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comment by Isherwood

ON the subject of shouting. I've noticed that a lot of people that are around me get their daily dose of racial conversation from second hand sources, from the news, or viral videos, or forum posts, instead of one on one conversations or physical interactions with individuals in their own community.

Those distanced conversations are decidedly one sided - you hear someone shouting and you naturally get rampped up, but you have no outlet to let out your ire. The conversation revolves only around discussions that conversations which have become heated enough to be yelling matches, and they generally only start at the most heated part of the conversation. You go from cat video to yelling match in a matter of seconds and it seems to make the human psyche get really boiled up.

Recently, we did a tour of churches in our town - going to about two dozen churches in two dozen weeks, and listening to what they have to say. We heard from all kind of people with all kind of opinions about the state of the moral world, and listening to those groups was much more calm and informative because we weren't just having the conversation, we we're getting the context.

I am sure the majority of people won't want to compensate for the discrepancy in effort expenditure between watching a 4 minute video and going and meeting people and learning their culture, but the people who do have the best chance of implementing real change (in my opinion at least).





bioemerl  ·  3076 days ago  ·  link  ·  

For example, there was recently a video on /r/videos of some asian woman giving a speech about some racism she faced, and where she mentions it as a less of "Black people can be racist too" and the reaction to it should go unsaid among the protesters.

However, watching the video in context, that person's story was absolutely out of context, and in the background someone says "This is why we need this space, so these conversations can happen, if we agree or disagree with them".

Which really changed my perspective on what happened, turning that group from unreasonable idiots to a decently reasonable protest, although I still have a suspicion of this "space" not being too open to "all discussion", I am much more willing to support their protests as a result of watching the whole video and learning the whole context.

Especially considering that, after the one group tried to stop recording, the "concerned students group" told everyone "let people record, don't stop them"