Black & Ugly or is it just a synonym?

Tu es belle.

Being a white male myself, I suspect that I know virtually nothing of the experience of an African-American female — I would have to have lived it in order to have the merest clue. And of course there are as many different experiences as there are individual African-American females.

But from what little I’ve read, and heard in extended radio interviews with African-Americans, I get the following impression (which may or may not be accurate): In some particularly economically disadvantaged African-American communities, there is greater danger in publicly admitting vulnerability than there is in many affluent white communities. People fear that if they publicly reveal any kind of weakness, some opportunist may try to exploit it and take advantage of them (a reasonable enough concern in those neighborhoods where there’s violence resulting from poverty).

Again, I don’t know whether my impression is accurate. And I certainly don’t know whether it’s at all consistent with your experience. But if you think there’s any truth to it, then it might explain why other African-American females are hesitant to speak up.

Or perhaps some African-American women are self-conscious about “looking bad” in front of white people. They might think, “Why give white people even more reason to look down on me?” (or “on us”). They might keep silent, or they might simply not mention the fact that they’re African-American.

I don’t know if any of this is true, I’m just speculating.

If I don’t know what it is to be black and a woman in America, I do know something about internalizing other people’s disdain for me. I do know what it means to think that others are right to look down on me, that I am inferior and sub-normal and not good enough and disgusting and inexcusable. I don’t know if that’s how you feel, but it’s been present in my mind to some degree every day of my life since first or second grade. It’s central to my identity. When one sees oneself as an intolerable disgrace, it’s tempting to stop tolerating oneself once and for all.

Losing the will to breathe — I know just what you mean.

But maybe others are wrong to look down on us. No, I’ll go further than that. I KNOW that people are wrong if they look down on you for being black. I’ve believed that firmly since I was about ten or eleven years old (I was an early convert). Nobody is going to tell me otherwise.

If they’re wrong to look down on you, maybe they’re wrong to look down on me, too.

If they really do look down on us. That’s the other thing — once somebody else’s disgust for us gets inside our own head, we start to assume automatically that everybody looks down on us. But do we really know that? Can we read their minds? I know that may be hard to believe if you face frequent discrimination. But is it possible that only a few of the non-black people you encounter actually look upon you with dislike just because you’re black?

But whether it’s just a few or whether it’s nearly everybody, they’re just wrong. I’m convinced of that.

Let’s please both try to hang on, by our fingernails if we have to.

I appreciate the responses from Faerie and Dagwood Agonistes, but I’m looking for assistance from someone who has some understanding.

My real frustration is rooted in a unique upbringing that I believe has hindered me in the opportunity to love and be loved romantically. I grew up in a middle upper class neighborhood and attended mostly private and catholic schools most of my life. I live in California in the Bay Area one of the most tolerant and multi-cultural and multi-lingual areas in the United States quite possibly the world. I’ve lived abroad for a year in Japan and in France for a few months and traveled to Portugal, Thailand, Morocco, South Africa, and a few other places. My upbringing is not typical. This is a turn off to many black men because I’m over educated, too worldly, and speak proper English. I’ve never been pregnant. My parents are still married retired professionals (both black) who do the crossword puzzle together almost every day. I will not move out of the Bay Area because I’ve traveled to other places in the U.S. and nothing else compares in my opinion. So now at 37 years old my sense of hope is now empty so the reason to die is now to give people my heart, or eyes, or liver etc.
I see no more use for me living.

Please note: those four Yahoo groups I just posted are all SPECIFICALLY FOCUSED on African-American women and depression (or depression + related disorders).

Redup you can call color or the amount of melanin in your skin. Whatever dude! My birth certificate says my parents are Negros, in the 70s the term was afro-american, black is very common and the perspective is generational. Kids born in the 80s are more accustomed to African-American. Yet, that isn’t accurate either.