Not meant to offend

[Renee750il]

Originally Posted by showdawgz

Most black children are taught to not pet strange dogs and the parents are aprehensive about it, the kids pick that up and eventually the parents fear of uncomfort is past on to the kids.

Remember most black communities are used to huge agressive pit bulls and other big dogs that are made agressive, and more and likely they've had a negative experience from those kinds of dogs. They rarely get to see a well trained, well adjusted dog, and assume all dogs are raging monsters.

Purdue and I ran into that kind of reaction YEARS ago, though, well before the thug-dog mentality took hold. I even talked about it with a couple of my closest friends - who were African-American - because we were close enough that we could talk about cross-culture things that were generally taboo subjects. Neither one of them had ever thought about why it was that way, they both just said that they and just about everyone they knew were wary of dogs. Neither of them could think of any good reason - they'd never been attacked or even chased, beyond a dog barking from behind a fence.

[LuvinBullies]

I have a little theory behind this, but of course I could be wrong.

Culturally speaking as a whole, most of my black friends tend to have larger than life personalities and are very expressive and tend to really work a crowd. Fun people by nature. By contrast many people of white/european descent historically have backgrounds in which children were taught to be "seen and not heard", brought up to keep to themselves when upset, heavy accent on being "proper", family reputations were big deals and disgraces to the family name were disowned, etc. Perhaps the same could be said of people with Asian or Indian descent.
So, we don't notice as much when someone from white/european/asian/indian descent is afraid of our dogs because that person may innately introvert his/her fears by way of genetic tendencies. They quietly move along in their fear. We weren't aware they were afraid. Now if someone of another culture whose historic background isn't quite so uptight comes across our dogs and they are afraid...well we notice more. In the last 100 years black people in our country really had to fight to make their voice/rights be known- so of course their cultural upbringing is going to involve more parental encouragement to keep a strong lively spirit.
Just my take on this anyway

[Renee750il]

That's an insightful theory, Bullies.

Like most things, I'd say there probably isn't one right answer, but a lot of contributory ones.