I agree to a certain extent, but even more disconcerting is the difference between blacks from Britain and Americans who are black. The British have a confidence and ease of manner which is sadly not present with their American counterparts. It's as if black Americans are constantly looking over their shoulders and don't believe they are secure to be themselves. I see no trace of this in blacks from Europe.
This stuff is making me cringe. "Black Americans" aren't looking over their shoulders. People from a pervasive underclass are acting in ways society has conditioned to, whether they're black families living in a rowhouse in Englewood or white families living in a shack in Missouri.
I live in one of the most "segregated" cities in the United States, literally on one of its fault lines (my alley divides White Suburban Chicago from Black Urban Chicago). White or black, the people on my block are confident and secure and happy and generally pissed off or insecure about the same things I am; meanwhile, the people across the alley are living amongst dogfighting rings, hand-to-hand retail drug dealing, and flashing blue police cameras.
It's not a "black" and "white" thing and it's naive to express surprise about it. We all know how it got to be that way. There is no magic wand you can wave to lift 115,000 people out of social, educational, and economic poverty. Except maybe, maybe, by pouring billions of dollars into their public schoools.
Please stop referring to "blacks"? I swear to God it's not PC-ness that's prompting this comment; it's my nerdy inability not to bristle at a sentence that misunderstands something so fundamentally.
I would avoid generalizing about black people in America. You might be thinking about "the black urban underclass". Those people are very different from "black investment bankers".
Then I call total BS, because no upper middle class black person that I know is "constantly looking over their shoulder", at least not in any way that upper middle class white people do already.
I'm going to be done discussing this now; I'm happy to read anything you write in response, but this is one of those super-unproductive discussions that is inevitably going to embarrass me in a year.
Europe still has plenty of behind-the-back discrimination of ethnic groups though, and conversely I think people in the UK have an ease of manner about saying racist things. America is very confrontational about it's racism, for better or worse.
