Bob Herbert on self-imposed obstacles for Blacks [View All]

[zoidberg]

Interesting column. I'm white, but hung around with enough black kids growing up that I saw this phenomenom happening. It's depressing that so many black kids only see success as something that happens to whites.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/opinion/10HERB.html

Caroline Jhingory had been warned but she was still surprised — and hurt — when some of her lifelong friends turned on her the way they did.

Ms. Jhingory is a 22-year-old black woman from Washington, D.C., who went off to college a few years ago. "One of the connections I had with my friends back home was that we had always been sort of aspiring hip-hop artists and things like that," she said. "But we were young, you know, and I eventually woke up from la-la land and realized that I would have to get an education and a job, something a little more concrete than fantasies about the hip-hop underground."

She noticed that when she came home on visits from school, some of her friends treated her differently. "I don't know if it was out of jealousy or resentment or whatever," she said, "but they would actually say to me, `You're acting white now.' They'd say that. They'd say, `You act white.' Or, `You act proper.'"