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Barkley Speaks His Mind

Foolmewunz said:
As to "not black enough", it's a common statement (in one form or another) in black communities. I like the conservative members trying to put it down to limousine liberals.
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Don't know if that was directed at me, but I didn't mean to imply that I only heard it from white people; I've definitely heard it from black people as well. But I hear it more often and more stridently from the far-left white folks. As someone else noted, it's all about identity politics. One particularly strident leftie of my acquaintance insisted that any minorities, particularly black, who vote conservative/Republican are "betraying their people".

And the vast majority of lefties I know are about as far from "limousine" liberals as you can get.

Interestingly, a very large segment of the local black communities is staunchly conservative in their politics; mainly those closely tied to more reactionary/fundamentalist religious sects.
 
Foolmewunz said:
The criticisms I heard, from black people, of Cosby was that he had a funny show but that it had nothing to do with addressing the problems of the black community, other than a Pyrrhic victory for getting a milquetoast family sit-com in which the average milquetoast middle class family happened to have darker skin tones than other such shows.
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Pyrrhic is the right word. A milquetoast middle class family, headed by a doctor who's played by a serial rapist. The Cosby Show was like Mandingo on salt peter. Even the soundtrack - smooth jazz instead of real jazz.
 
Foolmewunz said:
Gonna have a confused minority crossover problem if a gay East Asian uses the term "Twinkie", I fear.
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The slur I'm used to for an east Asian who is 'too white' or a 'white' who 'acts too Asian' is 'rice cracker'. I've been called 'rice cracker' a lot, mostly jokingly but once or twice as an earnest slur. I've heard of the 'Twinkie' one though because of it being 'yellow on the outside but white inside'.

Caper said:
I like what Barkley said. But I don't think he got it completely right.

For starters, he says only the black community is like this. I'm sure that's not true. I know I hear much of the same from the Native community in Canada. That is Natives complaining about the lack of support in their communities when they excel in education (that's the context in which I heard it).... things like learning is for whites, ect.

To me. It's a human thing. People grasp onto whatever they can to explain their failures..... and will use it as an excuse to not even try.... That's everyone, not just blacks or natives.... I know a lot of white people that if they could use slavery as an excuse to not get out of bed in the morning they would.

Anyway, in this case (blacks) see other blacks rising out of poverty, they become jealous. They have long used a racist system to explain their failures..... the racist system was the excuse they needed to not study for the test... or to commit a crime. Seeing someone rise past the challenges provokes jealousy and anger and a need to try and bring the person down to their level.

That's not to say at all their grievances with historical and current wrongs are not valid... it's just that there is also a danger in slipping into victim mentality.
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I agree with this, and echo that it's not just black communities. In basically all pressured communities (economic being the most observable in the US), there is the tendency to 'own people'. It's a basic human instinct to fear the loss of resources, and members of the community are a 'resource'. People who 'get out' are resented and shunned for stealing the labor and other input they took with them when they 'left'. This of course compounds the problems in these communities especially when so many of the ways to display your 'in-ness' are maladaptive to the environment.
 
luchog said:
"Sell-out/sold-out" is a fairly universal insult against anyone from a less privileged background who manages a notable degree of success; typically with the added complaint that they've "betrayed their roots".



And that's pretty much it right there. Though I would said it's not because of seeing someone else succeed where they've failed, but rather seeing someone else succeed where they haven't bothered to even try. Seeing all the excuses for their own lack of success invalidated by someone who succeeds despite such ostensible obstacles. Few things will generate more envy and hatred.
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^^^this
 
Foolmewunz said:
I see a lot of truth in what Barkley is saying and I think that he's noted for speaking his mind, even if he acknowledges that this isn't a conversation that necessarily needs to include white people.

As to "not black enough", it's a common statement (in one form or another) in black communities. I like the conservative members trying to put it down to limousine liberals. The criticisms I heard, from black people, of Cosby was that he had a funny show but that it had nothing to do with addressing the problems of the black community, other than a Pyrrhic victory for getting a milquetoast family sit-com in which the average milquetoast middle class family happened to have darker skin tones than other such shows.

