That is how I feel reading the comments of a video posted to r/Houston. Our city’s subreddit needs only a video of a shooting involving black people to start spouting racist comments (backed up here).

The video is linked above. It shows a group of African American men driving slabs around in circles throwing up smoke. An argument between two men escalates into a shooting. No one died, thankfully.

“Their culture legitimizes violence and ignorance, listen to 97.9 for a couple tracks and see why these guys think this shit is cool,” wrote user GeauxHouston22. “If you call it out, guess what: you’re a filthy awful racist.”

You know why people call you a filthy awful racist? Because calling black culture synonymous with violence and ignorance is racist. You’re discriminating by race and making unfounded generalizations about an entire race of people.

The Black Culture That Isn’t

These comments annoyed me precisely because they aren’t just idiots mouthing off behind their keyboards. These lovely commenters have the same opinions as a whole lot of other people in this country.

Quick: what do Bill O’Reilly, Don Lemon, Bill Cosby and these commenters have in common? They all criticize black culture for encouraging poverty and crime. The idea that black culture supports violence is not new.

It’s also absurd. You can’t honestly criticize “black” culture for any perceived fascination with violence when mainstream (“white”) culture gave us “Kill Bill,” “American Psycho” and “Mortal Kombat.”

Furthermore, what people like this redditor call “black culture” is the shit that multi-national corporate record companies produce. It’s a bullshit image that sells a lifestyle, an idea, a theoretical paradise full of mocha-skinned women and fast cars and excessive profanity. (Not unlike the “72 virgins” touted by Al-Qaeda propaganda and mainstream beer commercials.)

Remember what Master P told Congress? “Hip hop is a $4 billion business.” There’s a lot of money there.

Steve Johnson, writing for the University of Pittsburgh, tracked the progress of rap music (aka “black culture,” according to some people) through the 1990s.

“Music label executives and artist promoters heavily pushed ‘Gangsta Rap,’ often to the exclusion of other forms of rap, thereby creating a new culture and mindset,” Johnson wrote. “Whether the rap artists actually lived the lives they spoke about in their music, they felt that to be hugely successful, they had no choice but to do ‘Gangsta Rap’ if they expected to survive in the industry.”

Why wouldn’t the record companies sell this stuff? Everyone’s buying, not just the black kids. Hip hop is global. The “black culture” which internet commenters bemoan is bullshit hype made for the global market, not just African Americans.

The whole thread is an absolute shit show of racists and people arguing against the racists. It’s a miniature reflection of American race debates.

The Critical Difference

Those commenters also misunderstand the difference between the effects of poverty and those of race.

“If you looked at the cultural practices of poor black people in cities, how much would they differ from the practices of poor people in cities historically?” Ta-Nahisi Coates wrote in an excellent essay for The Atlantic.

That is the key point here. The easy and racist thing to do is to lump black and poor culture together and say skin color causes it all. That’s what Houston’s Redditors are guilty of doing: taking the convenient and racist way out.

It’s much harder to dig into the history and causes behind what is shown in the media as “black culture.” That might require acknowledging things like persistent inequality, modern-day discriminatory practices or even America’s long history of racial violence.

“Only if black people are somehow undeserving can a just society tolerate a yawning wealth gap, a two-tiered job market, and persistent housing discrimination,” Coates writes in another article.

The stereotype of black culture being violent hurts black people, families, and communities. It has been used throughout history to justify discrimination and even violence against African Americans.

“How many lynchings and race riots have resulted from false accusations of rape and murder leveled against so-called black brutes?” David Pilgrim, a professor of sociology at Ferris State University, asked rhetorically.

How many generations would it take a people to recover from such systematic terror? And these redditors want to call “black culture” violent?

While overt violence such as lynchings against blacks has dropped over time, the savage stereotype is still used to justify policies which damage black communities. That’s why minorities are disproportionately targeted by stop-and-frisk policies. That’s why black men receive sentences that are 15-20 percent longer than white criminals convicted of similar crimes.

The Easy Way, and the Right Way

Shitty internet comments are always annoying and always best avoided, if possible. The ones on this video are doubly irritating because they represent a common misconception of “black culture.”

This persistent misunderstanding of what constitutes African American culture is ignorant and harmful. The least we can do is not spread it.

Internet, that means you too.

There are a couple great subreddits you probably haven’t heard of. They’re weird, bizarre and absolutely worth reading. Here are some great ones.

r/comeonandslam

Anyone with even a hint of nostalgia for the ‘90s should love r/comeonandslam, a subreddit dedicated to remixing the Space Jam theme song.

As it turns out, the Space Jam theme mashs perfectly. With everything. You name, it you can remix it. The results are spectacular. Psy, Kansas, Frozen, Rick Astley and Macklemore have all been remixed with the theme. Someone even remixed the Bill Nye theme song with Space Jam’s, which may be the most ‘90s thing ever made.

No joke, I sat there for a good hour listening to these. They’re fantastic.

r/fullmoviesonyoutube

For everyone who doesn’t take their external drive with pirated movies to work (and can’t get Netflix), there’s r/fullmoviesonyoutube.

The subreddit is exactly what it sounds like. People upload full movies onto YouTube, and you can watch them for free. Quality tends to be a crapshoot, but you don’t have to wait for it to buffer. Everything just works.

The selection is pretty weird as well. It’s mostly obscure films from years back, but every now and then you get something cool like Exit Through the Gift Shopand Memento recut in chronological order.

r/perfectloops

I can’t put my finger on why r/perfectloops is so fascinating. It’s a subreddit dedicated to GIFs that loop perfectly. You can sit there and watch them forever.

r/thomasthedankengine

You could file this one with r/comeonandslam, but it’s so awesome it deserves its own entry.

r/thomasthedankengine collects remixes between random songs and the theme from Thomas the Tank Engine. Yes, seriously. While it doesn’t mash as well as the Space Jam theme song, it works well enough to be hilarious. Hearing Childish Gambino’s “Bonfire” put up against the Tank Engine theme alone is worth the price of admission.

r/peoplewithbirdheads

Reddit gets weird sometimes. r/peoplewithbirdheads is a subreddit for, you guessed it, pictures of people with bird heads. That’s it. Check out the weirdness over there.

r/ggggg

Ggggggggg ggggGggg gg. GGGgggggggg ggg ggggg ggg. Gggggg. GGGGGGgggggGGGGGG. r/ggggg.

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