Not like “I went to school with one” but have had an actual friendship?
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently where people have confidently said things about the Black community that are ridiculously incorrect. The kind of shit where you can tell they grew up in a very white community and learned about Black history as a college freshman.
Disclaimer: I am white, but I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I was one of 3 white kids in my elementary school lol, including my brother.
I’m black 👀 This post kinda acts like there are no black people on lemmy but we here… at least I am lol
Welp, that makes 2 of us!
Guess we have to start our own instance now so we can talk about [redacted]!
You’re the first one in the thread lol
Also Black here!
(My keyboard doesn’t have emotes, but pretend this is the black hand waving hi)
Edit: 👋🏾
Also black here 👋🏾
I’m also black (but not American) and I felt the same way reading this lol
You know “the black community” isn’t a homogenous group right?
In a certain sense, there’s no such thing as a homogenous group, period. But there are similarities between individuals with similar cultural background and historical context which makes it useful to talk about them as a group, while acknowledging that individuals will deviate from the average.
But there are a huge number of black people in the country with a huge number of cultural backgrounds.
Depends on how you slice em. A white person from Minnesota is very different from a white person in NYC, but it’s often useful to group both of them as white to contrast with, say, Asian. In the same sense, Asian can mean Chinese, and Chinese can mean Taiwanese, etc
Grouping people based on similarities is not inherently bad.
It’s decidedly not useful to say they have the same culture, though, because they don’t. There are common elements, but they’re nowhere near the majority, especially comparing those common elements to the common elements they also share with most black Americans because they’re American.
Well that’s a ridiculous take. So it becomes impossible to discuss culture?
Black people from Chicago, St Louis, and Oakland have cultural similarities. If you refuse to acknowledge that, you’ve taken “I don’t see race” so far you’ve looped back around to racism. This is exactly what I was getting at with the question.
We don’t have African Americans here, we have black people. We don’t call them African Americans because most black people in my country are not from Africa (we have a large Caribbean population) and they are not American.
I told a coworker this once and they went from saying African Americans to just loudly whisper the word black like it was a derogatory term.
Generally speaking, Black people prefer to be called Black. I’ve had a few discussions over the years and Black works best because it’s not some made up white guilt term (African-American), and is capitalized in the same way that a nationality would be (Italian, Filipino).
Anyone who casually refers to Black people as “African-American” would probably answer “no” to this question. But I worded it that way to exclude a horde of Europeans talking about their coworkers who emigrated from Africa. Black descendents of enslaved Africans have a unique culture, and that’s who I was asking about.
Where are they from? I’ve only ever seen “black” to mean African (or descendants of enslsved Africans), South Indian, or Aborigine.
I have had close friendships with two black people. One was originally from Usa (which probably qualified him as African American for your question), the other was originally fom Nigeria, but was a German citizen.
I live in Germany btw. where nearly everybody has white skin color.
Right, I know we have a lot of international users here on lemmy, so I wanted to specify Black Americans, the descendents of slaves. For instance, one of my friends and coworkers is a very dark skinned Tunisian, but that’s a very different culture than the one I was asking about.
No, I am only German, not international.
Do you exist in a nation?
*whoosh*
oh wow, it’s been like a decade since I saw someone do a “*whoosh*”
Did you just praise yourself for doing a thing you hadn’t seen in a long time?
Based move on their part, even if I do not agree on the ‘whoosh’, hahahah
I know a couple of black people, but none of them is African-American.
I know a couple. One was from Kenya, the other Sudan. I know a dozen or so Black Americans, several of which I have heard out right laugh at “African-American.”
Part of the problem is that the link to Africa was severed when their ancestors came here as slaves. Acknowledging that is pretty vital…
Yeah, I generally refer to the descendants of American slaves as Black (with a capital B) but I wanted my post title to be more recognizable to non-American audiences.
