First up: I am completely aware that the colour of your skin does not predetermine your personality or abilities in the slightest. We are all in possession of essentially the same brain, so you’re not going to hear me saying that there is ANY biological difference in our merit as human beings.
Any such difference would have to be cultural. And this is where I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate to the whole MTV-generation “we are all identical” ethos. I propose that there is a valid reason to view black people in the USA as a different sort of people than white people.
What? Has Coynil gone mad? Probably, but that’s a whole other post. For now, consider this: if you are a completely black person in the USA (i.e. with no non-african genes), both your parents were black, all four of your grandparents were black, all eight of your great-grandparents were black, etc. Now, since we are about five generations removed from the abolition of slavery, there has been 32 free black people and no-one else working to create you, the perfectly black contemporary US citizen.
Is that a problem? No. But it does smack of “sticking with your own kind”. There are countless mixed-race americans, who are the offspring of interracial unions. But the 32 people involved in making our black citizen did not mix races.
My assertion is that somewhere along these generational lines, there must be a strong family sense of “being black” and “don’t mix”, which is passed from parent to child. Otherwise, there would probably be a white person somewhere in the 32. So, our black US citizen, through no fault of his own, has ended up in a family where he will inadvertantly learn to stick to his own race.
Contrasting this with a person of mixed racial heritage who most often is proud of his genetic diversity, I would say that, yes, there is a difference in the way that these two kinds of people can be expected to behave. Is it worth looking into, sociologically? I don’t know. It was just a thought.
Of course, I am being provocative by taking the black man in the US as an example. Any ethnic minority group can be substituted, and the argument still holds – scandinavians in Minnesota, Italians in New York, Kurds in Iraq…
Anyway, please comment and convince me that I’ve overlooked something. I don’t really believe in this line of thinking myself, but I am compelled to put it out there and let it float.
Interesting thought! The only problem with this line of thinking is that the number of people viewed as “black” that have a generational line like you described is amazingly small. Very, very few modern day US “blacks” have that kind of racial purity; molestation and rapes were commonplace as punishments and to break the spirit during the days of slavery.
You can see the evidence pretty handily by the wide diversity of skin tones that you see in the African American community even today. Of course, there’s other evidence as well.
I see what you’re saying. But would the argument not still hold if, say, 80% of a person’s heritage were from a single race? There must be a critical mass where this sort of “don’t mix” mentality arises, and it’s not nessecarily 100%.