My uncle (who was a boxer with a career prematurely derailed by drugs) was cool with Camacho back in the day, he's mourning this shyt hard. I think the Black and Puerto Rican dynamic is far too complex for me to waste time thoroughly analyzing here, but Blacks and Ricans have had a love-hate relationship my entire life and before that. It's not only different in NYC from elsewhere, it's different from area to area within NYC. Where I grew up - East Harlem - Ricans and Blacks lived on top of each other, broke bread together, called each other nikkas, no matter how dark or light. Were there Ricans with superiority complexes? Of course. Were there Blacks who would turn on their Rican friends on some peer pressure shyt at times? Of course. Same can be said with fellow Blacks from hood to hood, West Indian and African vs. native, etc. Were there Ricans who didn't appreciate Blacks fukking Rican women? Of course. When I went down south I was shocked by how "color-struck," as a lot of people say down there, people were. NYC nikkas have jokes about lightskinned and darkskinned nikkas, but it doesn't reach the level of the insanity I saw down there, where women would literally put their cars in reverse to get at me, and chicks would openly admit to wanting to have babies with me so they could have "good hair." Sometimes I think nikkas in NYC were less like that because of Puerto Ricans - you didn't necessarily chase lightskinned chicks with the same ferocity you chased a Puerto Rican chick with curly hair. Now, that was never my thing at all, but a hell of a lot of my people were on that tip. In both cases (southerners chasing lightskinned "good hair" having motherfukkers, and NYC people fukking with curlyhaired Puerto Ricans), there's a sad reflection of Eurocentric, supremacist propaganda.
All of which is to say that the Black-Puerto Rican relationship in NYC is too historically and psychologically complicated to boil down to a simple dismissal of Camacho's racism or an outright indictment of it.
I have heard black people in my fam get downright racist in describing other blacks - even blacks in our family - in terms like monkeys and ******s. There's a contextual difference between them doing this and a group of white people doing it. Just as there's a contextual difference between Camacho doing it and a group of white outsiders doing it. At the same time, there's a difference between my fam doing it and Camacho doing it too.
And fukk no, I don't give those remarks a pass at all, by the way.
All of which is to say that the Black-Puerto Rican relationship in NYC is too historically and psychologically complicated to boil down to a simple dismissal of Camacho's racism or an outright indictment of it.
I have heard black people in my fam get downright racist in describing other blacks - even blacks in our family - in terms like monkeys and ******s. There's a contextual difference between them doing this and a group of white people doing it. Just as there's a contextual difference between Camacho doing it and a group of white outsiders doing it. At the same time, there's a difference between my fam doing it and Camacho doing it too.
And fukk no, I don't give those remarks a pass at all, by the way.
