<p>I would have made my parents report such a thing.</p>
<p>One of my teachers once pulled me aside during class to tell me that I was working too hard in his class. He said my high grade and my work ethic was amazing, but he wanted me to “chill” with all the work. </p>
<p>I looked at him like he was crazy, and ignored his stupid request.
Why not ask the Asian girls in my class to stop getting A’s? Why ask me?
It’s as if the whole world wants me to fit into the stereotype of my race.</p>
<p>or when you get into a college and they say " it’s because your black"</p>
<ul>
<li>I am not denying being black does help but seriously, it is because I have a better SAT/GPA/Extra currics. than you, buddy.</li>
</ul>
<p>lol, well, I’m Hispanic (Cuban). One time this Indian girl told me that I spoke really well for a Hispanic, haha. I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or insult. Besides, my English is way better than my Spanish :P</p>
<p>It is very annoying. One time a guy in my class said, “she makes the black people look good”… He said it in a comical way, but that remark came from the idea that blacks are somehow less than</p>
<p>I can so relate to all your experience–smart/pretty for a black girl, oreo, talks white. </p>
<p>One time (just once), I didn’t turn in an Honors Chemistry assignment. Despite this setback, I always maintained high grades and participated often in class. But my teacher still felt the need to ask to speak with me after class (in front of everyone) to recommend that I didn’t take AP Chem. There were plenty of actual underachievers who he didn’t discourage from taking the course. It was prejudice, plain and simple. God forbid, I call it what it was…then I’m an angry, black b*itch…</p>
<p>when you pull out the race card, even if it is true, the world turns on you.</p>
<p>Oh my goodness, this thread is so applicable to my life it’s not even funny! I can relate to so many stories on this thread, which makes me feel a little better because I am not alone. On the other hand, it upsets me to think about the inexorable ignorance that we face when we apply ourselves in academics :(</p>
<p>It’s extremely difficult at times to be a serious black student, because you tend to get it from all sides. Whites are often astounded at meeting an obviously intelligent and analytical black person, and disinclined to believe you’re really as smart as you seem, and blacks (kids in particular, unfortunately) are suspicious of your “black bonafides”, as if being book smart precludes blackness.:rolleyes: </p>
<p>Yes, it’s extremely frustrating and demoralizing. And it’s been going on since time-out-of-mind. I’m a 54 year old woman, and it’s all entirely too familiar. I wasn’t accused of being an Oreo so much as being what all the black kids at my Jr. High School called a “cheese eater”. To this day, I haven’t the faintest idea what eating cheese (a food I’ve never eaten any more or less than the next guy) has to do with loving school, and learning. I do know that it was tantamount to “acting white,” something I was accused of constantly. I quickly came to the full and depressing realization that what they were actually saying was, being intelligent isn’t a “black thing”, not something we do. Flip that on its head and what they were saying is we blacks are stupid. Stupid is what we do. We don’t read. We don’t speak correct English. We don’t get good grades—That’s not us! Sometimes, I simply wanted to cry out of sheer frustration. It was obvious to me that my black peers suffered from horrific racial self esteem. I too, wrestled with shame and inferiority issues, but it was something that I realized I needed to fight tooth and nail to overcome. Many of my peers simply hid behind a facade of aggression and militant nonchalance. They talked about being “black and proud” while engaging in every type of self-destructive and success-hindering behavior. </p>
<p>But that kind of entrenched social pathology doesn’t happen out of a vacuum. For as long as there were African slaves on this continent, the prevailing mainstream cultural axiom was that we were a race of people barely evolved beyond apes, not entirely human, really. That’s what made it acceptable to keep us in bondage for almost 300 years, and to segregate us under Jim Crow for another hundred. This ironclad belief was hammered home to us by virtue of America’s very social structure, reflected in every social and political policy that concerned us; When your very life doesn’t even belong to you, when your name has been stripped from you, when you’re prohibited from speaking your native tongue or worshiping the the gods of your ancestors, when your children can be bought and sold from under you, and your marital commitments are neither legal nor binding so as to more easily facilitate