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Have you? I have, and based on my experience the GGP is still making an extraordinarily inflammatory claim (that the interaction with a generic black youth would likely have looked like that) that requires extraordinary evidence (well in excess of either invoking stereotypes or linking an anecdotal video from the internet hate machine).
If the thesis is actually "members of culture X habitually communicate in the described way (litany of attributes considered negative in our culture, anecdotal transcription optimised for disgust response)", then I'd expect something on the level of scientific papers on the interpersonal value differences and the prevalence of intercultural misunderstandings induced by the different communication style supposedly illustrated by the example. Even then, I would drop the example; if that way of speaking actually induces a negative emotional response in members of our culture. then we should keep it out of the discussion lest we are made more irrational by our own emotional response.
Actually reducing the thesis to "different cultures communicate differently" would be a massive motte-and-bailey shifting of goalposts to a thesis that is so general as to be uncontroversial.
If your feelings on the matter are actually something like "but black people are really this bad, how do we deal with this unfair standard that makes it impossible to prove that in conversation", then maybe it helps to flip the scenario to get another setting in which the required level of evidence and careful wording would at least form a lower bound: imagine a white cook got fired from a prestigious cooking school. People think it's because he's white and there is a pervasive prejudice that white people have no cuisine to speak of. Would you accept someone making the argument with personal anecdotes about being fed canned Campbell's soup, Uncle Roger shorts and Twitter memes about US supermarket toast bread and mayo, or is there a higher standard of evidence you could think of demanding?
No, thank you for engaging earnestly - I was admittedly bristling somewhat after getting the sense that people were overly quick to jump to the defense of their ingroup, and your question was more than fair.
Well, to be clear, the alternative we're comparing to would not be saying nothing at all but more something like clinical statement along the lines of "the speech mannerisms and conventions of black people often register as threatening by members of other cultures", which would arguably convey the same information only at the expense of conveying directly some of what it would be like for the reader to actually be in that hypothetical situation. You could have a separate argument about whether it is better or worse to have the emotional reaction as an elderly guy who just had someone turn up at the door - that is, would a mandatory speech-mannerism babelfish that filters out emotionally salient cultural differences be beneficial or detrimental on average? - but here we are not actually trying to deal with interlopers who may or may not threaten us, nor even give personal recommendations to people who are, but instead trying to foster an environment in which we can discuss societal effects and abstract principles in a detached manner.
When I say the anecdote makes us irrational, I mean that it's hard to "shut up and multiply" the magnitude of one's emotional response to something; and for many people including myself emotions seem to come with a builtin self-reinforcement drive where they also motivate us to seek out more emotional stimulus that reinforces them and shun input that induces emotions in conflict. This complicates the "shutting up and multiplying" of a rational weighing process even further, as now we find ourselves actively trying to increase the first term we found and avoiding exploration of others. That (/whether) this is a problem worth fixing is a separate debate that is largely orthogonal to the circumstance that this is a problem that exists; susceptibility to drug addiction would also be nice to overcome but "start by binging on some drugs and then see if you can avoid getting addicted" is rarely good advice for the individual.
To illustrate the problem of calculating with emotions further, in this particular case, what would even be a counterweight that would allow us to weigh the potential emotional terror of the old man (conditioned on the interaction actually having occurred as OP hypothesized) in the context of the correct consequences to draw as a society? Shouldn't we also take into the account the potential emotional consequences for everyone else - such as the putative addition to the terror a black youth may experience about the prospect of accidentally going to the wrong porch? I don't see anecdotes conveying each of the emotions coexisting and being traded off against each other in a discussion without their respective proponents just getting angered and trying to shoot the other messenger.
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When I saw Joe Rogan in Baltimore, a fight broke out in the parking garage because someone wouldn't let someone else back out into the line. It was two cars behind us. The entire 60 minutes we were slowly emptying out of that subterranean edifice, dude was hanging out his window shouting at the guy in front of him more or less exactly like that. Baltimore being Baltimore, my wife was anxious actual violence was about to break out the entire time.
Where I used to live, we'd have to get my infant off the neighborhood playground as soon as the highschool let out, because a bunch of 13 year old black kids in the "mixed income"
utopiandystopian development we were renting would take it over and begin speaking exactly like that.Now granted, in a professional setting, I've never heard a black person speak like that. But literally 75% of the street encounters I've had with black teenagers, they were.
Some black people speak like that, Yes. But in peer to peer interactions mostly.
Virtually all of the black kids I know call any adults Mr/Miss/Mrs Firstname very politely and get a clip round their ear (or worse) from their parents if they do not. And that's including the ones literally from the ghetto. Where even the adults in their 30's are very likely to call me "Boss" or Mr SSCReader as an older man and be more deferential towards me than each other. For a black kid going up to knock on an adult's door they do not know well (given they didn't get the address right) it seems more likely they would be saying "Miss Talia, my mom sent me to pick up my brothers" than stereotypical ebonics even if he were a literal hood kid. Because if he didn't his mum was going to be told about his disrespect and so would her friends.
There is a lot in common with more southern politeness norms in black communities. And to be fair also in regards to levels of violence/threat. It is very similar to my Ulster-Scots brethren, where there are a lot of norms around politeness but also lots of fights/aggression. Which is perhaps why despite being in some of the worst ghetto neighborhoods as one of the whitest white men who have ever walked the earth, I've never encountered any problems. And it's usually pretty easy to see who has had in depth interactions within these communities and who hasn't. You were comparing people in an argument in the street and kids playing basketball (both where trash talking is likely) to a kid going up to ring a doorbell and collect his siblings from an adult. Why would you assume they would be similar interactions? Those are very different social situations. Codeswitching is a huge thing in the black community as you acknowledge later about professional settings and it is also very relevant to interactions like this.
And that's before we even get into the discussion of whether this kid was from a community where he is likely to use that language anyway in the first place.
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