Well, guess what? It's not a joke -- it was my Spring Break. I would normally choose not to identify the backgrounds of the people I went with except for the fact that it's relevant to the point I'm trying to make. My point? That their backgrounds don't matter in the first place, because what was more important was that we were all twentysomething-year-old college students looking for fun.
Our society seems to be controlled by the labels we place upon one another so we can fit people into our own schemes for the sake of convenience. None of these ideas are negative or positive within themselves, but it is what we do with these ideas that creates the problem.
When we give each other arbitrary labels to live by, we create a community of separatism and myths of superiority. Attaching a stereotype that might be negative in nature to one group causes the groups that don't have that stereotype to think they are superior.
Consequently, if you have one segment of society that has a lot of negativity associated with it, its members are not only expected to fail by other groups but also by their own group. (This should sound familiar to the African-American community.)
Thus, if all black people are supposed to be ebonics-speaking, bling-blinging musicians, those who are not are considered the exception to the rule by other communities and not really black by their own community. This also appears to be prevalent in the white community, but for some reason it's less controversial (not surprisingly). I can't speak for the white population, but there seems to be some disregard for those whites who "act black."
Clearly, there are phony people who try to play off that they're down with some culture that they don't know the first thing about, but I think many of these kids are often being themselves, not being "black." My definition of black is a color, not a behavior, so how could they possibly be black when their skin isn't dark enough to know what that means?
My question is, Why is there a community in a first place? I believe each of us, especially minorities, has a responsibility to help uplift the entire community because minorities have historically been discriminated against as one group. Thus, the only way to fight that discrimination is as a group.
I question the need, however, to let one's life revolve around the same collection of people just because of racial or religious similarities. I would argue that it is more beneficial for whites, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and others to establish their own identities apart from their respective groups. Otherwise, only this community you perpetuate so much shapes your whole identity. All you're known as is that Indian, that Mexican, etc.
Two women were walking in front of me the other day. One of them related a story in which her father was freaked out when he saw two girls kissing. Her response to her dad was, "Don't worry, they're just lesbians." Well, that's probably true, but why couldn't she have said, "Don't worry, they're just kissing?"
