I’m not sure your chosen examples (Nigeria to Kenya, and Belgium to Poland) make for good comparisons. Nigeria and Kenya are on the same continent, but any other similarity seems to stem from their shared experiences as former British colonies (knowledgeable of English culture/language/administration/law/music/sports/etc). You probably should have picked closer countries like Nigeria and… Ghana. Or Kenya and Rwanda.
Belgium and Poland, while different countries, are still quite close to each other (separated only by Germany) while Nigeria and Kenya are on the opposite shores of Africa with no know direct histories or ethnic/cultural relations; and a total of FOUR Germanies apartNA~!DENTE4NzYyOQ.MzM2NjA3NTI)NQ~!DENTUyMzc3MA.MzMwNjI5OTE)Ng) (at their closest points)
I work in a diverse school, and I will say that most of my African students are very aware that while they may not think of themselves as being culturally closer to African Americans than to any other American group, cops and other authority figures don’t make that distinction. This does create a common ground and a powerful shared experience. #BLM speaks to both.
Most of my kids have been in diverse schools the whole way through. There doesn’t seem to be any particular gap or tension between the two groups. African kids are a lot more likely to be forbidden to date ANYONE, generally speaking.
Do American Caucasians have problems in the Caucasus?
No, that’s not a serious question. Yes, I am going all reducto ad absurdum. But I’ve a parallel. I met a Mayan girl in Guatemala who had been adopted in infancy and raised in Ohio. Vacationing with her gringo family in her distant birthplace was difficult; she looked local but wasn’t.
Point taken. I was trying to go for a country in western Europe versus a country in eastern Europe and a country in western Africa versus a country in eastern Africa. But of course Africa is much bigger than Europe. I actually almost went with Uganda and Kenya for my example, but then I though people would say “But of course they’re similar, they boarder each other” so I went with a country farther away.
I don’t know about the Caucasus and Caucasians, but I do know that Acadians who were put into service as translators during WWII were sometimes looked down upon by the French. This may have been cultural or linguistic. Louisiana Creole isn’t exactly the French of Parisian universities, but most random Cajuns drafted during WWII weren’t university student materiel, either. In any case, the epithet connasse was used and Anglo soldiers heard “coon ass”, which entered into Acadiana’s vocabulary thereafter.
Anyway, people are tribal and insecure and if they don’t have a claim to superiority, they are likely to invent one. But, that’s just the opinion of this Coonass.
Slavery fucked African Americans up. And so there are many who perceive us (African Americans) to be tainted not due to any genetic failing, but due to the history of fucked-up-ness we’ve experienced for the past 400 years.
Immigrants tend to be strivers full of hope and ambition. There is a widespread belief (incorrect one) that African Americans don’t have hope and ambition…that we’re all lazy anti-intellects. Mainstream America holds this belief, and so do many immigrants.
African immigrants tend to be very well-educated and successful. It is challenging enough for upwardly mobile African American women to find men from their culture who are in their socioeconomic league. So it doesn’t surprise me that a random African woman living in Detroit has decided to save her flirtatious ways on demographics that are more skewed towards upward mobility than what you find in the Detroit branch of African American Malehood. It is very possible if these young women were living in, say, Atlanta or DC, they would have a different mate-selection hierarchy since those cities are pretty dang buppified.
My ex brother-in-law is black Guyanese. He and his family didn’t really identify with African-Americans. As immigrants, they perceived themselves as being more ambitious and motivated than black Americans. He and other members of his family all, I think, married white Americans. On the other hand, I think my niece and nephew identify to some extent with black American culture, simply because they are shoehorned into it. (However, my niece’s boyfriend, who she met in college, is Dutch.)
My brother’s partner is from Trinidad, and is of South Asian ancestry. In my experience, Trinidadians from South Asia can be very prejudiced against West Indians of African descent.
There are divisions within expat communities all over the world. A lot of Westerners in Asia prefer local partners over fellow Westerners, so I’m not surprised that Africans in America could have certain specific choices. monstro’s explanation makes sense.
If you’d asked my female immigrant friends to Miami for their preferences in dating, those who’d just arrived would have very little racial preference. After a while, we realized that “WAPs” and us were from different planets: White, Anglosaxon, Protestant person, often but not always from “the heartland”, were the ones most likely to have wifely expectations which were in direct contradiction of our own lifely plans. So we preferred… anybody else! And within “anybody else”, someone from your own country and preferably from your own region was most likely to involve the smallest amount of cultural shock, arguments about food, etc.
This includes women from multiple Spanish-speaking countries, multiple European countries, India, China, Taiwan, Vietnam and several African countries. Religions included several brands of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, along with atheists and agnostics.
in high school a kid in class had African relatives and said most Africans didn’t like American blacks… they saw them as lazy shiftless welfare thugs with no class or manners … and that was some the nice descriptions …
That’s… very weird and feels a lot like folk etymology to this snooty Parisian university type dude.
Namely because “connasse” is feminine - an insulting term for women that wouldn’t be used on men - much less soldier men, no matter how wrong they talked. The masculine version is “connard” (the d is silent), which obviously wouldn’t be derived into coon ass or even coon arse. But in any event “connard” isn’t particularly linked to people perceived as stupid or uneducated, it’s about being an asshole, more or less. There are plenty French epithets that would have been more suited or suitable for y’alls transatlantic moonspeaking ploucs :).
(“plouc” itself is derived from the Breton “ploug” meaning village. Because rural manual labourers from Brittany going up to the big cities to find job in the factories after their main line of work on sailing ships declined, and who wouldn’t speak “proper French” because that only really became a nation-wide thing after WW1, would answer questions like “where are you from ?” with “from my ploug” or the actual name of their village, which naturally most are called “Ploug Something”)
And these sorts of prejudices on the part of black Africans tend to get a disproportionate amount of attention from American whites, because it makes them feel better about their own racist prejudices. “See, other black people think of African-Americans as lazy shiftless welfare thugs same as we do, so the problem must be African-Americans, not us!”