barrier breaker
- You can! You totally, completely can! On some level, this question is incomprehensible.
- At the same time, education has often been used as a way to say that black people are inferior. To protect the thought that black people are inferior, several barriers to education have been put up. But school is not the only place to get an education; your circumstances, be it a school building or the streets, educates you. And people take pride in their education — people with degrees in the humanities and in the sciences have argued a lot over the worthiness of their respective degrees, simply because you take pride of where you were educated. And if you were educated on the street or in job that didn’t require college instead of in college (often due to more opportunity to be educated on the street than in a college classroom), you’ll take pride in your education just as surely as someone with a college degree. And it puts bread on your table and gets you by. You’re good at it. But people will demean your education, forcing you to fight back. I think that’s all it is, when it happens. But it happens less often than white people think I’ve never talked to a black person who has said I’m not black because I’m getting a doctorate in the humanities. Hasn’t happened.
- Why do I have to be mixed in order to have long hair?
- Wat? Next question.
- Why do you think well-off black people don’t know what it’s like to be black? Black isn’t only defined by adversity.
- They do think they know what it is to be black. It’s just a different experience of blackness. Intersectionality, anyone? Not all black people are the same, and the fact that you’re black doesn’t mean you like the 1%.
- In the United States? Are you saying that old line that people shouldn’t use blackness as an excuse for difficulty? Cause that kinda seems insinuated. Look: yes, there are black people who have “made it” –but there are fewer of them, and they experience racism in their own endeavors. Adversity is all over the place. Even Oprah Winfrey, the richest black person in the United States and the third richest black person in the world, has said:
[Racism] shows up for me this way. Sometimes I’m in a boardroom or I’m in situations where I’m the only woman, I’m the only African American person within a 100-mile radius and I can see in the energy of the people there, they don’t sense that I should be holding one of those seats.
I can sense that. But I can never tell is it racism, is it sexism, because often it’s both.
- Why do some black people say, “Oh I have Native American in my family” in order to feel more interesting or more valuable than other black people around them?
- It’s not to “feel interesting.” It’s because we’re proud of our goddamn cultural heritage — all of it (and — news flash — being “Native American” is its own stereotype). Why are we only allowed to say that we’re “black,” regardless of who is in our ancestral line? That was rhetorical. Next question.
- Why can’t we just acknowledge that there are a bunch of black people walking around and they’re all unique and special in their own way?
- Wait. Wait. Hold up. You’ve just gone through about 20 or so stereotypes about how black people are pretty much the same in having one or more flawed ways of looking at the world, and you’re saying here that we need to see that we’re all unique and special like it’s OUR problem we don’t recognize it? Look in the mirror and tell it to yourself.
- Bye.
- Why are black people so quick to tear each other down and look at other races in terms of their success and what they have and never want to look into the mirror ourselves?
- Tear each other down? These are the same people who wrote questions 8-11, who doubt it’s possible to look in the mirror and think that black skin is beautiful? Wow.
- Why do people make videos like this that do this? Maybe it’s because they want to look better to white people, so they ask black people the questions white people are afraid to ask, but because it’s a black person asking the questions it’s supposed to be OK, no matter how racist the question is. I mean, I’m not saying they’re “cooning,” cause that would be wrong but………………*pregnant pause* next question.
- Why are we always looking for the discount? Shit, I ain’t gonna lie, I’m looking for the discount, too; I’m one of them. *chuckle, shrug*
- “One of them”? One of “whom”? Like I know you think it’s a joke, but — Christ. Are you trying to differentiate yourself as not “one of them”? Who is this “them” you’re referring to?
- Yeah, I look for the lowest prices on all my stuff. But — I don’t know if it’s a coincidence — I’ve been in line for ten minutes waiting for the white lady in front of me to get the discount from her pile of 50 coupons. My mom once hired a white lady to buy groceries for her, she was so good at that couponing shit. Now, I’m sure black people do it, too — we all do. I’m just sayin’ what I see.
*drops mic*
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