June 4, 2006

"Is it a good time for black men? Is it bad? It's right in between."

A WaPo poll.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 8:23 AM
Tags: , ,

3 comments:

Finn Alexander Kristiansen said...

Someone says:

I cannot imagine anyone being ignorant of the nature of the struggles faced by blacks

The other day me and some friends, white and Asians, were standing outside of our postal data entry facility. Some police arrived and went inside while we were on break. Eventually, this one friend of mine, white, joked about the police coming out and kicking the crap out of me. He is liberal, I am conservative. His assumption was that 1) police go after black people because they are black and 2)my experiences would mirror that "theoretical" experience of every victimized black person.

And I just smiled, twisted the joke a bit further (saying I would grab my Asian friend who looks hispanic and hold him in front of me to block their bullets with his body), but I was partially annoyed.

My friend assumed that all black experience was the same and that all cops were evil, despite the fact that I have never had an overtly bad experience when dealing with the police.

(A cop once pulled me over for a rather flimsy reasons, asked me "What's in the bag" on the seat, and when I showed him my Italian sub sandwich, he mellowed out, said "that looks tasty" and all was well, with me mildly ticked off. But such is life.)

He never realized that pigneonholing me into HAVING To be the one pumped with bullets might, on some level, be offensive or just irritating. It had the effect of saying, "You might be standing here, but you are seconds away from having it all taken away, and thus, you are not like us".

Liberals often have a way of reminding you, by accident, about how delicate they think your position in society is (ergo, stop voting for people like Bush, they say).

I suspect he was just ignorant of the nature of the struggles (however detailed and nuanced) faced by blacks , even in mere casual conversations.

6/4/06, 10:57 AM
Jennifer said...

I don't want to put words in Finn's mouth, but I think his point was part of the struggle for black men is the struggle for normalcy.

In other words, the struggle for recognition that they don't all struggle. I think it would be frustrating to constantly be perceived as oppressed when you are in fact a perfectly successful, perfectly average member of society.

Sorry if I got that totally wrong, Finn.

6/4/06, 12:19 PM
Eli Blake said...

I don't know.

I teach at a community college in Arizona. Granted, not in an area with a large African-American population, but there are some.

And since the college disbanded the basketball program three years ago due to budget cuts, I have had exactly zero black men in my classes. I've had my share of black women, but not even one black man (as in nada, zip, zilch) in any of the classes I've taught (and I've taught probably thirty classes since then.)

so based on what I've been able to observe, my take on whether it is a good time for black men would be somewhere between, 'No,' and 'insufficient data.'

6/4/06, 2:48 PM

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