human trafficking, and this goes on for hundreds of years, the belief that you are vastly inferior can very readily become a part of your psychological and cultural DNA, something that you internalize and accept, something you pass down to your children, generation after generation, even though you may consciously deny it. That’s why I believe the “N” word has always been so readily bandied about within the black community. It reflects a deep down belief many of us still harbor within ourselves about ourselves. It’s not cool. It’s not “appropriating the term in order to strip it of it’s power”. Heck no! That word is every bit as poisonous as it’s ever been. It’s a form of self-erasure, and psychological self-mutilation, and we need to stop. It’s not cool coming out of the mouths of white people, nor black rappers. I also think this entrenched (often subconscious) sense of inferiority is what accounts for the level of black on black crime that’s found to be so rampant among us. In it’s raw psychological expression, it’s a form of externalized self-hatred, the destruction of that which one sees reflected in the mirror. </p>
<p>It’s no accident, that the results of “Doll tests”, modeled after those administered by black psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark during the 1940’s, have barely changed. At that time, the test was designed to study what the Clarks believed were the psychological effects of segregation on black children, and was used to demonstrate the damaging effects of school segregation during arguments before the Supreme Court in the 1954 landmark case, Brown vs.The Board of Education. Young “negro” children between the ages of three and seven were presented with two identical diaper clad baby dolls, varying only by skin color: one white, the other black. They were then asked questions to identify characteristics that might apply to each of the dolls: questions like, “Which is the ugly doll?” “Which is the pretty doll?” “Which one is the nice doll?” “Which is the bad doll?” “Which is the smart doll?”, “Which is the stupid doll?”, etc. More than 2/3rds of negro children routinely attributed negative characteristics to the black doll and positive characteristics to the white one. At the end, each child was asked to pick up the doll that looked the most like themselves. The discomfort and conflict in the faces and body language of the children who reluctantly picked up the black doll was there for all to see. The results of this 1940s experiment were heart-breaking, but none too surprising, given the saturated milieu of institutionalized racism that prevailed in America at the time. But, what’s more heartbreaking, and much more surprising, is that similar doll tests administered to school children in subsequent decades have yielded almost identical results. CNN ran a television special that revealed the results of a variation on the Drs. Clark experiment in 2010. If one searches YouTube under “CNN Doll Test”, you will find a number of video clips which show black children overwhelmingly attributing positive characteristics to illustrations of white or light skinned children, and negative ones to brown and black skinned children. White children, showed an even higher tendency to identify dolls in this manner. The vast majority of whites have never struggled with self-esteem issues predicated upon their race, and the results of this study, as well as similar others confirm what most people already know. What was revealing was how entrenched negative racial stereotypes were still present in white school children, even when they are presented messages that supposedly combat those beliefs. And what’s revealing, is the intractable nature of low racial self-esteem among black children, even though ours is a much less segregated society, and the most overt forms of institutional racism have been outlawed.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the belief that blacks are genetically intellectually inferior to whites, shows little signs of remitting. When I was in high school in the mid-70’s, a white psychologist named William Shockley caused a national stir when he presented statistical “evidence” that ID tests “proved” that blacks were far less intelligent than whites, and that genetics almost entirely accounted for the discrepancies in scores. Fast forward to the late 1990s, when a book by two Harvard psychologists entitled “The Bell Curve”, basically put forth the same argument, and it felt pretty much like the movie, Groundhog’s Day. It should only be a matter of time before someone dusts off that long-standing axiom, dresses it up with a new set of statistics, and folds it between the pages of a new “controversial” best seller. What such studies never do is account for the effects of 101 poisonous and lingering social variables, unique to African Americans, that undoubtedly skew IQ “test results.” The niggling anxiety that one really might not measure up, even though the “overt” social message now is that “blacks are every bit as smart,” probably has a lot to do with score discrepancies that persist, even among middle and upper income blacks. They know that many of their white and Asian peers aren’t buying it. They know they are in the position of having to “prove” themselves almost daily, and salve the hit their self-esteem takes every time some white kid says something asinine about them being “pretty smart for a black guy”, or “you only got in because of affirmative action.”</p>
