Not like “I went to school with one” but have had an actual friendship?
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently where people have confidently said things about the Black community that are ridiculously incorrect. The kind of shit where you can tell they grew up in a very white community and learned about Black history as a college freshman.
Disclaimer: I am white, but I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I was one of 3 white kids in my elementary school lol, including my brother.
You know “the black community” isn’t a homogenous group right?
In a certain sense, there’s no such thing as a homogenous group, period. But there are similarities between individuals with similar cultural background and historical context which makes it useful to talk about them as a group, while acknowledging that individuals will deviate from the average.
But there are a huge number of black people in the country with a huge number of cultural backgrounds.
Depends on how you slice em. A white person from Minnesota is very different from a white person in NYC, but it’s often useful to group both of them as white to contrast with, say, Asian. In the same sense, Asian can mean Chinese, and Chinese can mean Taiwanese, etc
Grouping people based on similarities is not inherently bad.
It’s decidedly not useful to say they have the same culture, though, because they don’t. There are common elements, but they’re nowhere near the majority, especially comparing those common elements to the common elements they also share with most black Americans because they’re American.
Well that’s a ridiculous take. So it becomes impossible to discuss culture?
Black people from Chicago, St Louis, and Oakland have cultural similarities. If you refuse to acknowledge that, you’ve taken “I don’t see race” so far you’ve looped back around to racism. This is exactly what I was getting at with the question.
I’m a white guy who moved to Japan and it’s funny sometimes that a handful of people think we all must know each other (and all speak English though that’s true in my case).