[quote]Gregus wrote:
ALDurr wrote:
Gregus wrote:
Most of what the black community has had to deal with is themselves. I lived in one and went to school in a 80% black high school. As a European white boy i saw that Blacks are their own worst enemies, it’s that simple. It’s like watching the black people conspire together to keep each other down. I can’t tell you how many times one of the black guys would do something like his homework or speak up in class only to have the WHOLE class of black students laugh like they’re in audience of the Def Comedy Jam. Every bro that tried to be smarter was met with very vocal put downs from his buds. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of a porblem this is. You would have to live in the ghetto yourself for a while to get the full experience.
Your fat friend example you used is a good one. She is LAZY pure and simple. Too lazy to want to loose weight in the first place. She’s happy being lazy and likes the attention her bitching gives her and allows her to happily wallow in her fat laziness. LAZY!!!
Just about every immigrant that came here, came from an opressive regime. You think it’s easy for Eastern Europeans?
You porpably don’t think that we came here from communist regimes that would arrest people at night and take them away for weeks for speaking up.
You don’t realise that fathers would be taken for voicing criticism of the
regime.
You don’t realise that mases of people would be shipped to slave labor camps.
You don’t realise teachers would be eecuted for being too intelligent.
You don’t realise that something like a Rodney King Beating happened every night in every city.
And you also don’t realise that we were made to live in a system that allowed you to own nothing. Everything was government owned. We had no opportunity to even make more money then what was rationed for you particular “job”
Please, i have a ton of excuses to use if i want to. I won’t even get on a tangent of talking about the atrocities of having millions of my people be forced to build then burn inside the walls of a concentration camp so as to make my culture extinct… And i’m not Jewish even.
Yet we’ve made no excuses, never used our hardships as excuses. We kept it inside of us and worked through the shame of scrubbing someone elses toilets and we made it. You just have to want to suceeed, you have to be motivated and not lazy. Pure and simple. Don’t confuse the issue with pshycho blabber of this and that, it’s all too much talking. If a person wants to suceed thay have to work and work hard for a long time.
Anyone can look at my mother on the tennis court and can think this i a wealthy lady. What a nice life of leisure she has. How little do they know, how little do they know indeed…It was knuckles to the bone work.
People stop making excuses for lazy peole. It just keeps them lazy.
I am not even going to begin to tell you how completely asinine your comparison is of what your people went through in your home country to what has been done to systematically destroy those of African heritage in THIS COUNTRY for the last 400 years and counting.
Furthermore, I am not going to get into a discussion on the differences of CHOOSING to come to this country (or escaping your home country) as a free WHITE person, with all of your culture and heritage intact and being dragged over here in chains and having your culture and heritage being stripped from you by one of the most inhumane systems in existence and how that has affected African-Americans to this day.
I also am not going to discuss how the negative stereotypes of African-Americans in this country is what shapes the mainstream’s perceptions of all African-American. We all get lumped into the perception, regardless if we do or don’t fit into it. Every image that is given of black people in this country portrays us in a negative light. I am not talking about just the ones where we are taken away in handcuffs (which are too numerous to mention). Look at Sports Illustrated and see when a black person is on the cover, they are usually looking fierce, mean and violent. When a white person is on the cover, they are posed like some Greek god. While I’m glad to see that black person on the cover, subtle things like this have been going on for many years and has had a negative impact on the black community.
What I am going to do is applaud your family for surviving some of the harshest conditions known and coming to this country and making good. We will hopefully never have to deal with that in our lifetime. No matter how anyone feels about this topic, your family have done things right with hard work.
However, for you and all of my caucasian friends out there regardless of where you came from, until you can switch color and walk in this country as a black person, your comments like these will always be viewed as ignorant and racist. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
Am I making excuses for people being lazy? No. What I am saying is that it is far more complicated than people being lazy and sweeping blanket statements like “They are just lazy!” shows how truly ignorant you are to what has been going on in this country.
I am not using the word ignorant as an insult. I am using it as the definition of “lacking knowledge”. Please do not take it as an insult. This is by no fault of your own. You couldn’t know because you are not part of that community. You could no more know what it is like being black in this country than any man would know about giving birth.
Just as a side note, I was that black kid in class being made fun of for being studious. I was that black kid that had to fight people because I was smarter than them on something (I got good at fighting because of it). But did I become a self-hating black person? No. I knew that many times it was fear that drove them. They were more scared of me than I ever was of them because I showed them that we could be better than that. I eventually earned their respect because they saw that I was doing the right things and good things were happening to me. Many of the same guys that initally gave me a hard time became my protectors because they wanted to see someone do well. Maybe it made them feel good to elevate one of their own. Thing is though, people like you would never know this because you are on the outside looking in.
