https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1gf4vgz/cmv_the_black_people_at_my_college_are_starting/
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I am proud of you. You are being curious. Your post says one thing but means another. Your post says "I am arriving at X conclusion" and the subtext is that you suspect that conclusion is wrong, but what you really mean is "Yall I am curious why the heck I am having such a wack experience. It don't make no sense!"
I love your curiosity. And I think you are right, something is wack. But it isn't racial. It is cultural. You know black people. It isn't genetics that makes anyone behave in this confounding way, it is the culture they come from, which is SHOCKINGLY different than your own. So in the face of this shocking difference, the first go-to human reaction is to hate difference. The next might be curiosity. Third might be understanding. Then lastly compassion. So lets go slide along that track.
Imagine the laundromat where they live. People camped out. Claiming spots. No one caring about each other. Everyone fighting for everything. Maybe you have to get all up in someone's face to get a machine. Maybe people are dumping each other's clothes on the floor. Aaaaaaand maybe you are judging all that as "wrong" but but but, what if it isn't? What if a whole culture lived like that, without respect for each other, or an agreement to make things work? And what if that was a viable way to live? Your judging it likely stems from two different fundamental world views that at their base are polar opposites: "The System works for me and people like me" versus "The system does not work for me and people like me". Imagine how differently you might feel about society if you had lived your whole life knowing that on any day at any time for no reason at all that the police might arrest you, simply for the color of your skin, and in fact might kill you, and you had no way to 100% avoid this outcome. The system is against you. And that is the extreme version of it, but imagine that there are a million microaggressions that convey to you that the system isn't for you, it is for "them". Worse, imagine knowing that any and all your efforts to make the system better will not work. The system will always be against you. That would really discourage you from trying to make the system work, any system. you would instead focus on getting what you needed, and disregarding others. You are encountering people who have come from a culture like that. And you may want to counter that they should adopt your culture, of respect and mutually-shared-agreement to make a system-that-works, and you might make them wrong in your mind for not sharing those values. But they make YOU wrong for naively not knowing that the system doesn't work for everyone. They might retort to you "fix the system for EVERYONE and then I will support it." And boom there you are. Life isn't fair. You are not going to move their position at a fundamental level because their pov isn't wrong. The system is fundamentally borked. You just lived on the side of it where life mostly worked for everyone, and everyone had buy in.
So how do you interact with people who don't buy into the system? Well... like them, You fight, and push back and assert yourself, and be vigilant. You guard your laundry. You throw theirs on the floor. When they show up and yell at you, instead of feeling badly, you yell back at them You learn how to operate inside their culture. Learning how to be inside a different culture is HARD. It takes about a year. Imagine moving to New York City or Los Angeles. It is WEIRD and different, and it takes you a year to learn how to even BE in those places. Then, once you've learned it, you learn to love how it is there, and you can thrive. Like that, maybe the black people you are meeting will learn how to behave in this new environment. They might learn how to cooperate and respect. They might learn the culture you grew up in and love it. Or not. Likely you are all being shoved together your first year. But here is what will happen your second year: You will segregate, and you move to a place where they aren't, and live with a self-selected group of people who agree to try to make things work, and you exclude anyone who doesn't share your POV. BOOM! Problem solved. That is pretty much the fundamental solution that suburbia represents. You go segregate from people who don't agree to make life work for everyone, then ignore all those other people, and then have kids, and then your kids go to college and experience those other people and are like DAFUQ is wrong with them? And here we are.
Good luck. Keep being curious. When you experience hate, keep trying to dig deeper to figure out why others are different than you, and then deeper still until you can imagine being in their shoes. A good framework is to imagine that people are not "bad" but rather that they are having a hard time. Trying to imagine their struggles and POV will help make sense of their actions. Good luck!
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are neighbours really beefing in the laundromat?
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Lol no you get them arrested and ruin their credit rating so they can't ever buy a house on your block. Stupid cracker
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