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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
sister if you can't see it then I'm done trying to explain. What is wrong with my cultural identity? Why does it trouble you so? What, am I supposed to work at the Gap, shop at Kohl's, eat at Red Robin, attend a local Presbyterian congregation where I play cheesy rock guitar in the church band, marry a boring plain jain white girl and name my kid Todd to appease your misconceived notions of who I-man is supposed to be?
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At the risk of either fanning the flames or putting words into knox 'cunt' knox's mouth, the problem is largely not where you identify culturally. There's plenty of people who identify with cultures outside of their ethnicity, and the subject is vastly more complex than being reduced to skin-colour, relating, as it does, to a multitude of socio-economic factors. No, the problem is that you constantly - and I'd say largely unwittingly - identify white culture in entirely negative terms. Personally, I identify quite heavily with people like Oum Kalsoum or Munir Bashir, and I've been working quite hard on learning maqams and so on. I'm well aware that my relationship to Arabic culture is largely due to its esoteric nature - it's largely absent to me, except as rendered through British Arabs and ex-pat Arabs in Britain. But while this privileging of one culture is fair game, doing so at the expense of cultures closer to me isn't. Your situation is necessarily different - you say you live in a heavily black area, so the saturation of 'black' culture (obviously, culture shouldn't really be identified by colour) is expected. But the negation, or the stereotyping of 'white' culture in negative terms, is what gets people's backs up - regardless of their ethnicity. There's a (likely just) moratorium on identifying 'black' culture negatively, but the upshot of this should never be that 'white' culture be rendered as something to be avoided.