Roland Fryer is an economist at Harvard who has done research on “acting white” in the black community. According to the good folks over at Freakonomics, Fryer recently learned that exceling in academia is no longer called “acting white” and instead is referred to as “acting asian“.
My question is, why do we EVER label any sort of achievement or culturally divergent behavior as “acting”? What is accomplished by calling a person an Oreo, Twinke, or whitewashed? What purpose do names achieve?
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5 Comments to “Acting [fill in the blank]”
courageous kiwi wrote:
Because we stereotype. Don’t kid yourself. You discriminate against poor people.
Posted on 06-Nov-07 at 12:53 am | Permalink
Chook wrote:
“..why do we EVER label any sort of achievement or culturally divergent behavior as ‘acting’ ?”
Not many people are comfortable swimming against the current of majority opinions/behaviour – so those who do, will often fine that the majority will disassociate themselves through derogatory labelling. I think it comes down to a fear of change in the status quo.
Posted on 06-Nov-07 at 11:44 pm | Permalink
Bertie wrote:
“What is accomplished by calling a person an Oreo, Twinke, or whitewashed? What purpose do names achieve?”
It fills silence with mindless conversation to amuse ourselves and our friends. Sort of like how people gossip viciously at brunch about folks we haven’t seen for ten years, because if all we do is talk about our real lives, we’d all be discussing “TPS Reports” or “discovery requests”, depending on our career choices, and we’d all die of boredom.
Posted on 07-Nov-07 at 4:03 pm | Permalink
Jesse! wrote:
I blame it all on our fruit eating, tree dwelling ancestors. Something in our brains, cross-culturally, has an absolute need to categorize and name because they needed to determine if something was good to eat or not. Fine. Awesome. Unfortunately we do it now with such snap judgments that we are often wrong and/or cannot easily change these categorizations, esp. after they are set during the more imprinting stage of childhood. (eg, racism in the household begets more racism)
It took me a really long time to stop calling lame things gay, but I made the effort. Now, I’m pretty pissed at people who use that word in that way. Eminem, I’m looking at YOU!
Posted on 07-Nov-07 at 4:49 pm | Permalink
Bertie wrote:
The word “twinkie” is lame.
The word “twink” is gay.
Posted on 08-Nov-07 at 7:59 am | Permalink
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