exodus Yeah, there’s so much I could write about my own difficulties understanding other parts of America, e.g. about growing up in a very black city, going to a majority black high school, and slowly realizing how many things that I thought were obvious turn out not to be for many other white people on the internet.
To give just one example (I actually wrote many more examples when drafting this, but it was all needlessly angry for this forum), the police raided my high school multiple times a year for vague reasons I didn’t really understand. Each time they’d occupy the school for several days afterwards. There was a guy whose job seemed to be to scream at me for standing at the same spot I waited at everyday for my mom to pick me up. Obviously they said and did much worse things to the black and hispanic kids.
There’s so much about how everyone was racialized when I was growing up, black friends I had as a kid gradually getting different paths from mine picked out for them, teachers (both white and black) talking to me and other white or asian kids differently from black and hispanic kids – stuff I think about everyday, none of which I really know how to talk about to, say, my friend from Portland. Whenever I mention stuff to her about high school it feels like she doesn’t believe me. She’s Mexican and was one of the only non-white kids at her high school, which of course is an experience I can’t fully understand either.
Anyway, it was kind of weird to be using twitter in 2020 and seeing all these people’s sudden collective realizations of what I had assumed was common sense to everyone on the left. And then it was a similarly weird feeling to see how short-lived many of those realizations seemed to be for the greater American public. At the very least, people do seem at least slightly angrier still than they were pre-2020.
To get back on topic from this complete tangent, I guess it’s just weird living in the United States, this very big place where so much is superficially the same, until you realize massive fundamental differences beneath the surface. We use a lot of the same vocabulary, words like “suburb” or “neighborhood”, to describe complete different local situations. It makes it easy to imagine everywhere else to be just like where you grew up. At least in, say, China different places speak completely different dialects, which makes it easier to realize the obvious fact that someone from a different part of the country probably had a different life experience from your own.
The other thing that can also be hard to reckon with is that after discovering the massive differences between two places there is still so much that somehow is still the same. Obviously that’s a cliche, but an example I see every day in China is people asking how anyone could possibly live in a place like the United States with so much gun violence. The answer is “Well, pretty much the same way people live in China or anywhere else.” Which of course is unfortunate! The state of affairs re: guns is not something we should be used to. But people don’t really think about the peculiarities of the worlds they live in that much.
