Bullshit. I’m not gonna argue seriously AGAIN. If you don’t care enough to use your words when you talk to me, I’m not going to respect you or pay much attention. You’ll sound like an uneducated child to me and I won’t respond any further. Key words - TO ME. If you don’t care about ME, what’s it matter?
What language do you speak? If there are regionalisms or variants based on location, fine, I can handle a twang here or a beautiful southern drawl there. If you’re peppering your discussions with “dayum” or “sheeit” or “homie” (no offense to Hey Homie, it’s a cool name and makes me giggle) I’m going to think that you have no command of the words that might be used in place of those.
I simply don’t understand your nut with this line of thinking. You clearly have presented yourself on these boards as well-spoken and read, however you appear to have a “thing” for people who can’t represent themselves well enough in an adult conversation.
If/when my children start using slang and stuff, I will do my utmost to continue to provide them with what my English teachers taught me was important. Please, Thank-you, Excuse Me, Pardon Me. All very important in civilized society. So if I look down on those who fail to provide civilized conversation, so what? Does that include you?
I know it’s a favorite stance around here that “language is a changing and growing entity” (or however it’s usually phrased). Even if that’s true, are you saying that there’s no such thing as standard English? That grammar is meaningless?Do we not share a common language with at least some basic ground rules? Maybe in time “street lingo” will become the norm, but I don’t believe we’re there yet.
I couldn’t say. I do think they *sound * less intelligent, though.
I don’t know that she thinks they are inferior people. I took it more as that she doesn’t relate to people who display that particular behavior. In that sense, I agree. I don’t particluarly care to be around “ghetto” people. I use that term in the cultural sense(as opposed to the racial).
Oh really? So far she has said that people who say “dayum” are **uncivilized, uneducated, ignorant, unlovable by her, unequal to her **(she actually used the word equal) and otherwise beneath contempt. She is the one who came here looking for a fight. She said herself “we’ve been over this” etc, but SHE is the one who dragged her “opinions” into this thread in the first place. She did not have to bring it up. It really has NOTHING to do with the OP, but she’s got a chip on her shoulder, and she wants to be able to spout nonsense and not get called on it. I had DROPPED it and she came back with a rant. Read this thread again. I said NOTHING MORE ON THE SUBJECT once she said she didn’t want to talk about it, but she had to come back and attack me more and rant.
I don’t care to be around people who worship the devil or have sexual relations with their relatives. The one white friend I have doesn’t engage in either activity, and for that I am glad. Because we wouldn’t be friends otherwise. And I am NOT sorry for that. He gets a kick out of pretending to be an incestuous satanphile just to see me scream like that black lady on old Tom and Jerry cartoons. I love him.
No, RSSchen brought it up in the first place, when it was entirely unwarranted, which is incredibly telling.
But to the OP, I more or less am the black friend for most of my friends. They’re white or asian.
My best friends here are one ‘white’ guy from England and one ‘black’ guy from Grenada. I usualy have at least a few very good friends from India or Pakistan. I guess usualy about half my good friends aren’t ‘white’.
I only have one black friend, but that’s really because I tend to be insular and most of my friends are “loaners” from the few friends I’ve made on my own, who are white. If I was less introverted and got out more I’m sure I could assemble a Rainbow Coalition of friends but I am pretty happy in my rut. Er, not because of the whiteness though.
This comment really bothered me, mainly for the reasons EE has noted. I moved to the US permanently as a ninth-grader, and my neighborhood was full of immigrant families, mostly SE Asian and Mexican. A lot of kids, and their parents as well, didn’t speak great English. Some of those folks are still friends today.
In my circle of friends some didn’t finish high school, some didn’t go to college… it really is a circumstance of family issues and economics for most. Yeah, some of them made bad choices but I don’t see how one could ascertain if someone is educated from an initial meeting. I’ve met people with pristine degrees from incredible institutions who are the most painfully slow-witted, dull, and bigoted people I’ve ever encountered.
Like many African Americans I code-switch. If I’m in a group of mostly Black people, I will talk differently, use different vocabulary, and so on. I don’t think I change that much but people who know me from one setting (say a class at school) are sometimes surprised when I’m in a group of Black people, Texans, or British people. I code switch because I’ve been exposed to different lingustic styles and ways of expressing oneself. Some people don’t code switch because they haven’t had the exposure. It just seems really unfortunate that if an individual hasn’t had the opportunity to meet and associate with different types of people = lack of education and friendship.
Anyway, back to the OP. Four distinct phases of life for me:
Early childhood in UK: mostly White friends (living in villages in Suffolk and Oxfordshire), but American friends were fairly diverse. Best friends were born in the UK to Trinidadian and Chinese parents.
Teen years in Texas: lived in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood, most friends were Mexican American or SE Asian. Some Black friends (not many) and probably even fewer White friends (they weren’t around!).
College years: started out with mostly Black friends then branched out to a fairly mixed group - White, Latino, Jewish, international. Most of my closest college friends are not Black.
Professional life/grad school: I always befriend the people I work with, so that group, while diverse, is mostly White - but again, Native American, Black, Persian, Afghani, Jewish folks prominent in the mix. At school my closest friends are exclusively Black and Latino. We sort of seek each other out and it’s similar to my friends in HS… if you’re friends with one of us you will eventually know all of us. There are certainly challenges to the worth of studying “people like ourselves” or race/ethnicity in grad school, so our friendships are often sustaining when we feel our work and interests are not valued. It’s a great community and our friendships continue, even after people bust the coop and graduate.
