What black and white people really think about one another

There is a degree of truth-telling going on. The film Dear White People, released in the UK in July, is a satirical look at the situation of black students at a predominantly white Ivy League universities. Americans do a good trade in discussing cultural idiosyncrasies. Many a US standup comedian draws laughs from the idea that white people do things one way, while black people act differently. Such humour works less well in the UK. Yet, it is the contention of my friend Dotun Adebayo – broadcaster and columnist – that such trading on stereotypes happens in the UK in private, and he set out to prove it.

He presented two programmes this month on BBC Radio London, one on what white folks really think about black people, and the other on what black people really think about white people. The four white Britons he invited into the studio for the first programme said, without rancour, that they found black people loud, excessively feisty, excessively ebullient and oversensitive. Sample complaints: “When someone calls me ‘white trash’, I don’t get upset. Why do black people have to take a diss so personally?” and “Why has everything got to get an ‘Is it because I’m black?’ response?” This suggests that those who took part in the experiment had been exposed to a good few stereotypes, and principally very negative ones. The lack of frankness between the races about each other is more a white problem, said one, “because black people know more about us than we know about them”.

The following week, four black guests cheerily questioned why their white friends dress down while black people dress up, but – more seriously – cited an enduring reluctance to discuss what they saw as a core issue: majority mindsets conditioned still by the imposition of enslavement and colonialism. “They felt that for all the conversations white and black people have, they never truly deal with that. They saw it as the elephant in the room,” says Adebayo.

It wasn’t all just stereotypes, he says. There was a genuine acceptance among his white guests that black Britons get a raw deal, but although they felt part of an equation that caused them real concern, they felt impotent in terms of doing anything about it. Hence, perhaps, some of the frustrations and resentments expressed in private. Guilt and impotence never was a good mix.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/23/what-black-and-white-people-really-think-about-one-another

I like Dotun Adebayo... must be because I'm such a racist...