<p>What I find almost comical nowadays, is the way many whites (usually conservatives) now insist that “the playing field” has been “leveled” for blacks—nay, that blacks now have the advantage!—and it is whites who are the overwhelming victims of racism in this country. They say it without the slightest hint of irony in their voices, too…</p>
<p>^Ashe</p>
<p>Just smile and nod my brothers and sisters, smile and nod</p>
<p>I’m sorry, specialtwo, but I somehow I’m not understanding your comment. Care to elucidate?</p>
<p>Is it wrong for me to say that I don’t really mind? The only thing I dislike is when other blacks try to make us look bad. That’s probably the worst. I like shooting down people’s false perceptions of black people. That makes me feel good inside.</p>
<p>Its far better than “your the dumbest Chinese person I have ever met.”</p>
<p>btw: im Korean</p>
<p>Just as bad as the “You aren’t really black. You are the whitest black guy I know.”</p>
<p>Am I supposed to be ghetto??? I think I missed that memo.</p>
<p>What I mean is that you cannot let these things affect you. When they are done calling you this or that, you have to turn around and succeed in spite of it. When I say smile and nod, take the opportunities given to you and run with them, not to condone these perceptions but change them.</p>
<p>It happens a lot, but I just usually ignore it and move on. </p>
<p>Sent from my PC36100 using CC App</p>
<p>It doesnt happen often to me, but at times other black students who arent in honors/AP call me oreo and all that cuz of it so i just ignore them and move one</p>
<p>Racism is still alive and well. With that said, I’ve experienced these comments not just from Whites but from all races (Whites, Asians, Hispanics, etc). “Your pretty for a black girl” (Well, does the rest of my race look like the monkeys you commonly associate us with?) “I could bring you home to meet my parents” (So your parents are racist, but because of my beauty and intellect I may be an exception?) It’s annoying and it hurts to think about those who sacrificed there lives (MLK, X, etc) to end these stereotypes and hatred towards us. Now, I have never experienced any hatred or dislike from other Blacks. I’m not an ivy league admit but I am no dummy either and I always took pride in the good grades that I brought home. And with all of that I never received any hatred from my black peers. Actually, I gained a lot of respect from them. I won’t lie, I have turned up my nose at some of my own color who may be on the receiving end of some “Oreo” like comments, but never once have I gone far enough to hurt someone with those comments. I think what upsets me is not the fact that there are other smart black individuals who speak English well but because of the fact that some do look down upon their black sisters and brothers. If we are going to acknowledge stereotypes it is only fair that we acknowledge both. Many of these “Oreos” who although are black, are not brought up the same way other blacks are and therefore acknowledge the same stereotypes that whites and other races do. They look down upon us and never look to gain friendship with other blacks. Even if you are smarter than others of your own race if you don’t look down on them like the rest of society does you could be a great inspiration to them instead of being the subject of their jokes for “selling out”. Forgive me for going on such a long rant but I feel if you are going to have this discussion, then all points must be mentioned.</p>
<p>I ignore all of it.
Doesn’t phase me.</p>
<p>@transfer
Your forgiven lol. I completely understand what you are saying</p>
<p>I agree with entertainer, It doesn’t so much bother me what other races think as I love to prove them wrong about whatever stereotype they may have formulated or chosen to believe. However when my fellow black Americans choose to validate these stereotypes, placing more value on the latest “kicks” than their education, it rattles me to the core. How are we ever supposed to better ourselves as race? That’s why generalizations don’t work you have to look at the individual.</p>