Outside of about 6 years spent living in Detroit, most of my childhood was spent in the suburbs around middle class families, and a lot of upper middle class blacks. And while I definitely encountered plenty of snobbish "how much money does your father make?" black kids focused on their GPAs, most were caught up in imitating thug/ghetto culture and expectations. Mentally it's hard for a kid not to be influenced by that shit without conforming to some degree.
I remember being on an AAU basketball team and inadvertently mentioning I watched a lot of the History Channel, which resulted in them laughing at me for weeks. I pretty much stopped watching the History Channel after that. Whereas most of my internal responses to that type of pressure resulted in me just growing to disdain "ghetto" culture while embracing my own individual racial "oddities" (liking metal/rock, reading, playing board games, etc), for some reason that treatment angered me so much that I gave up on something I liked. To this day I can't think of another example of me being effected by peer pressure like that. That type of pressure is hard for a kid to deal with, especially when it's coming from all sides. Many black kids can't escape it, at school or at church or on the playground etc, regardless of how nice of a neighborhood they're in.
Most of my friends in high school were white, Asian or Arab. They liked the same shit I liked, and I didn't have to worry about constantly being belittled or criticized.