So what you’re saying is that undetered you kept on working . You persevered where you could have rolled over and died. You worked, worked, worked and it payed off. Thank you for proving the point i was trying to make.
Thanks also for the compliment on my familys sucess.
Look, i never would presume to tell a black person what it is to be black. But you’re wrong to think that i can’t relate. It’s a little ignorant in fact and you’re judging and trivializing the the events and tribulations of another culture as uncomparable to yours. This is wrong, pure and simple. Blacks are not the only ones carrying burdens and the issue if lazines is referred to by me toward many youth, in this case it’s the people of NO. Now are there other facotrs that decide and push a person into powerty? OFCOURSE there are. It’s never that simple.
But to all able bodied young men living in NO. If have 2 arms, are on welfare and decide there’s jobs that are beneath you or that you can make more off welfare you need a kick in the ass to get a move on and start building your futures. I’m sadened by generations of lost blacks even till this day. The black culture is so rich with talent and captbilities that it almost puts me to tears to see life’s wasted on sitting around in hatred doing NOTHING… And God forbid Jessy Jackson would dare give an empowering speach of inspiration to move forward and educate… No discontent is the main message. It keeps an entire race doing…Nothing. Very sad and again i would not want your burden.
A less open minded person could label you as a racist for judging someone on the percieved color of their skin and you thinking:
“how does he knoe what he’s talking about, he’s not black, look at him he’s white”.
Also don’t group me with your white friends because i can assure you it’s as silly a mistake as it would be for me to group you with some thugz that i may have as friends because you’re black when in reality your an individual with a name and uniqness matched by none, and i’m sure you have name and not just a black face, see where i’m getting?
Your comments on the portrayal of Black people in the media is a little off. Did it ever cross your mind that the black athletes on the cover of a magazine want to look mean? Is it impossible for the given althelete to get a kick of being portrayed as a beast? To like looking tough? Don’t read into silly pictures as it always becomes a case of seeing what you want to see. Those athletes are highly paid professionals and they create the image that suits them, pure and simple.
Next.
You may be an educated man, but true enlightement may be right around the corner. It will start when you stop seeing color as a deciding factor in your subconscious propagation of thought processes as to what a person may be capable of understanding, their empathasing and spirit. Truly you don’t know me, my troubles or spirit…
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Funny, you berate me for making generalization about you, but then throughout the posts you make generalization about me and blacks as a whole. This kind of thing will get us nowhere.
I am not out to trivialize the struggle of your familiy and the people from your home country. I applaud the accomplishments. What I was trying to say is that it didn’t happen here. Your family had the ability to go somewhere better and earn a life for yourselves away from that environment. What I am saying is that blacks are in that environment right now. Did your family stay in that oppressive environment and try to work within it, or did they leave? We already know the answer. The blacks you are looking at in NO are in that environment. Some of them are lazy but some of them just did not have an understanding of how to do better or that they can even do better. This society is more open to accepting a “white” European than an American-born black person. Look at the USA’s history, it is an inheritanly racist country, period.
Unfortunately, I do not have the option of ignoring color like you do and this is why I make some of the statements that I do. There are intangibles that I deal with on a regular basis that you and many other whites would have no idea about. That is the ONLY reason that I lumped you in with other whites. Based on your statements only, the understanding does not come across.
You seem like a generally good person that truly tries to look at people as people, but there are just some things you will never understand beyond the first layer and it is because you won’t experience them to the level that I have. I’m not saying that you can’t relate, and I appreciate the empathy, I am saying that you will not have a true, full understanding. Much like I would not understand what you went through. The difference is that I am not saying that those who didn’t leave your family’s home country did do so because they are lazy. Making these kinds of statements is what adds fuel to the fire. I do not have to know you, your troubles or your spirit enough to show respect for you and your people as human beings and not make blanket statements about being lazy.
As far as my opinion on how blacks are portrayed in the media, I’m sorry but there is too much evidence out there to just blow that off as “they want to look tough”. White athletes don’t want to look tough? And maybe that was not a good example to illustrate my point of how blacks are viewed in the media as a whole. Unless we are entertaining the masses, no one believes that we can do anything positive. Those things don’t make good stories.
By the way, Racism, to quote Webster’s is “belief in the superiority of one’s own race. Discrimination based on this belief.” I never said that blacks were superior nor do blacks in this country have the ability to discriminate based on this belief. That implies power that we as a people just do not have. I will accept being called prejudiced, which is a “preconceived opinion, bias.” Notice it doesn’t mention race, which means everyone posting on this topic falls under this definition.