| Author |
Message |
    
Troy
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, March 16, 2003 - 07:29 pm: | 
|
You would be surprised how many people take issue with the name of our web site Below is an email I recieved recently.
Below is the orginal email:
==============================
It sure puts a real pain in my side when I see sites like yours. If i put up an site called " White American Literature Book Club " I'd have Jesse Jackson knocking down my door calling me ever racist name in the world. Now I just can figure why It's ok for the blacks to do it!!.....thing that make you go ..hhhmmmm
==============================
end original email.
It is not clear to me why people often judge someone's actions based upon the actions (or what they think will be the actions) of an entirely different person.
Besides this person has no idea how much email I already get calling AALBC.com racist.
Perhaps if anyone of the folks who has called AALBC.com a racist site were held up to represent the entire white race, like Jackson is held up to represent Black people, we would have been shut down a long time ago.
Is AALBC.com by its verynature racist?
|
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 01:25 am: |
|
White people just don't get it. Black people are simply doin' their own thing, indulging their uniqueness. Maybe we get a little territorial sometimes, but that's because we're leery about whites co-opting our ideas and white-washing them. LOL |
Yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 01:36 am: |
|
I don't think AALBC is racist. The problem with calling something racist is determing what is and is not racist. The real or major problem, however, is that white people don't have to place the adjective "white" in front of anything! Whiteness is normalized, so that being white and white institutions are not modified, gramatically speaking as they should be.
For example, until very recently, when we took a literature course, we knew or should have known that the authors were mostly white men. Now these classes didn't say, "White Literarture 201," but it only taught white authors. In other words it is all about your frame of reference, which is often determined by who is in control of society. Again, when we learned history, did it include black people? Yes, as objects...things! Did they call it white history, now it was just called history.
Troy, the person who sent you the email doesn't even understand racial politics. If a site had American Literature Book Club, we all know that it would be mostly white authors! It'll have Wright,Hurston, Walker, Morrison, Baldwin, and Ellison. And i bet we can name the essays or books they would discuss.
Question: How often do white authors identify their characters as white? Never, unless their are black characters and rarely are their black characters. Yet, they'll identify a black person and an asian person. Black authors do similarly.
I remember once that my black professor asked the students to identify themselves, only black and latinos identified their race or ethnicity. The whites identified the borough or state. Their white identity was taken for granted. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 10:35 am: |
|
Yukio has a point. Go to other literature sites, they don't say White American Literature, but the only writers you find are white. They take it for granted, just like the debate about why don't you have white leaders--as though Trent Lott, George Bush, Ted Turner, Bill Clinton and on and on and on have to say that--they don't have to. It's taken for granted. There are sites for Asian literature, Latino Literature, Greek, Spanish, English etc etc etc literature. The poster does not complain about that--why? I don't know, but it does raise questions as to why the very mention of an African American website would raise his hackles--maybe he is a fan of some of those websites that do say they are white--like the White Aryan Resistance or Christian Identity Movement--but maybe that is unfair.
I do wonder about why this raises the hackles of some white people, though. |
Yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 01:34 pm: |
|
Chris Hayden,
White people feel threatened and they are because black people, to some degree, are succeeding and they are doing it with their own culture: music, literature, dance, etc...
Without, necessarily, assimilating to white culture.
White people and even assimilated blacks to many degrees have been taught that this country is color blind, so that the mention of "race" or blackness causes them to call something racist. This allusion of colorblindness obscures reality and history.
Here is the issue, some of us here are african americans and others are african and caribbean(all ethnic groups of the africa, some through voluntary migration, most through coerced migration),not black(race, which is socially constructed. In other words there are no biological differences among so-called blacks, asians, whites, etc...to constitute distinct racial groups. Of course there are differences in melanin, features, hair, etc,,, but according to scientist, these differences do not constitute racial groups).
Ok, this means that we are a cultural group constituted through specific historical conditiosn and struggles. For some of us, this cultural group is called African American.
Racism, particularly US internal colonialism, marked our bodies as color and racialized it.
