The “serious” conversation: the most overrated thing…ever
by Jane Smith
a law student, a lawyer, two neuroscience phd’s, an engineer, a banker/engineer, and a scientist/published writer enter a room.
Although this sounds like the beginning of an extremely ambitious version of the aristocrats joke, the italicized sentence represents a (partial) resume description of each of the seven people i chilled with saturday evening, as what was originally just supposed to be a 6pm fish fry at the lawyer’s crib turned into a rum and coke and convo filled all-nighter (we didn’t leave until 3am).
With this cast of characters, you could reasonably assume that the conversations probably included topics such as the social dynamics behind the public reaction to the gulf oil spill, how black academics can learn from john wooden’s coaching legacy, why blanche devereaux was more carrie bradshaw than carrie bradshaw, and any other ridiculously intellectual subject that sounds like it could be a title of an article at the root, and you wouldn’t be wrong to make that assumption.
Why? well, if you were to randomly ask 100 educated negroes to list 10 characteristics any potential mate and/or friend must have, “the ability to talk about immigration and irrigation and other serious topics“ would probably show up on 98 of the lists. typically speaking, we (educated negroes) are a bunch of pretentious assholes (on paper, at least) so it wouldn’t be completely off-base to think that this particular gathering of educated negroes contained more evidence of said pretentiousness.
In no specific order, these were the topics actually discussed saturday night:
Homeless white women. the genital daredevil. running trains. how our white neighbors would react if we decided to grill chitlins. threesomes. royce reed. pretzel m&m’s. titties. freestyle rapping. mexican midgets. howie mandel’s sexuality. tok and the chi-chi man song. lebron, gloria, and delonte james. granny panties and soulful white men. white people are crazy
Hmmm. not exactly real time with bill maher.
Just to show that this night wasn’t an anomaly, here are some of the topics discussed during a black law association cookout i attended memorial day weekend:
Dominican hairdressers. how burnt is too burnt for a hot dog. spades. road rage. parking spot chivalry. kanye. dating in pittsburgh. white people are crazy.
Even i–a man with multiple public proclamations of love for women with “asses, glasses, and advanced degrees”–can’t remember the last time i had a long conversation with my soon to be phd’ed girlfriend about something that didn’t have to do with cats, netflix, sex, food, or her friends.
I’m not bringing this up to boast about how awesome my circle of friends are, or even to chide those who usually have conversations about serious topics in social settings, but to say that those actual serious conversations about afghanistan and health care and learned helplessness and the legality of profiling don’t actually happen…ever
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Wait, lemme rephrase that. it’s not that they don’t happen ever, but why do we put such a premium on a person being “informed” and “knowing about the issues” when we’re 100 times more likely to actually have conversations about drake than darfur?
You can probably say that the ability to have these conversations is m0re important than actually having them. but, if this is true, why stop at “the ability to have serious conversations“? why not list “the ability to fly a helicopter blindfolded” or “the ability to eat an entire kosher ice cream cake in one sitting” as well? i mean, i can surely think of a few circumstances (ie: hostage situations, jewish weddings, etc) when both of those skills would be extremely useful. its all the about the ability and potential, right?
Since any hoodrat with an HD feed can speak in-depth about basketball wives, to me the focus on the serious convo is just a way to further hierarchy ourselves and our wants from the uneducated masses. this makes sense in theory, at least until you realize that the vast majority of us would much rather date or befriend someone who’d much rather expound on fiddy’s unexpected weight loss than the financial crisis.
i guess this makes us all hypocrites. but, i’ll be that as long as you can tell me were you’d rank ray allen on the list of ”top five NBA players with surprisingly good looking mothers“.
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