked, here's what two economists have found. I tend to trust 'numbers people' on this more than sociologists or psychologists. There's no telling whether the other two types of 'experts' are lying, except for your 'gut', so it's easy to go with whoever reinforces your original opinion. You can at least check a proof.

An Economic Analysis of 'Acting White' by Roland G. Fryer (with D. Austen-Smith). Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2005

First, acting white.is not unique to Blacks and we (purposefully) reference other groups plagued by similar phenomena. Second, and most important, because various insidious forms of social interaction such as acting white.exist does not imply that nothing can be done about them. The comparative static results suggest that improved labor markets, group incentives, and means for supporting implicit community-specic contracts are likely to undermine acting white. In the past, the sorts of interaction explored here have been used by some to argue that particular subgroups are responsible for their own marginalization [see, for example, McWhorter 2000]. The implication being that policies aimed at eradicating educational achievement differences are ill-advised. In contrast, by analyzing such a phenomenon in a rational choice framework, it is transparent that the behavior is a result of strategic interaction for which any group with the same initial conditions would fall victim. As such, nothing should be ascribed to the inherent values, preferences, or ideologies of particular groups who are plagued by this insidious form of social interaction.

I take this to mean that any group with the same history would have the same stigma (against 'acting white'), that it is not the result of any cultural deficiency.