Racism and Jim Crow were more than political and economic barriers established according to race or color. The US and European culture is infused with white racial superiority, so that, as i said, any institution, music, literature, education, did not require "white," because it was taken for granted. Whiteness could be taken for granted because it was considered universal. In other words, all thought, beauty, culture was understood in one perspective. Only foreign cultures or the proverbial,"Other," was marked as having a specificity.
|
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 04:46 pm: |
|
Today is St. Patrick's day. Apparently it's all right for Irish-Americans to have their special holiday. I think white people overlook the fact that being a hypenated American is not racist, per se, but is rather a badge of ethnic pride. African-Americans are just identifying themselves the way other nationalities have the option of doing. e.g.: Italian-American, Polish-American, German-American, etc. Would anybody give it a second thought if, say, Greek-Americans had their own literary on-line book club? I remember reading somewhere that, actually, there's no such thing as a "white" race, that this is an artifical concept peculiar to America.
|
Yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 07:59 pm: |
|
These other groups can identify their ethncity, because (1) this country, whites and black, have race phobia and (2)black people, to most white folk and black, don't have an ethnicity. To them and some of us, we are a racial group. |
Tee
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2003 - 11:59 pm: |
|
I'm pressed for time, so I'll just answer the question. No. Just like Pampers specialize in baby pampers and Crisco specializes in cooking oil, sites like AALBC specialize in African American Literature. It annoys the hell out of me to get those type of messages.
:::rolling eyes at ig'nant folks::::
-Tee |
John Harrison
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - 10:50 am: |
|
How could a site be "racist" ? I think that a lot of people do not understand the term. To be "Racist" is to have an effect on someone's or something's financial well being or lack thereof, not their feelings for the ethnic backround of a person or an organization. I think that we get the word mixed up with Bigot or Bigotry. |
Beautifulwaterstar
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, December 02, 2003 - 08:27 pm: |
|
LOLOLOLOLOL bout "racist"
Yow John, I was wondering the same thing. How they' call a broke collective in a capitalistic (well really imperialistic hiding under the fancy term "capitalistic") society "racist"?
That is too funny. Hey Yukio, how DARE you send your child to an historically black college, YOU RACIST!!!? Cynique, eventhough things are set up to honor so not black history every day all day, you celebrate black history month and YOU, my dear, are RACIST!! Chris, why don't you write books specifically for WHITE people, you freakin' RACIST you!! AAARRGGHH! I'm SURROUNDED by a group of people who do not oppress my people as my people have aided in THEIR oppression and I can't STAND it because they are sooo racist! Oh my God, eventhough I can just like sooo not visit this site, I am like so like totally frustrated that it like exists in the first place! *tossing hair to the side*
WHITE REPARATIONS NOW!!!!!! lolol
(Sorry, Y'all. I'm feeling really silly.) |
Yukio
Regular Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 31
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 01:25 am: |
|
beautifulwaterstar....yes, yes, yes, we're here, we're here! |
Theprophetess
Regular Poster
Username: Theprophetess
Post Number: 40
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 05, 2004 - 02:28 pm: |
|
Troy hello I'm the handle theprophetess and I must say this is an excellent subject you brought up. Those ignorant yahoos and their demented mind never ceases to amaze me. The fact is, they have no problem with a 'Jewish, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, etc.' white board but they have problem after problem with our appellation so named black. They'll just have to get over it...as the term 'black' is used as our 'origin identity' along with African/American and that thanks to their wretched white forefathers who stripped us of our identity so that we cannot like the whites refer to ourselves by the direct lineage we come from.
Now, they'll just have to get used to the fact that their demonic ancestors evil forced blacks to identify ourselves by color origin. Whereas the above mentioned many white tribes don't have to do that, but let it be proclaimed, 'we's do know they are white' now don't we?
So I could care less, that the title 'black' gets their graw. It certainly doesn't bother them that 100% of our tax dollars, and resources of America is controlled by 'white' males, then it will never bother me that we rightly go by the honorable appellation 'black' and/or African/America. Deal with it! |
Mojochica
Newbie Poster
Username: Mojochica
Post Number: 9
Registered: 05-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, May 15, 2004 - 07:33 pm: |
|
I have my own book message board, called Black Love. I had someone actually try to tell me I threw him off the board because he was white. When he never joined my message board! He made it so much harder for me to promote my board.
http://p066.ezboard.com/fthelounge4679frm12.showMessage?topicID=672.topic
|
|
Email This Page