I really have issues with this ideal. Personally these images do not represent me:
I know I am not some magical Negro, so why do they take negative stereotypes and run with it? Are they taking their personal experiences and applying it to the whole race of people?
Do they believe most blacks are poverty stricken and on welfare? That we have four kids and three baby daddies? Do they believe we all listen to Jay Z and think Tupac and Biggie are gods? Is the assumption most blacks think education is not important?
Have American blacks been used to uplift non American blacks to be the "ideal" black?
Are we building a hierarchy based upon geographic location?
Is this another divide and conquer mentality? Must American blacks always been seen in a negative light?
7 comments:
As someone who is half African-American I must say that sterotypes run deep on both sides.
As far as white Americans(SOME) are concerned, they prefer blacks who are not AMERICAN because they don't have to feel guilty. That said, go to France or England where they prefer an African-American over any other black.
Oh, wow. I just wrote a paper on this very subject, and am going to work on having it published next semester.
I have had black people from other countries tell me to my face that they are better than African-Americans because we are:
1) lazy
2) uneducated
3) ghetto
4) criminal
5) and really really lazy!
Some friends and I got kicked out of a cab in DC by a West Indian cab driver because he said he wasn't taking us,"Lazy ni%%as" anywhere. And then he said he'd pull his gun if we didn't get out!
Not some white cabbie, a BLACK cabbie!
Internalized oppression runs so deep and really this attitude that one group of black folks is better than another IS a perfect strategy...No one has to disunify and destroy us. We're doing it FOR them!
As someone who is half African-American I must say that sterotypes run deep on both sides.
As far as white Americans(SOME) are concerned, they prefer blacks who are not AMERICAN because they don't have to feel guilty.
Beauty In Baltimore:
I definitely understand that. One person who was from Africa was talking about Eddie Murphy and his negative stereotypes he used in his comedy years ago about Africans. There are stereotypes on both sides. I think my frustration is due to the fact that SOME people from all walks of life come here, benefits from the African American struggle, and then want to look down upon those they deem inferior (ie American blacks). The sad thing is, most of their beliefs come from the negative images of media, not always personal experience.
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Jerrica:
Wow. So I am not making this up in my mind. To me this is a new thing. I never knew that there was a hierarchy of us vs. them. I honestly didn't.
Good luck getting your paper published!!! I would love to read it.
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Liz:
That cab experience was ridiculous. You should have called the cab company and complained. That is unacceptable. I like how he determined you guys were lazy all by getting into a cab.
As we've seen this is a mighty sore subject. Look at it this way, the children of rich people are often entitled self-important brats who don't know the value of hard work. Even if their parents manged to build up a fortune after a hardscrabble childhood, they look down on people with less money and feel superior (even though the fortune they enjoy is through no effort of their own).
Although it's definitely wrong, I think it is part of human nature to become arrogant after benefiting from someone else's struggles. The cost of progress is the ingratitude of (some) those who come afterwards.
Siditty - That *situation* on another blog did get out of control. But I refuse to participate in the us vs. them foolishness. As I said on that blog, at the end of the day we are ALL black in America. Period.
I have always been aware of and experienced to a degree, the us vs. them (the them acting superior) mentality. It IS frustrating and on a bad day, infuriating...BUT I know who I am and the beauty, dignity and grace of the struggles of my parents surviving and striving through the Jim Crow south era. NOBODY can make me feel ashamed of who I am or define ME by their ignorance.
pinky
Siditty,
Sorry for another long comment, but I thought this was very interesting.
Model, S. and Fisher, G., 2001. Black–white unions: West Indians and African Americans compared. Demography 38, pp. 177–185.
Before justifying the expectation of nonlinearity, we develop our key hypothesis: native white-West Indian pairs will be more common, all else being equal, than native white-African American pairs. To support this expectation, we take into account the attitudes of whites and both groups of blacks. In this regard, two data sources are helpful: the responses to a special module of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the responses to ethnographers' interviews with West Indian Americans. In 1990 the GSS inquired about feelings toward several new immigrant groups, including West Indian blacks (Smith 1991). Respondents were asked to rank groups in terms of their social standing, on a scale ranging from 1 (low) to 9 (high). West Indian blacks received an average standing of 3.56, a score lower than for "Negroes" (4.17) and nearly identical to that for African blacks (3.58). The term Negroes was used in order to maximize comparability with older versions of the survey. The terms African American and/or British West Indian probably would have yielded higher scores. Still, if these figures mirror perceptions about intermarriage, then whites feel more positively about unions with African Americans than with West Indians.
Yet, a large ethnographic literature argues otherwise (Arnold 1996; Foner 1985; Gordon 1979; Waters 1996, 1999). Most British West Indians maintain that they receive better treatment from whites than do African Americans. A Belizean teacher in Los Angeles told Faye Arnold, "West Indians are treated the best....[T]o be truthful--I have spoken to a few people and they told me that they had dealings with Whites--you know people working with white people--and they feel that foreign Blacks are treated a little more considerate than American" (1996:16). Caribbean blacks have a variety of explanations for this more cordial reception. Their diligence and dependability are cited frequently; among related considerations, West Indians are said to be more comfortable with white authority than are African Americans, to be less angry toward whites, and not to feel that American society "owes them something" (Foner 1985; Waters 1999).
One way to reconcile these contradictory findings is to suppose that the whites who ranked "Negroes" more favorably than West Indian blacks in the GSS had little if any contact with West Indians. West Indians are a relatively small and geographically segregated group; the majority of American whites probably have never encountered any. Moreover, some West Indians have admitted to ethnographers that they take steps, when meeting whites, to communicate their heritage and the meaning of that heritage. Another respondent told Faye Arnold, "I always go to school the first week. I volunteer. I join the PTA, the Parents Council, you name it. I let those teachers know...that we come from Trinidad and Tobago so our culture is different. We expect our kids to be...students and will do what is needed to see that they do" (1996:25). If this scenario is common, then whites who have contact with West Indians may view the Islanders more favorably than they perceive African Americans.
With respect to the black side of the equation, no study has systematically addressed whether West Indians and African Americans differ in their attitudes toward whites. In Hildebrandt's (1999) interviews with intermarried blacks, however, African American respondents reported hearing stronger objections from friends and family than did Caribbean respondents. Mary Waters also speculates that West Indians view whites with less rancor. A Trinidadian teacher explains, "I'm not American, and I do not see myself as having been deprived by the whites of America. To the contrary, I came here, I was accepted, I was acknowledged for what I knew and I am in a position now where I am earning a good salary" (Waters 1999:144). In sum, there is no reason to expect that West Indians will view the taking of a white partner less favorably than do African Americans, and some reason to expect that they will view it more favorably.
With regard to the effect of generation, "straight line" assimilation theory predicts that the foreign-born are less exogamous than the native-born, and that the younger the age at which an immigrant arrives, the more predisposed to intermarriage he or she will be (Alba and Nee 1997). In the case of West Indians and whites, however, we suspect that the "straight line" model will not hold. Rather, we believe that the intermarriage rate will be highest among West Indians who arrived as teens, followed (in order) by those who arrived in childhood, the native-born, and West Indians who arrived as adults.
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