I seriously feel like I was born in the wrong time period, and racially I don’t fit in anywhere. I was raised in a conservative microcosm thinking it reflected the rest of the country. But when I have to face the “real world”, it’s so scary and I get misunderstood and judged. I grew up in a small Texan town. Culturally, me, my family and local friends identify more with blacks of the past than modern blacks. Let me explain this: I am a social conservative and a Christian, just like blacks of the 1940s. I talk “black” but write proper English, just like blacks of the 1940s. I have a strong work ethic, just like blacks of the 1940s. Me or no one else in my family would dream of having sex and children out of wedlock, just like blacks of the 1940s. The illegitimacy rate used to 15-20%, today it’s a whopping 70%. And for awhile I grew up thinking that nuclear families and premarital chastity we were still the norm, so when I visited bigger cities and other parts of the country, you can bet I was in for a shock. I still am culturally black- I talk black (I don’t write black but I talk black), I like black music, literature, and food- I’m just not “ghetto”. I like old school jazz, swing, and soul and prefer old black movies because they have more dignity and aren’t minstrel shows like rap is. Blacks from other parts of the country and even whites judge me and label me an oreo because I don’t conform to the modern ideal of what it is to be black. It seems that so many people these days think that being black is synonymous with being degenerate and not liking anything else other than hip-hop, Def Jam, and Baby Phat. It just stuns me how so many black people today could actually think this- thinking so little of themselves and being so ignorant of their own culture and heritage. So many people can’t process the concept that I am proud to be black without liking hip-hop or being pleased with the moral decline and absurd separatist trends in modern black America. I am proud to be black, but I am proud of my real heritage and culture as it was in the past, not what it has become and how our roots have been lost. I also like to identify with my people of the past and imitate the way people in the old movies talked. I like saying “brother” instead of “n*gga”, “zoot” instead of “of tha hook” and “*****” instead of “African-American”, because ***** isn’t even a bad word- we used to call it to each other all the time and white people back then used the word “*****” to be polite, it was like saying “African-American”. So when I use the word ***** I use it because I associate it with positive feelings of the past not because I’m a self-hater. I also think I can make jokes about my people without being called a self-hater either. Blacks call me an Uncle Tom and whites call me an oreo even though I’m actually proud of my culture, just not in the way they think I should be. People think I plagiarize on my essays just because I write formal English and write so much differently than I talk, it’s like I’m bilingual. So anyway, I’m kind of out of touch with reality but why should I return to reality when it’s so bad?
2007-01-21
21:29:20
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4 answers
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Anonymous
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Other - Society & Culture