Very Smart Brothas' Damon Young grapples with the way black people tend to recoil at certain comments, even when those comments address the same things we criticize about ourselves.
… I know we generally do not take kindly to White people criticizing anything that has to do with Black people and Black culture. As stated earlier, the criticism could even be the exact same thing we criticize about ourselves, but a White voice seems to make that criticism invalid.
For instance, in the last couple of months, there have been at least two high-profile instances of a non-liberal White person publicly criticizing something related to Black people and facing serious repercussions because of it.
John Derbyshire’s “The Talk: Nonblack version” — a “letter” to his son teaching him the best way to avoid violent confrontations with Black people — got him fired from his job at The National Review. While Derbyshire deserved to be fired for using shitty science to back his race-based racist assertions, much of what he said in his piece has come out of our own mouths many times.
Read Damon Young's entire piece at Very Smart Brothas.
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Damon Young is the editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas.com. He is also a contributing editor at Ebony.com. He lives in Pittsburgh and he really likes pancakes. You can reach him at damon@verysmartbrothas.com.