"Why Don't You Act Like Your Own Race?"

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It has come to my attention that a good number of seemingly innocuous terms are rather specific ethnic slurs:

apple - Native American who "acts too Caucasian"
banana/Twinkie - (South-)East Asian who "acts too Caucasian"
coconut/potato - Hispanic or South Asian who "acts too Caucasian"
egg - Caucasian who "acts too (South-)East Asian"
Oreo - black person who "acts too Caucasian"
reverse Oreo - Caucasian who "acts too black"

Perhaps I'm not the kind of person to complain about these things since I'm white (on the inside and on the outside), but I believe these epithets are completely insipid. Sure, it might be a struggle to be yourself if what you know or enjoy differs significantly from where you came from, but I think it's pretty petty to complain about someone "being a race traitor" or "appropriating culture" via cold reading instead of getting to know the non-conforming individual in question. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make myself a snack. These stupid slang insults have made me hungry.

The Oreo ones were pretty funny.

How does one "act Caucasian"?

i've never heard of any of those

at least once i've witnessed someone been told they they "act white" for their academic success...and avoidance of slang.

The one "oreo" thing (black on the outside, white on the inside) was the original one. It appeared in the late sixties, during the tumult and social upheavel of that decade.

Have not heard, nor seen it I print for decades, and I NEVER heard/seen ANY of the others before at all.

In my job (we are in the B-to-B sector, and go into stores and either count their inventory, or stock their shelves) I overheard some young Black women of our company talking about the young Black lady manager of a store we were working in for several days, and heard one say "THAT's why she talks so proper." Thought to myself "I guess that girl in our company must have just learned that the store manage was an immigrant from the Caribbean, and speaks in British English...well duhhhh...ofcourse she isn't gonna speak in American ghetto slang."

It also illustrates how "race" isn't really "race". Its ethnicity. Blacks in the USA are not the same ethnic group as Blacks from Africa, or the Caribbean. "Acting Black", or "speaking Black" is not about having African DNA, its about being a member of a particular subset of people with African DNA who also have a long heritage of living here in the USA who are quite culturally distinct from recent immigrants who also happened to have African DNA.

So it's more a class thing than a race thing?

Precisely why I'm not on board with broad generalisations made based on skin colour, and why so many liberals view it as regressive.

Oddly, I'd heard of those but had to look up insipid.

This is not race at all, it is culture. saying that 'culture' is 'race' is a racist thing in of itself. Should we now compell people into conforming to what are ultimately self defeating sterotypes based on how others think that people from certain geographical locations think that they should act?

It's culture and racism rolled into one. A black person telling another black person they're acting white is saying that black person is not acting the way they "should" to be part of the culture, but it's also racist because a white person would be unwelcome in the culture even if they acted "correctly" to fit into the culture, thus racial discrimination. You see this racism on show when Black Lives Matter push their white allies into an unequal position (get to the back, we don't want you at the front!) They don't want whites to stand equal with them in common cause, they want them in subservience to them.

We Americans seriously need to get past this race horse$hit, and accept that an American is an American is an American. I know, racism has made that virtually impossible for too long, but the best way we can achieve the end of racism is by imitating one another to one extent or another. So let's appropriate each other's culture!! !

It highlights how race and culture intersect. Some of the damaging stereotypes reside in each one. Many people in the Dominican Republic see a distinct difference between themselves (Dominican) and their Haitian neighbors (black), and while many Americans would see no obvious difference between them in lots of cases, they see themselves as racially as well as culturally distinct. Likewise, take a woman from a rural village in Mexico with some Aztec features, and depending on how she dresses, she can come across as Mexican, Indian, mestizo, or any number of other cultural classifications endemic to the perceptions of people in that area.

I don't see it as passing, in the old-fashioned sense, because most people in the world have the opportunity to celebrate many different cultures and traditions of their ancestry in their own identity. It all depends on how we perceive the fundamental unit of society. Most of us here will see that as the individual, but many people hold dramatically different views, holding the family, village or tribe as the most important unit of society. A few terminally hopeless fools believe in race, and act like they consider race the basic unit of society.

As far as being "white" goes, I understand the need to call out self-hatred but when it comes to more superficial things like their mannerisms, the way they talk, dress, etc. that's when the shaming gets absurd.

I still don't believe there is a "white" culture.

There are very many ethnic groups within what is considered the "white" race. Many "cultures."

I think we forget just how much of the so-called white American culture of independence and self-reliance merged with democratic institutions comes not from Europe, but from the Native American people whose governance methods we absorbed as we displaced them, along with certain values.

Additionally, as we have gotten onto the topic of simplifying cultures, I think I understand why our society has long favored images of Plains Indians over all others. Yes, the headdresses look cool and distinctive, and who doesn't love a soft outfit made of buckskins. But, I currently think that the Northeast and Northwest like to use these images over images representing the actual tribes who lived in their area, because the Plains Indians had gone through a massive cultural shift. White people pushing west had displaced other tribes like ball bearings in a tube, and had pushed the Comanche (for example) from their previous home near the Great Lakes far south into the Great Plains. As a result, the complex interconnected societies of the Algonquin (for example) had not developed. The environment in the SW probably suits a nomadic lifestyle better, anyway.

Focusing on the Plains Indians and forgetting about the huge and well-organized networks of tribes in the northeastern US and along the entire West Coast makes it easier to think of Indians as savages. I don't mean to impugn the Plains Indians, by any means, but the coastal tribes had a lot more recognizable trappings of advanced societies, and I think white people in the US would like to forget about destroying them.