Support the 100 Black Men and the 100 Black Women. One thing I've never got is why black folks can never see ourselves the way we really are. Black folks will be steady reading a book, but then say other black folks don't read books, even if all their friends are reading books too, and black imprints are doing huge business. Folks will pretend they are different and special because they don't act like they come out of a rap video. That's dumb- most black folk don't act like they are out of a rap video. Heck, even the rappers don't act that way on their own time. And of course, out of the media, we get dumb shit like this. For fuck's sake, what a bunch of bull. I'm sad we get some misguided black folk like that- they think they must pretend they aren't black to the point of avoiding perfectly harmless foods like fried chicken(read the article that the linked editorial springs from). It's a fearful synergy. We got the black person who is afraid to own their blackness and we got white folks who are so scared of folks not being exactly like them, that they'll enable the unhealthy habit of trying to ignore one's ethnicity.

I'm not saying you gotta listen to rap or Bob Marley if you don't like them, but at least acknowledge that you're not some amazing special negro if you like classical music instead. For example, I like singing along to morose Aimee Mann songs. But I don't act like "yea, I'm not like those other blacks" just because of my taste in music. I instead acknowledge that blackness is a big category, and there's no need to run from it. Every black person on the planet probably deviates from the stereotype somewhat, because it's a stereotype. Why we got to give it credence by ignoring the black people around us, and the black people we are by acting like we are to be judged against something that was made up?