You're not from their culture, their race, their streets, you don't know their struggle, what they have to fight against, rise up from, deal with on a daily basis... You may not like to hear it, but you don't understand it enough to judge it that way.
It's meant for a reason, a "don't forget where you and your people came from and struggled to acheive" thing to say, to remind those who think they've been accepted and have turned their back on their culture, streets and people.
That's how it was explained to me...
That sounds exactly like I understood the use of the phrase, and is exactly why I find it so stupid and offensive. The expectation that somebody has to behave in a particular way or somehow owes something to 'their people' or 'their culture', based on skin colour or some aspect of their cultural upbringing, is nonsense, and seems to me a way of encouraging racial divisions. 'No, you cannot just think of yourself as a person and get on with things. You must always remember that you are a
black person, must identify with other totally unconnected black people and their struggles, and must consider the history of this particular subset of dead people
your history.'
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