More on race and culture--part 1 (December '06)

I was just over visiting The Othergound Forum at MMA.tv, when I came upon a thread discussing how hip-hop culture has done much to regress the gains and advances made by the black revolutionary culture of the '60s and '70's.

This is all well and good.

What grabbed my attention was a statement towards the end of the first post talking about how "white people" encourage this and speculating about how "white people" might feel about this.

That's when it hit me that the very idea is silly, but not for any idealistic, "let's hold hands and sing in a colorblind world" sort of way.

Here's where the problem occurs.

Black people in the United States have a very unique history, and the culture has been affected such that even black people who are not descended from slaves have to deal with the fallout from a society that has evolved with inherent inequities when it comes to the races.

The development of "black culture" has been a way to deal with the fact that so many black people were robbed of any heritage or national identity by the slave trade, and many other black people who do have a national identity have found that they are treated as a racial group rather than as an ethnic group by the culture at large. Hence the development over time of a "black culture" instead of a Ghanan, or Kenyan, or Nigerian, or what have you culture in America.

That was setup...here's the point:

White people don't, haven't, and won't function that way. White people do not see themselves as white. They are German, Croatian, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Belgian, etc. They further divide themselves by region here in the US or political ideology or whatever, but not by race.

When black people talk about "white people" or "white culture," or the "white leaders," it just doesn't work.

There is no "white unity" and there is no "white culture."

It doesn't exist, and nobody is about to buy that it does, so when black people speak about "white people," white people either laugh or tune them out, because that kind of racial identity is utterly foreign to all but the most trashy and least educated fringes of "white" societies.

The argument is sticky because race and ethnicity are apples and oranges. They can't be equated.

Black people can choose to self-identify as "black people," but the projection of this unified identity on to "white people," doesn't and can't work. The histories are too different.

I think that many, many, many people have been trying to approach these issues as though there is some validity to the "unified race vs. unified race" approach. It's like having two teams on the same playing field, but one is playing soccer while the other is playing lacrosse. There's never going to be any resolution to that game.

I don't think we'll advance in discussions until we agree on the parameters, and that includes self-definition.

This makes for a nice lead-in to part two: The myth of the racial conspiracy.

Enjoy, comment, and tell your friends.

***P.S.--As an addendum to this blog, I'd like to add that I don't really buy that there is a unified "black culture" either, but since that seems to be an accepted premise in society and the media--accepted by perhaps the majority of "black" people as well--I ran with it for the sake of the blog.

I still maintain that people are people and that the color of your skin doesn't pigeonhole you into a culture if you don't want to be there. You can rebel, and I point to Fishbone as a proof of that.***