31 March, 2014

Other People's Pathologies - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic

Other People's Pathologies - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic:

People who take a strict binary
view of culture ("culture of privilege = awesome; culture of poverty =
fail") are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly
underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. They extoll
"middle-class values" to the ignorance and exclusion of all others. To
understand, you must imagine what it means to confront algebra in the
morning and "Shorty, can I see your bike?" in the afternoon.
It's
very nice to talk about "middle-class values" when that describes your
small, limited world. But when your grandmother lives in one hood and
your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than
"middle-class values." You need to be bilingual.