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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13114 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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About 30% of black people and 10% of white people in my town still mask, and this is the rust belt, not Massachusetts.

Odd. I’ll occasionally see a Hispanic or Asian masking- but never black.

White people who mask seem to generally be in clearly poor health.

This kind of thing is so wild to me every time I hear it. Always makes me wonder what made it stick in certain places. I live in a deep-blue city and stopped regularly seeing mask-wearers in probably 2022, maybe 2023 at the latest. They’re not gone, but they’re quite rare. Under 1% of people I see walking around, easily. I suppose it could just be my circles but I actually spend a fair amount time in left-leaning or left-friendly spaces, like small bookstores and punk concerts, and they’re very rare even there.

Of the ones I do see it’s probably 40% young visibly-neurotic women, 15% obvious trans people (perhaps some overlap here for the ones who pass well), 40% frail-looking elderly white people (usually women), and 5% ghetto and/or homeless black people (often under the chin or similar, this group I truly don’t understand). I don’t even remember the last time I saw a young man with a mask; the last time I recall noticing someone with a mask was a (visibly neurotic) young woman at a concert, accompanied by her unmasked boyfriend.

Actually, having typed that, I do occasionally see Asian people out and about with masks. But I don’t mentally count them as “mask wearers” because they’re clearly doing it in a sane and culturally-normal way. I do sometimes think it would’ve been good if we had come out of Covid adopting the East Asian norm of “go out wearing a facemask when you’re contagious with something”, but both sides contributed to this being impossible, and obviously just going back to normal is far better than living under the Permanent Covid Regime would’ve been.

Yeah, I wish I could count on masked people having a cold.

As it is they're either brain-broke on politics, currently stealing or reinventing human sexuality from first principles....badly.

I do see a strange amount of masking (well, the mask is under the chin) from ghetto/poor/underclass black people and could never figure out why. The queer leftists I get, but these people aren't exactly famed for their social consciousness.

From the limited contact I have, it's a combination of covid conspiracies (they have a whole raft of unique ones), surveillance conspiracies (ditto) and avoiding identification for criminal acts.

Where is this? I haven't seen anyone with a mask in ages outside of the obviously mentally ill and definitely not any black people. Even in the airport, it's maybe 1%.

Can't you bus these people to Portland or something?

Tri-cities, Michigan. It's a long busride to Portland.

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