LOIE
Gold Member
- May 11, 2017
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- #201
This is the kind of disgusting behavior I'm talking about.
The book The New Jim Crow suggests questions we should consider: “Economist Glenn Loury once posed the question: are we willing to cast ourselves as a society that creates crimogenic conditions for some of its members, and then act out rituals of punishment against them?” A similar question can be posed with respect to shaming those trapped in ghettos:”are we willing to demonize a population, declare a war against them, and then stand back and heap shame and contempt upon them for failing to behave like model citizens while under attack?”
It is helpful to put the behavior of young black men who appear to embrace “gangsta culture” in the proper perspective. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. Psychologists have long observed that when people feel hopelessly stigmatized, a powerful coping strategy is embracing one’s stigmatized identity.
For those black youth who are constantly followed by police and shamed by teachers, relatives and strangers, (and I’ll add being called the n-word) embracing the stigma of criminality is an act of rebellion – an attempt to carve out an identity in a society that offers them little more than scorn, contempt, and constant surveillance.”
I offer this, not as an excuse, but as an explanation.I believe that many of us white folks, if we were constantly, day after day, year after year, put down, called names, oppressed, pushed to the brink, unaccepted, feared, hated and demonized, would also blow-up and lash out in some form. We are not always the blameless saints we make ourselves out to be.
We are always offering psychological explanations when white people behave badly: "oh, he was drunk," "Oh, he was just under a lot of stress." "Oh, his dad beat him when he was a child," "Oh, he didn't start it, the other guy did.", "oh, he was high," etc., etc. But, when it comes to offering the same psychological explanations for black people behaving badly, we do not.
Ain't no explanation being offered from me for that type of crap except they need put down like the rabid dogs they are.
PS: All those paragraphs were an elaborate excuse. It was you trying to justify it in your own mind somehow and coming up short.
Not really. I just recalled an incident. When I was single and living in Germantown I used to take walks after work. On one of these walks I was surrounded by 5 or 6 young black men. I said hello and kept walking. They kept walking with me and then one of them touched my arm. I kept walking. One of them finally said, "She's O.K., man, let's go," and they all left.
I did not have anything negative in my mind about them. I did not fear them. I did not hate them. I did not call them n******. If I'd had anything negative in me for them to pick up on, things might have gone differently. Negative vibes when picked up, will produce negative reactions. Not justifying, just trying to understand what sometimes happens in human interactions.