Brandon's Insights (with some of mine of course)

Cause black kids can’t possibly like the same shit

Color, color, color…

I might as well get this post out now before too many people start actually paying attention to what I’m saying.

Ok… I went to a Spanish Immersion Elementary school so there was little separation between white and black, well… with any race really.  So you can understand the cultural shock I received when I hit middle school and saw the blatant socio-economic and cultural differences between the privileged suburbanwhite kids I had grown up with and the black kids who also went to school with me.

Race has always played a factor in my character; for instance, in middle school I took it upon myself to separate myself from the black kids in the school and show that we can, in fact, be motivated, articulate human beings (my first middle school was in a particularly poor area, I didn’t really have a representative view of my own race at all besides my own family and them).

Beyond that, I’ve been ridiculed in one way or another from things as far as my apparently acting white (I still hold firm to the belief that one cannot act a color), and my skin color. I’ve said before that I’m done defending myself on these two fronts; I would just like to add that I’m proud of the color of my skin and the history that comes with it.

Which leads me to my final point of today’s topic:
The ‘N’ word.  Every time I get upset when someone who is not black says it I feel like a hypocrite.  I couldn’t articulate why I was okay with my black friends saying it while they’re rapping or generally and not okay with my non-black friends saying it.  I’ve come up with this: it’s an issue of respect for me. And it’s easy if you think of it as respect for the nearest black (really, any) person within earshot.

I try not to say it around people with whom I would get upset with if they said it, because that would be hypocritical.

I will say it if it’s in a song, but generally only if I’m by myself.  Anyway, out of respect for me… while I’m around, please just don’t do it.

//My communication of ideas still needs some work… I hope this was enlightening if only a little. Feel free to shoot me a message with suggestions (maybe for topics, or how I could better write these, or what direction you would like me to go in).

P.S. People don’t just get scholarships (especially mine) or some other things just because of the color of their skin; that’s ignorant.  People get these things because of need or hard work.

As a response

I think that you realize a few things in this that very few have yet to see. I applaud you in being able to effectively communicate something that has such a strong tug on your being without getting hostile. I agree that it is impossible for someone to act like a color, but unfortunatly the stereotypes(if you should call them that) that culturally go with the color of someones skin and their race within a society are hard to escape from. They have been so ingrained into our thinking that it is hard to not think in such terms. One can only hope that our generation is the beginning of an era where such things begin to fade away.