Okay, I'm gonna need some help here.

[conuly]

It's like banging my head against a wall, but more painful. And if I'm going to keep wasting my time on this futile effort, I could at least get a little company there.

I mean, I'm not wrong, am I? My facts aren't wrong, are they? My thoughts aren't missing a crucial point, are they? This person IS being willfully annoying, right?

HELP ME OUT HERE I FEEL SO ALONE.

Also, I didn't know this as I don't really follow celebrity anything (I'm lucky if I know who a certain star IS, much less what they've done and why people care) or watch many movies or TV shows (I do watch TV, of course, but I seem to limit myself to three or four shows. If I add a new one, an old one inevitably drops off my list), but I'm realizing it now by looking at these pictures...

WOW does that girl look like her dad. Will Smith? HIS DAUGHTER LOOKS JUST LIKE HIM.

It's sorta creepy to look at, but I'm sure as she gets older it'll be more her face and less her dad as a young girl. (Kinda like a kid down her block who looks spookily like her grandmother... or she did at four. Creepy seeing a four year old who looks like a 50 year old woman, but now that she's 12 even though her face hasn't changed, it looks like HER instead of her grandma.)

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I was talking to you - you were the one who asked if she was being wilfully annoying. I agree with bayushi about the excessive chatspeak, because I do find that annoying, but I don't think it's deliberate. I seem to recall having embraced more than one cool jargon with excessive enthusiasm in my youth, and looking back, I'm sure a number of my elders must have longed to smack me for it, but I didn't realize that at the time. LOL, want to hear really annoying; for a brief period in my teens I took to speaking in blank verse; chatspeak can hardly hold a candle to that.

*hugs* True that; only one person - a young, possibly not very intellectual person, who may know little of the world besides what she's seen on TV, and doesn't realize that saying "I don't care about race" is similar to saying "I don't care about poverty", or pollution, or cancer: that race is a huge problem that affects our entire species, whether or not one is being directly affected by it at the moment. Probably no one's ever explained it to her in those terms before.

Like I said, I thought you were doing all right up to the point where your frustration got the better of you. She wasn't terribly receptive to what you were saying (and why should she be, when you're just another stranger on the 'Net?) but she was sticking with the dialogue, and she was not getting personal or insulting, so there seemed a decent chance you were getting through to her a little.

But then you lost your temper, and thus not only lost your chance of getting through to her, but practically guaranteed that the next person who tries will have a much harder time. In essence you told her "I'm right because I'm black", and thus lost any claim to be speaking against racism.

I thought you were right, but not because you're black, and particularly not because being black gives you the psychic ability to know why someone who isn't thinks what she thinks. You were right just because you were right; because we all know the movie producers have to focus on 'box office', and many of them seem to be mentally stuck in the last century, so they figure white folk won't go to a movie with black protagonists.

Maybe that's true, maybe not; in any case, if that's what they want, there are plenty of stories written with all-white characters. Hopefully the scorn heaped upon Sci-Fi Channel's lousy Earthsea will have taught them the folly of taking a beloved story and characters and altering them out of recognition for the sake of 'box office'.

[conuly]

I'm, uh, not black. I'm at least 50% guaranteed white (that's the first/second generation immigrant half) and the other 50% is I strongly doubt I have any African-American ancestry at all, and would be surprised to hear otherwise (that's the DAR half).

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

My apologies; I am not up on the current usage and don't mean to mislabel or disrespect you; also I'm not recalling if I've seen an actual picture of you, or if I've only seen pics of your nieces and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Aren't they considered 'black'? They're certainly what was considered 'black' in Brooklyn the last time I was there, but that was pretty long ago. It occurs to me now that their Dad is black but not their Mom?

Anyway, sorry; so-clueless me.

[conuly]

They're biracial, yes, their dad is black and their mom is not.

I'd assume most people would view them as black, but I don't go around conducting polls on the subject. And of course I don't know how they'll view themselves when they're grown.

And it's not being rude or disrespectful or anything, but I don't want to misrepresent myself. I'd be actually astonished to find out I had any non-white ancestry, you know? It's possible, I guess (although I know that the work of tracking down my father's family tree has already been done, if I care to look it up), but it seems extremely unlikely, and even if I did find out "Wow, I do have one non-white great great great great great great great...." I certainly wouldn't change how I identify myself. That'd be a little weird.