In that same sense, a politico can be seen as "not black enough" if he/she grew up separated from the issues that blacks face on a daily basis. And that's why Obama was seen by many as "not black enough". That doesn't mean that he can't address or hasn't experienced being black. His skin color guarantees that he can. But having knowledge of dealing with killings on his front steps, of keeping his kids away from gangs, of trying to scrape by with a single parent for moral guidance and financial input, of lower quality schools and infrastructure, etc... As much as conservatives love to tag the guy as a pinko commie radical, he's a middle class (now upper-upper-middle class) black man with only second hand experience of those situations.
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It would be productive if people could recognize how many people can directly relate to things like the highlighted from first hand experience who are not part of the same race they are. All too often arguments are dismissed with the ad-hom of 'you can't know what it's like to be x' when in fact for many of the elements the party can know. Common experiences shouldn't be dismissed, and no race 'owns' many of them, even if they are more common in those communities mostly of that race.
 
Foolmewunz said:
I see a lot of truth in what Barkley is saying and I think that he's noted for speaking his mind, even if he acknowledges that this isn't a conversation that necessarily needs to include white people.

As to "not black enough", it's a common statement (in one form or another) in black communities. I like the conservative members trying to put it down to limousine liberals. The criticisms I heard, from black people, of Cosby was that he had a funny show but that it had nothing to do with addressing the problems of the black community, other than a Pyrrhic victory for getting a milquetoast family sit-com in which the average milquetoast middle class family happened to have darker skin tones than other such shows.
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I've seen it too, rarely. It's a position usually reserved for idiots, and street-corner lunatics like five-percenters. And even the Five Percenters are in favor of "knowledge", it's just that their version of "knowledge" is numerology and the like.

But among the typical - goes to work and sends their kids to school household, the Cosby Show was just a good sitcom, with black elements in it, but not a Black Sitcom.

Same with Obama. There were black women who wanted Hilary to win (and let's be honest, there wasn't much difference between their policy positions) and sure, there were people who called him "not black enough", mostly because they were mad that he wouldn't kiss their rings, but just went directly to the voters. But for the most part, the everyday black person who was against him, was simply convinced that white people would vote against him in overwhelming numbers, and he might end up dead.
 
tyr_13 said:
Wait...what conspiracy theory? What am I missing?

Well, what am I missing here. The list of things I'm missing in general might be too much even for the new servers.
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This:
" Obviously, doing things like concentrating bus depots in black neighborhoods, especially when they ran on leaded fuel, will affect those neighborhoods."

It's absolutely absurd.
 
WildCat said:
This:
" Obviously, doing things like concentrating bus depots in black neighborhoods, especially when they ran on leaded fuel, will affect those neighborhoods."

It's absolutely absurd.
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That's a really square peg for that round pole. I don't see anything he wrote as a conspiracy theory, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. If you had any sense of decency you'd just apologize and move on.
 
Unabogie said:
That's a really square peg for that round pole. I don't see anything he wrote as a conspiracy theory, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. If you had any sense of decency you'd just apologize and move on.
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I neither expect nor desire an apology from Wildcat, but here's a starting point for anyone interested.

ETA: This is getting off point. What Barkley is saying is another very old stereotype - one that is, in this case, usually perpetuated by black people, against other black people. It's not at all unusual for black Americans to internalize these stereotypes, of black people as amazingly violent, sex-prone, and so on. I'm not at all shocked to see, for example, Don Lemon joining in on it, since that's a part of Lemon's act. But like most racism in the US, this goes back over 100 years.
 
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Mumbles said:
I neither expect nor desire an apology from Wildcat, but here's a starting point for anyone interested.

ETA: This is getting off point. What Barkley is saying is another very old stereotype - one that is, in this case, usually perpetuated by black people, against other black people. It's not at all unusual for black Americans to internalize these stereotypes, of black people as amazingly violent, sex-prone, and so on. I'm not at all shocked to see, for example, Don Lemon joining in on it, since that's a part of Lemon's act. But like most racism in the US, this goes back over 100 years.
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The article doesn't answer one question, that being, which were there first, the homes or the businesses? If the businesses were there first, it's hardly their fault if homes were built around them, unless they built them in the first place. That's IF, mind you.
 
