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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1992 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 25, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I just had my bike kicked out from under me by a pedestrian while I was stopped in a cross walk. I shouldn't have been in the cross walk (and I won't in the future, at least for the next week), but I also would have happily moved if he asked, or he could have, you know, walked one foot to the right and went around me. My bike weighs about 10 pounds so I was fine, but because he was black (and I'm white) I was seething with racial animosity on the rest of my ride home. On one level I recognize that this is obviously irrational (and racist), but at the same time I have had so many negative interactions with black people in this city (Baltimore) that I'm starting to wonder if there maybe is some truth in the HBD/race realist positions.

Something stark that the Floydenning taught me was that black people really are living their lives assuming that whites absolutely hate their guts. It was a shock to me how unified the black voices were in the chorus against widespread white hatred. And in a way it was a bit of telling on themselves for how tightly woven into their worldviews general racial animosity is. I wondered if their models for how they assumed whites spoke of blacks in unmixed company mirrored black people's true experience of the inverse.

I know for a fact that white people self-police among themselves for distasteful and inappropriate stereotyping. And I no longer make such assumptions for other racial groups.

There was no real question in your Sunday questions thread post. So I'll answer a question you didn't ask: Yes, you should get out of Baltimore. How did you end up there anyway?

I'm doing my PhD at Hopkins. I'll be done by May 2026 probably.

Godspeed son.

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