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comment by tacocat
tacocat  ·  2101 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 27, 2018

I live in an area now where white people are a statistical minority. I'm pretty often aware of my whiteness and the otherness that implies in this area. And I realize that this is the American experience for every racial group that isn't mine in every place I've ever lived





b_b  ·  2101 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I had the same feeling when I moved to Detroit. It took some getting used to, but after a while it really does help you to see people as people and not as a demographic. Not that I'm saying that you can eliminate your biases, just that you have an easier time seeing people's humanity before you see their racial or ethnic traits. When I got married I moved back to the burbs (typical, right), and I like my house, but I really would prefer to raise my kid around more non-white people. My wife and kid are Jews, so they basically comprise the diversity of the neighborhood. I grew up in a snow white place like that, and I can say that it does affect you. I had to unlearn a bunch of stuff as an adult.

blackbootz  ·  2101 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What did you have to unlearn?

b_b  ·  2100 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Cultural cues, I guess. When you grow up in a place that is snow white, and lots of the white people are racist, and most of the exposure you have to black people is from music, movies, and TV, you tend to have a distorted view of black people. It's an almost certain outcome. Especially when the closest city to you is Detroit, which is an economically depressed place with endemic crime, and most of the adults you know wouldn't go within the city limits without a really good reason, you will almost certainly be intuitively afraid of geographic locations that are predominantly black. That's shitty but true.

tacocat  ·  2101 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm not complaining. I think it's good for me. I know plenty of other people would be pushed to racism or galvanized in existent opinions in the situation which is fucked up also the predictable reaction of a certain set of the whites.

I do wish the Latino population would put some limit on what is acceptable behavior of their children in public. I couldn't take a shit the other day because a little boy was wandering aimlessly around a restaurant and decided the latch on the stall door was an awesome toy. Hard to be culturally sensitive when a popular parenting style of a culture butts up against basic anatomical necessity