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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

IME, the majority of upper-middle class American white people have a big blind spot about this due to only interacting with black people in contexts they find familiar. Where do most people meet their friends? School, work, hobbies, sports, music, etc. If you do mostly typical white people things for those, the only black people you will meet and have the opportunity to talk in depth with and befriend are the one who have already chosen to step away from primarily black activities and participate in mostly white activities for an extended amount of time.

Unless you go out of your way to do something unusual for your race and class, like get deeply enthusiastic about rap music or playing pickup basketball, and stay with it despite being one of only a handful of white people (how do you think those black guys who choose to do white stuff feel?), you will never meet the black people who mostly want to stay around their own and do their own things and never hear the kinds of things they say to each other.

It's a hard thing to study or do research on, and there's not much media out there that covers it. I have no idea how to get hard numbers on it. It's definitely out there though. The Boondocks TV series has some good examples. If you've read Freakonomics, there's a passage in the story about a university researcher embedding with an urban Chicago crack gang, whose leader happens to be a black college graduate with a business degree who tried working in a normal legitimate business but felt too out of place there. Consider the deeper meaning - everyone around him must have understood what he was talking about and why he chose to leave a white-collar job to lead a crack-dealing gang.