[Neill]

It is easy to understand how you can feel disconnected from your supposedly inherent Blackness – that automatic connection a black person is supposed to feel towards their culture, but it is difficult for one to accept or acknowledge their own blackness. A US citizen is inundated with the ideal of whiteness, immersed in the white point of view and truthfully many Black people don’t feel Black – there is no inherent Black emotion, feeling or thought. Therefore Blackness is based on two sources of input – how people react to you and how society views you. The people that react to you: parents or teachers for instance can reinforce your positive Black ideal or negatively enforce your Blackness – negative would be to assign inherent goodness to white society and to denigrate black societal contributions: Bach good – rap bad. Society views you: media whether on television and movies is not conducive to a positive Black experience. If a person were trying to understand Black culture based on media – it would be a sad bleak thing. The most interesting view of Blacks is to watch “the Weakest Link” – US version. On a number of viewings I’ve seen Blacks get voted off based on the perception that they were intellectually holding the group back as opposed to the reality – even one time when the Black contestant scored all his answers correctly! Inside our heads we are no more than ourselves – there is no Black self or white self, it is only self — a collection of experiences. I never wake up in the morning feeling Black, but sometime during the day someone will remind me that I am not a person – I am a Black person. Admittedly it is somewhat of a shock to remember that I am Black, people reacting to me as if I were a threat: white people afraid to meet my eyes – even at work. Angry white commuters getting ready to holler at a driver, see my gaze, then purposefully avoiding looking in my car. Blackness is not based on musical preference or dress or any of the exterior things that people want to assign to it – it is based on genetics and life experiences.

User Detail :  

Name : Neill, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : Black/African American, Religion : Baptist, Age : 39, City : Sacramento, State : CA, Country : United States, Occupation : Insurance, Education level : 2 Years of College, Social class : Lower class, 

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