I'm not sure what I'd suggest.. I'm not in your shoes, but in my experience the best rule of thumb is to just ignore the self-pity and listen only for the pertinent parts of the conversation. If the conversation is too full of the woe-is-me BS for you not to get aggravated by, or even nothing but that BS, just take a raincheck.
When it's worth taking the time to filter through what they're saying, keep at it, and if they ever choose to make their paranoid BS explicitly your fault,
then show in a very down to earth or transparent common sense way (the same way you'd quote someone's posts on this forum when they won't admit they did in fact say something) it's them who's insisting on involving that BS into the otherwise normal conversation.
At that point they either (in my experience) go off the deep end, or recognize it. If the former, the useful part of the conversation's usualy over right away, the latter you can just accomodate them in whatever brief way will get them over the embarassement and get back to the important part of the conversation.
I'm completely sick of that BS. I've lived in France, and when I was small, I was a foreigner. I moved to Canada, and there I was a frenchie. Back to France and I'm a Canuck, or Arab
Moved to the US, and I'm a Frenchie again, or freakin latino. Now I'm on this island, and the locals here stubbornly categorize anyone who's not from the local's descendence and customs as "foreigner", even me who looks like them if you don't take your time to recognize all the other ancestry I have. And from there it's hands down, carte blanche BS blaming and whining and any self-pity, endless rationalizing of the same sort of crap you get from "those" blacks in the US.
It's a bit like the impatience of us that have gotten past and know better than
that BS for
those whiners, and in a way you could argue that it's fair game. I mean, they had/have their little island, it's homely to them, and like a lot of people justifiably defensive of their culture and sovereignty, they
ought to strive for its continuation just like you ought to strive for your own survival. The problem though, is when they take it too far and trespass onto your own concerns. It's fine that they are different and want to keep it that way, but it isn't defensible to use it as an excuse to blame you for anything
when you aren't even trying to interfere with their livelihood, when you are just trying to get things done without yourself trespassing on their concerns; i.e. what FX1 was doing recently for his real estate work.
It has nothing to do with ethnicity ("black" culture and memetics aside) and everything to do with individual psychology. It's just a ****in crutch and the wild card racism blame nearly always saves their ass. Anyone can play it anytime. A good analog is women or gays and sexual harassment. It's a path of least resistance abuse that's gotten a free ride all this time thanks to history (slavery etc).
Two wrongs don't make a right.
edit- Did you mean what word I'd suggest? Sorry for rambling then
I'd suggest black because it is the plainest, but that's less PC than african american, which itself is too PC. Negro is ok in spanish (commonly used IIRC, not sure about in the US though), and in French too. It's gotten a good dose of connotation in English though. I asked because it seemed like the sort of word that someone like you would have a hard time defending against the black-stigma.
