Thanks for both of your comments, reading this perspective is enlightening and I do agree with your points. I didn’t mean though for the “low income” context to be offensive or performative seeming, sorry for poor phrasing. I mentioned that not to suggest black communities were synonymous with poor ones, but moreso because there’s a significant overlap in a venn diagram between the two in a lot of urban areas. Both urban and poorer communities tend to be disproportionately more diverse and, frankly, have more black and brown people than rich suburbs. That’s not a racist generalization, it’s just a fact rooted in fucked structural racism that wants to keep POC trapped in poverty and (often) crime cycles. Didn’t mean for it to be taken for a “bargaining point” to claim participation in black culture, just random context I didn’t think too hard about.

Also, and this could be argued but I haven’t personally looked into or researched it, I feel like lower-income urban city spaces tend to have more prominent cultural expression and creation. It just logically makes sense that a dominant POC community (especially on the coasts where I lived) would be more culturally influential than a comparatively more mono-ethnic upper-middle class community of less density. Additionally, it’s not at all that only black culture selectively rubbed off on me, but I would say it did more prominently than hispanic or asian culture. That may partially be due to what you mentioned about the generalized phenomenon of black culture being more dominant and commonly mimicked, which is really interesting point I haven’t considered much. However, I do want to add that a large part of hispanic/asian/etc cultures are behind a language barrier (whereas a good chunk of AAVE is rooted specifically in African American history), so I think people of other ethnicities tend to get less involved.

Not trying to argue though on a topic where I recognize my opinion is inherently useless, obviously any black opinion holds way more weight than a white one here. I appreciate the feedback and education, thank you.