Solved: Why White Ppl are Assholes

maybe, i think thats what smee and lara find attractive - but it was only an aesthetic difference and not a cultural one right?

so some people are attracted to people different to them culturally as well as visually, but for others its just the visual thing

because they throw around terms like pseudo-chink?

this thread is very weird.

In fact the woman was of mixed race - white British dad, black Jamaican mum. She had lived for some years in England, then over to Jamaica for many years, then back to England. She considered herself black and described herself as black rather than mixed race or anything like that. I think being comparatively light skinned in Jamaica and seen as black in Britain gave her an unusual insight into some of these issues. (She has written about some of these issues too, in The Guardian among other places.)

WTF? lame.

Why didn't he just leave it there?

Unfortunately, he was also very messed-up (in the head) and depessive and got into dealing cheap drugs :(

Odd. In James Baldwin's Another Country, the main female black character accuses *white* women of being prude-ish in bed. I know that that's USA and Martin lives in the UK, so it's different situations (and different time periods as well of course!), but I still find that strange...

I'm scared to look back at the Asian Women thread to see if I expressed myself well at all, but I imagine my main point was something like this: most people prefer to be perceived, romantically speaking, as individuals, not as members of an ethnic group. It's a great thing for people to be interested in different types of people, different bodies and often different backgrounds -- but when it starts to look like someone is fixating on ethnicity and to the point of forgetting about individual identity, it gets really offputting and shady, sometimes even pretty demeaning.

There's a segment of young white girls in the U.S. who fetishize black men. The reasons some of them do it can be awfully insulting: they have a lot of stereotyped images of black men in their heads, often because they grew up watching rap videos in towns with no actual black people; their interest in black men tends to be largely sexual or "fun," but they'd never imagine really relating to or marrying a black person; many of them get off on the idea of themselves with black men because they think of it as dirty. Obviously this is just a "segment," and a small and not necessarily well-defined one. But it's stuff like that that can make you suspicious about any given person who claims to be actively interested in a particular racial group.

I do want to note that I wasn't saying that whole fetishizing thing constitutes some major race-relations problem in and of itself! It's often symptomatic of more serious underlying stereotypes, yeah, but as a thing itself it's mostly just patronizing and annoying.

Never mind.

no doubt it pisses off a lot of white male bigots tho...oh well...(i really wish i could make that 'oh well' read like the 'oh well' SOUNDS in Dizzy Rascal's 'I Love U' btw)

But I don't want to set up a double standard here: there are just as many bad reasons for minority groups to chase after the majority -- status and self-loathing are two not-uncommon ones. I'll admit that I'm slightly less bothered by the idea of someone sitting in the center of an ethnic majority being attracted to it, and this might be unfair or hypocritical of me -- I'll have to think about it. But then I understand the Otherness attraction in either direction -- majority/minority or vice versa -- and I don't think it's some great blameworthy moral wrong: I just think that often involves seeing people as things they're not, in ways that are likely to be hurtful or offputting to them.

(The funny thing is that when white people do this misperceiving to black people, black people largely just get annoyed; when black people do it to white people, white people sometimes don't even notice and just assume that wow, black people must lead really different lives from us!)

It was confessional, yet dishonest. Jane pretends to be horrified by the sexuality that she in fact fetishizes. She subsumes herself to the myth of black male potency, but then doesn't follow through. She thinks she 'respects Afro-Americans,' she thinks they're cool and exotic, what a notch he'd make in her belt. But, of course, it all comes down to mandingo cliché, and he calls her on it. In classic racist tradition she demonizes, then runs for cover. But then, how could she behave otherwise? She's just a spoiled suburban white girl with a Benneton rainbow complex. It's just my opinion, and what do I know?

I certainly do.

