Race is universally legible and culturally significant, but *what it means* is geographically quite specific
I’m not sure what it means to be Asian in most countries, but IME it’s sometimes not a good thing (and for sure it’s worse for other brown people)
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I imagine this is one of the nicest things about being white. While cross-cultural interaction does sometime contain a little resentment (theirs) or guilt (yours), people tend to assume you are: - reasonably intelligent - wealthy/sophisticated - worthy of respect or deference
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When I express things like this to white friends, they often react a little defensively. To them this sometimes sounds like “Fuck white people!” Which is something they hear a lot in movies, TV, and pop music, not to mention literal “race politics” in “the discourse”
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But wait, no! Listen, it’s not like that! I have a white friend!pic.twitter.com/D8gBkcJP3p
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Really though, most of the people I know well are white I grew up with (& am still close with) white dudes who are redpills, performative leftists from rich families, classical liberal/libertarians, body-optimizer fitness guys, crypto bros, all the memeable white guy characters
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I’ve lived multiple decades inside white/trad bubbles with varying levels of ideological diversity, and I’ve actually developed a lot of sympathy for white people It’s why I can’t really get properly outraged at uncomfortable microaggressions, or even at open MAGA style bigotry
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Race is confusing AF for white people in The West Atomizing culture and abstruse online social justice movements are rapidly minting new concepts and creating semantic drift in terms that already existed
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New orthodoxies are emerging and changing too fast for anyone to have a comprehensive picture And each year the stakes seem to get higher—cyber-bullying in the early aughts was nothing compared to the brutal doxxing/cancel culture that we live in today
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I’m a Very Online digital native with a decent finger on the pulse of mainstream online discussion, as well as an intrinsic fascination with some of the communities on the fringes (communists, anarchists, queer radicals, revolutionaries, redpill/tradcon ideologues, etc.)
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As a Not White person, I also sometimes get invited into dedicated spaces where people talk vulnerably (and profusely) about their frustrations with race
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In other words, I have a medium-resolution map of the territory that an old person or a white person might have a very hard time replicating And I still have no idea how white people should talk about race
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As a White person, I think the best you can hope to do is find yourself a comfortably diverse subculture, learn their orthodoxies, and be careful not to broadcast too loudly (or at all) on other wavelengths
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This is why I can’t get *that* upset with my racist old piano teacher in Missouri for somehow getting more racist in the last decade She made the same choice as my progressive white friends in SF—find your bubble, then disengage And she had a lot less mobility than they did!
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The “culture war” turned Boomer tradcons into refugees, ideological outsiders Just a couple decades ago, they were the righteous mainstream, and now everyone is (somewhat justifiably) pointing the finger at them for our problems re: race, climate, business
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And even though I think her politics are selfish and unworkable beyond her narrow, homogeneous in-group— I still *like* my racist piano teacher, and she likes me too
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Anyway, 1. We live in a society 2. Love thy neighbor 3. Maybe the real racists were the friends we made along the way
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End of conversation
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