It’s important to me to have close Black friends, and friends of color. Because I work in higher education I don’t think it will ever be difficult to have friendships with White people. I guess one of the prerequisites of being a friend to me is… wait for it… keeping it reall! I’m Black, it is a significant part of my identity, and if you minimize that then you’re not respecting who I am. I have a few conservative friends (who also happen to be White) that are cool with this, even have a little fun with it, but there’s no way in hell a friend of mine would pull that “when I see you, I see Hippy Hollow, not a Black person” stuff that someone said about me in a training seminar in college. I responded, “Well, I guess you don’t see me… because I am quite happy and prominently a Black person.”
I dunno, Ensign. I tried to see it your way, I really did. This is what I find.
RSSchen starts with this statement:
To which you respond with a series of eek smileys. And at this point I thought, yeah, I’m wrong, Ensign never asked her to continue. But then I read on where you with the face asks:
And **RsSchen **answers:
To which you answer:
So you certainly did challenge her to respond. She continues with an answer, and ends with
To which you accuse her of hiding and not wanting to answer:
It bothers me that every time we mention something in a thread we have to then sit there and defend it for pages. She gave you her answer, yet you kept niggling at her. Her answer was clear enough. I see no reason why she needs to continue defending why she feels ghetto talk is unintelligent; she is merely stating her feelings.
She did bring it up first…perhaps she felt she needed to explain. And you can definitely lay that at her feet. But it was you who kept nagging at her to explain more and more.
Anaamika, how can you say I kept “niggling” at her? She brought something up. She then claimed she did not want to talk about it. I think anyone might be questioned on why they brought something up if they did not want to talk about it. Her whole attitude was “oh, why are you forcing me to talk about htis again”. She brought it up! I see no reason why she has to keep defending herself either, but apparently she does. She has an awful lot to say for someone who doesn’t want to talk about it.
Your claims are false. I did not keep “niggling” at her. I told her that in the future, if she doesn’t want to talk about something, she shouldn’t bring it up. That’s it. I didn’t ask her any more questions. i didn’t demand anything from her. I accepted her at her word and yes, I took a parting shot, one I feel was justified because she obviously knew her opinion was controversial, yet she chose to drag it out again anyway, then insisted she didn’t mean to, then started it up again.
In elementary school, before everyone got factional and cliquish, I was friendly with the black kids in my class in the same way I was friendly with everyone else. After things got factional and cliquish, my own clique didn’t happen to include any black kids. There were quite a number of Chinese kids in it, and a couple of Indian, in addition to all of us white people, just not any black kids (there weren’t any black kids in the accelerated classes we all took, btw, so there wasn’t an easy opportunity).
In college a lot of my friends continued to be Chinese/Korean/Indian/Arab, but there was only one black friend. He was British, actually. And we were fuck buddies for a couple of years.
'Kay. This is why I don’t get into arguments, or try not to. I don’t feel that, even fairly presented (as I at least attempted to do), people listen to contrary views at all. Anyway, I am not** RSSChen** so by all rights she should be defending herself. I will bow out at this point…I will apologize, however, for originally making it seem as though it were only you, Ensign.
Okay, Anaamika. You’re a good apple, you shouldn’t be sullying yourself dancing with lowlifes like me anyway.
I do want to note that I think it’s hardly fair to claim I’m not “listening to contrary views” when no one has made a cogent argument for the people RSSChen thinks of as uncivilized, unlovable idiots actually being that. I also think you might have overlooked how personal this is for some of us. I get that you want her to be able to say things without being attacked for them, and that you feel like a lot of threads end up this way. But she has been very offensive. If she had said “Oh, my Indian neighbor is okay because she doesn’t smell funny or wear weird clothes, or believe in some heathen religion” would you not feel you had a right to question that? What if she said she thought your family was uncivilized and unequal to her for any reason at all?
I’m seriously not trying to pick on you here, and I know you want to bow out. I’m not trying to attack you or drag you back into the argument, I swear. I just feel like you’re missing a key element of this and maybe if I turn it another way you’ll see it. If not, okay – I know your reasons for objecting were based in your concern that this board not be completely taken over by bickering, and that’s a fair concern. But believe me, this is not a case where I’m just pigheadedly refusing to see “her side” of the story.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Your attempt at humour aside, don’t we choose our friends based on shared likes, viewpoints, etc…?Why would you be friends with an incestuous devil worhsiper unless you were into those practices yourself?
Would I get a pass if I said I’m not into hanging around with yuppie soccer moms?
I’m emphatically white. It seems my black friends tend to be less attached to black culture for one reason or another.
I had a friend in law school who was actually half black, half white, but had been raised by her white mother and white stepfather. There was a clicque of black girls in our class, but she was not part of it.
I inherited a group of friends when I got together with my husband. Our friend Sabrina also “married in” to the group. She’s black, her husband’s white.
I have a couple casual friends who are Indian - met them through our neighborhood. We were similarly friendly with our neighbors on both sides in our last house, who were black. I think it was thanks to that arrangement that I got a couple complimentary issues of Ebony magazine, one featuring the headline, “What do White Women Really Think of Us?” which I found amusing.
My god(less)son is a quarter Japanese.
By and large, my friends and acquaintances are of European descent. It’s probably partly dut to growing up in a very white state, then moving to a very white area of a more diverse state.
Mostly I think I just don’t have much in common with the vast majority of the people I meet, being an atheist, extended-breastfeeding, cloth-diapering, vehementy skeptical sci-fi geek with no interest in reality TV. The additional burden of vastly different cultural backgrounds is hardly necessary.