I grew-up in a very rural county - population 29,000 or so - only traffic light was over a one-lane bridge, but then the bridge was washed away in a flood and there was no need for the signal anymore (I wonder what they did with it, come to think of it.) The county was predominantly Caucasian, with a healthy representation of Italian, Chinese, and Slavic immigrants from the time of the California Gold Rush. There was also a small Native American population, but they seemed to be segregated, though I didn't realize that at the time. My entire educational time, (K-9th grades) I had a total of two classmates who were African-American. I don't remember there being any racial tensions, but, then again, I wasn't aware of racial problems anywhere - we were that kind of isolated.

Anyway, when I finally escaped that county and made it into the big city ("big city" = any community with more than 5,000 residents), I was fascianted by African-American culture and men and women and everything - it was completely foreign to me, in so many ways - I couldn't comprehend the world that they were living in and they sure as hell couldn't understand Amador County. I dated several African-Americans at this time, and I know that at least some of the attraction was the fact that they were "different" - but not necessarily racially different but culturally different. Sheesh. I am mangling this. Anyway, I wanted to learn from them - I was amazed at their upbringings and family arrangements - it was like being exposed to a completely new world.

I wasn't aware of any stereotypes about African-American males (or females, for that matter) at that time - and I do not think that those tales would have made a difference to me, one way or the other.

Following that period in my life, I moved on to a wonderful romance with a young man from Ghana (whom I still miss and would love to track down, again) and when he went back home I ended-up living with a Persian woman for a while - each of these relationships so broadened my horizons - I liked the fact that we were different - and that therefore we could learn so much from each other. Of course, there were some cultural issues that were difficult to overcome, in each case, but those were on both sides.

Anyway, the odd thing that happened to me, when I first made it to college, was that I didn't realize that African-Americans were the people referred to by the "N -word" and so forth - I'd been so isolated that I had missed all of that socialization. Therefore, I was able to see them as people, and only as people - not as a "group" or a bundle of stereotypes or whatever - they were (and sill are) to me, just people who had a different background from me, the same as my Caucasian and Asian and Slavic and...etc. classmates had.

I am still shocked, sometimes, when I hear someone referred to by their racial grouping. I worked with a Laotian-American woman for six months before it dawned on me that that she was of Asian descent - I just figured that she had dark hair like I did, and the smooth face of my father, and so forth. It's odd - I just so do not get the big deal. I am attracted to people, not their race or their gender - just them.

Having said that, I do find that cultural and such differences create an added appeal, because it's something else to talk about and learn. This was true of my South African girlfriend (who was white, but it would have been exactly as true had she been black) as the woman I talked about upthread, and only slightly less (because the culture is less distant) of my latest girlfriend, who was Italian. (Actually the South African woman was also a wheelchair user, and that was another not dissimilar area of interest, and again I couldn't imagine thinking in terms of whether I like women in wheelchairs. I just liked her.)

One thing I've always loved about my hometown of Lexington, KY (which has given me lots of reasons not to love it) is that we've got a very strongly mixed population ethnically...African-Americans, Latin-Americans, Asian-Americans, Euro-Americans, Arab-Americans, etc...and thus I grew up with kids with names as diverse as Lateesha and Alvarez and Phong and Mahmoud and Dave and Hamish and so forth. I think growing up with such a cornucopia of flavors of human existence helped me fully embrace the variety of Earth's humanity.

I don't like to act like I don't acknowledge people's race/ancestry, I prefer to embrace differences...not just ethnic, but also differences in faith and beliefs and class and everything.

If you is a human, the nickalicious is down wit cha. Unless your name is Dubya.

honestly Abbott I think that's a pretty normal experience, feeling feverishly committed to not being one of your parents in a dimension in which they are particularly offensive. I think you're being kind of hard on yourself about it.

also this:

I wasn't born with a sense of smell, so I'm not ascribing Super Smell Power to anyone; I just never knew what was smellable. ie I thought my parents might be able to smell it when I lost my virginity and the game would be given away.

is amazing!

and the aside from the opening post (not in a P Larkin way, altho that too, have sex w/ me & I'll tell you all about it) is the best aside ever.