Well i like fishing, gardening, wine tasting, and i love the country!

Oh and if i had the opportunity, i would take up canooing, bungy jumping andjoin the green peace. Hmmm, i'm worried now....perhaps i am a closet coconutblkhide

I really wish everyone could focus on what a fantastic alternative rolemodel she is for young black kids. We compain saying that the media don't promote any positive blacks for the kids to aspire toand that all they have to look up to in the media is 50cent. However, we have a black woman who is doing a job that only the elite of elite scientists could be chosen to do and some here are more concerned about whether her extra-curricular actvites are 'black' enough. What the hell is this 'acting black' thing.

I honestly believe that in the eyes of some blacks she would be a better person if the type of stamps she was collecting were food stamps because that would show she was down and had rejected the 'white man's education. I was once told that I thought I was a white because I was going to uni by a black guy who thought it was funny that he only passed two GCSE's and was seeing an equally dum white girl! WTF!

I see myself as 100% black yet I go snowboarding every year with a group of people I used to work with, does that make me a wannabe white? I also cannot stand 90% of R&B or Hip-Hop and prefer to listen to the blues, 60s music (e.g Jimmy Hendrix), funk and rock. I pursue any activity I want and I don't give a damn who wants to speculate whether I am a sell-out for it. I see so many of my black friends missing out on fantastic experiences like snowboarding, camping, fishing etc because they are scared that other black people will say they think their white. They all say 'oh I've always wanted to do xyz' but they are either afraid of being the only black person there or of other black people dissing them. We need to let people be themselves.

babygirl44 wrote:
its true. people should do whatever they enjoy in theirleisure time. althoughyou may thinkthings like snowboarding, camping, fishing, going heavy metal concertsetc.are fantastic experiences there will be othersincluding some black people who aren't interested in those pursuits so they aren't in fact missing out on anything.

i know that heavy metal is a very popular music for white kids mainly, but if a black kid likes it and wants to go to concerts and meet other fans of Led Zeppelin or whatever fair play to em. that doesnt mean they think they are white and nor doesvaluing an education mean they do - that attitude tends to be about more than just speaking articulately and liking camping and skiing.

@ Bubz and others. I would just like to highlight that I hate heavy metal music so although I am obviously a sell-out for liking rock music I havent crossed over by that much Anyway when I said that I don't like 90% of R&B and Hip-Hip I meant now. In the 90s R&B was where it was at. Nobody loved Jodeci more than me but in recent years it has fallen off and all sounds the same. There's hardly anything new which is why I only like 10%

@The Dogon. I really dont think that we need to be careful about being an individual because Tiger Woods hates black people and himself and said some really out of order crap about not being black. When I have kids I dont want them to feel embarrassed to like any legal actvity as my parents did with me. All the kids I was friends with when I was growing up both black and white tended to be on the more middle-class side so it was normal to fancy Bobbi Brown whilst at the same time wish you could get a ticket to a Kylie concert, maybe my upbrgining has made me feel less rigid about what socially acceptable as a black person. I never experienced any type of street life or peer pressure to conform to typical black behaviour. Luckily my man (who is black I must add) is the same. In fact he said that he really began to like me when he realised I was so laid-back about the types of things that some people would asscoiate with being a coconut because he liked the same things and he felt he could just be himself around me. (although Im sure that some will put me and my man into the sell-out, professional black couple category, KMT!) .

I want to see the day when all young black girls are more ashamed to admit they are pregnant than that they like Westlife!

Big Up Stephanie Wilson - Astronaut! pride of AAs and blacks everywhere!

Calm down, calm down!

Only two or three people found her hobbies questionable.

Anyways props to her for her achievements. That's some credentials.

Mezmerized wrote:
bighairlolI bet she collects stamps too.