Unabogie said:
That's a really square peg for that round pole. I don't see anything he wrote as a conspiracy theory, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. If you had any sense of decency you'd just apologize and move on.
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Well, just from a technical point of view.
Busses run on diesel.
Lead was put in petrol to up the knock resistance (octane rating).
Putting bus depots in certain neighbourhoods to target the children there with lead poisoning sounds like a CT to me. Hard to prove and easy to debunk.
Now giving them lung cancer due to the soot put out by the busses...

Or asthma, as pointed out in the article Mumbles linked.
 
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Shrike said:
Well, just from a technical point of view.
Busses run on diesel.
Lead was put in petrol to up the knock resistance (octane rating).
Putting bus depots in certain neighbourhoods to target the children there with lead poisoning sounds like a CT to me. Hard to prove and easy to debunk.
Now giving them lung cancer due to the soot put out by the busses...

Or asthma, as pointed out in the article Mumbles linked.
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You're right, it's actually asthma. Thanks for the correction. Still, my mother knew it way back when, and to this day will occasionally ask me about it. And thanks for striking out the CT stuff - this isn't about some conspiracy, but about the simple fact that these sites were pushed out of wealthy and, to a lesser extent, middle class white neighborhoods, which leads to them being concentrated in black (and poor white) areas.

Here's two things that tick me off about what Barkley said. First, um, Charles Barkley is not intelligent. In fact, he was probably one of the guys who ound beat up "nerds" back in school. Second, in my experience, both as a smart black kid, and as a mentor, people in the hood will support the intelligent kid, and celebrate when he or she succeeds. I went to one of the top private schools in the state, and it never crossed my mind to hide it out of fear that some "unintelligent" black people would try to tear me down.

Now, I did hide the fact that I was playing Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 3, but that's less "intelligent", and more "nerdy".
 
Mike! said:
The article doesn't answer one question, that being, which were there first, the homes or the businesses? If the businesses were there first, it's hardly their fault if homes were built around them, unless they built them in the first place. That's IF, mind you.
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We're discussing Boston here. Neighborhoods like Roxbury predate the invention of the Diesel engine. The houses were there first.
 
Mike! said:
Never been there, so thanks for the clarification.
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In a lot of places there was also the issue of redlining and segregation. Places like Bill O'Reilly's famous Levittown, where he likes to say he learned him his solid family values and virtues, explicitly forbade minorities from living there. So naturally, in many places, if you can't find housing where the white people are you end up finding it in the places where no one wants to live. And that's usually "on the other side of the tracks" where the factories are. This results in minorities living near pollution at a higher rate than whites. So it's not a conspiracy in the sense that whites want to make black people sick, it's that segregation results in black people getting sick, and white people didn't think that was a good enough reason to change the situation.
 
Mike! said:
Never been there, so thanks for the clarification.
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You're welcome...but we're getting off track again.

We're in 2014. Does anyone remember this time of year, in 2008? This is about the time when Obama was elected president. And black people (as well as some white people, but that's not the point) just burst out in celebration? People were banging drums, honking horns. Hell, people just created parades to celebrate the first black president.

But now, a mere six years later, we're supposed to think that the average black person hates to see another black person succeed.

That's nonsense, obviously.
 
Mumbles said:
Here's two things that tick me off about what Barkley said. First, um, Charles Barkley is not intelligent. In fact, he was probably one of the guys who ound beat up "nerds" back in school.
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I don't know much about the guy, so I'm genuinely curious as to why you say this and what it's based on. In his role as a sports commentator, he comes across as far, far more articulate, insightful, and intelligent than Shaquille O'neal, for example. In fact, the contrast between the two is astounding.
 
Doghouse Reilly said:
I don't know much about the guy, so I'm genuinely curious as to why you say this and what it's based on. In his role as a sports commentator, he comes across as far, far more articulate, insightful, and intelligent than Shaquille O'neal, for example. In fact, the contrast between the two is astounding.
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You mean aside from his frequent on-court brawls, and that time he threw a guy through a window?
 
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