D34r f15h: Why are black people so loud?
Black People Say It Loud
Let’s be fair here: There are plenty of African-Americans who are not so loud, who are, in fact, pretty quiet. But I know what you mean. Black folks seem to speak at higher volumes than white folks whether they’re happy (hanging out with friends, conversing on public transportation, watching a movie in the theater) or angry (scolding their children or significant others or complete strangers). They hold intimate conversations in public spaces at embarrassing pitches, shouting things that white people would be ashamed to whisper in the company of strangers. Why is this?
Well, several factors apply, it seems to me. For most of them, you can Google “Why are black people so loud?” and find many helpful responses, from “Because they’re ignorant little picaninnies” to “Shut up, you fucking racist cracker.” Beyond that, here are my humble contributions to the debate:
First, the level of frustration is high for black mothers in particular. With so many absentee or no account black fathers, black mothers often feel as though they are alone in the difficult task of raising black children, who may or may not be more prone to bad behavior than white children. (I don’t think they are any worse than white kids, but the black mothers I hear yelling at them all the time might disagree, at least in private, if there is such a thing as “private” for black mothers.)
Secondly, black folks have been told to shut up for a long time, and at some point along the way, maybe with the advent of the Black Power movement in the mid-late ’60s, they became sick of it. Empowering messages transmitted through negro music such as blues, rhythm & blues, soul, funk, and rap encouraged them to make some noise. To do otherwise would be to capitulate to white culture and assume the mantles of “Uncle Tom” and “Aunt Jemima.” Ever since slavery, lots of black folks have carried chips on their shoulders. I don’t blame them. I mean, if I went back far enough, I could probably find slaves in my own ancestry, but for African-Americans, the brutal and repressive condition was much more recent and in the country in which they still live. That doesn’t excuse them from taking personal responsibility for their lives, but it’s something. They’re mad as hell about not being able to talk as loud as they wanted to back then, and so they are not going to take it anymore.
I hope my wisdom has enlightened you on this issue, dear reader. Next time you are annoyed with a loud black person, just tell them, “I am so glad you are no longer a slave, but could you assert your freedom a little more quietly or farther away from me, please?” And if you thought they were loud before …
Cultural/Evolutionary Basis of Cutting: In Defense of Self-Mutilation, part three
Cultural/Evolutionary Basis of Cutting
Human beings have been cutting themselves for thousands of years. Way back when, however, it wasn’t a solitary activity in response to overwhelming psychological stress. It was integrated into the community as a rite of passage, a ceremonial scarring to mark one’s acceptance into the adult community. Highly ritualized events like this not only provided a sense of direction and belonging, but they acknowledged the human need for intense physical experiences (pain in this case, but other ancient rituals emphasized sex, drugs, starvation, etc.) and gave those experiences boundaries of time, place, and community.
Of course, we have disposed of those barbaric traditions, because we are now too civilized and too rational to do such things to ourselves or our children. Of course, drugs (including but not limited to booze) and addictive behavior; illicit and compulsive sex, prostitution, infidelity; violence and S&M dynamics of all sorts still flourish somewhere in the shadows (and often in the broad daylight) of the adult world. But at least the children are safe. (OK, I’m being obviously sarcastic here. I won’t insult your intelligence by drawing that out.)
My own opinion is that there is nothing inherently bad about sex, drugs, or violence. (There is, of course, something inherently dangerous about them, but it’s not a moral issue.) Nor are they demons from our distant past that we can stamp out through some sort of political, psychological, or social progressivism or reactionism. In fact, we run into virtually identical problems whether we liberate these forces from the prison of moral interpretation (replacing it by either excusing excess with novel designations of victimhood or celebrating excess with a blind eye toward its dangers) or beat them repeatedly with moral baseball bats. They have always been an integral part of the human experience and they always will be. The only choice we have to make is how to work with them, direct them into channels less likely to kill us and our loved ones. As long as we refuse to make that decision, old human patterns will persist in their more destructive forms.
As long as kids have little or no sense of purpose or meaning, no sense of personal identity (you can’t tell just by the hair or the music or whether they get along with their parents), no sense that their actions can affect the world around them, sex, drugs, and violence will flourish in their world, too. Pain will be a solution to pain. Cutting will not stop. But in some distant memory, in the chemicals that flow from our glands and swim through the primordial waters of our bloodstream, all of this connects us to an age when everything made a hell of a lot more sense.
Related Posts on Other Blogs
The RecoverYourLife.com Forums discuss whether seeking help is just “being selfish?”
ModBlog shows us a journey from “Self-Harm to Self-Love” using conscious and deliberate self-branding over cutting scars, and and another “Self-Injury Scar Cover-Up Procedure” using artistic scarification.
ModBlog also has some incredibly interesting posts on ritual and/or performance cutting (Caution: Graphic, bloody pictures).
