Blacks and Whites

[bill4long]

Blacks and Whites

Will they ever get along?

[Gadianton]

They do on Apple TV+. Is that bad?

[yellowstone123]

People have good and bad experiences and tend to start linking then to certain groups. It's been going on for as long as they realized that there was something different. But really what's different? If you study anatomy and physiology, we are all basically the same, although might be very small differences that could be created from 50 thousand years in a certain environment - something like have blue eyes that developed moving far north of the equator, but we are all Homo Sapiens. The problems start occurring when a person experiences small and large cultures he/she is either born into or later associates with, and those cultures may say something different.

[msnobody]

Blacks and Whites

Will they ever get along?

Some do get along.

[yellowstone123]

Neil Peart, the drummer for the band Rush, explains the issue more clearly:

“While I was frantically reloading the bike and putting on my riding gear, eager to get back on the road and get moving again, one of the more talkative Natives remarked on the height of the bike, and said with a laugh, ‘Too tall for orientals.”

With a start I realized that those bush-wise young men who had helped me so willingly and knowledgeably were not “natives” in either sense , but were actually Chinese, probably only a generation or two away from an ancestor who raised millet and spoke Mandarin, or grew rice and spoke Cantonese. Their grandfathers might have worn the long braid of the Mongol emperor; and their grandmothers might have woven conical hats to keep off the sun in the paddies. Now these young men had become so native' that I had actually mistaken them for the ‘first immigrants’, those who have been there the longest (in this area, probably Cree).

These rough-and-ready individuals looked and acted so wonderfully unstereotypical in their work boots, bush clothes, the muddy pickups with ATVs in the back, their talk of hunting season and snow machines, and I realized that these Canadians absolutely were natives, now in every sense, fully adapted to their environment. For the time it was clear to me that when we try to clarify others by stereotypes of race, what we really mean is culture. The modes of behavior, dress and habits of “The Other” that we find strange and exotic, or sometimes contemptible, are cultural patterns developed over hundreds of generations in a specific locale, under local influence of weather, livelihood, diet and daily customs.

Something I had long felt instinctively, without being able to articulate it, could finally be put into words. I saw that it was plain wrong to evaluate people according to race, for it was clear that culture was the real divider among people. Given enough time, a generation or two, we could all become “The Other,” no more different in behavior from our neighbors and peers than they were from each other. Even the cosmetic differences would disappear in the course of a few more generations of “assimilation” adopting the local diet, mores, and chromosomes, and eventually dissolving into the gene pool."

From the book Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road by Neil Peart

[Jersey Girl]

Blacks and Whites

Will they ever get along?

My family gets along just fine. Thanks for asking.

[msnobody]

My best friend growing, her husband is pastor of a church with all black congregants. I never pictured her as one day being a pastor’s wife.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

[bill4long]

Blacks and Whites

Will they ever get along?

My family gets along just fine. Thanks for asking.

I was referring to these guys...