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Linda Keres Carter's avatar

Sorry, never got notice of your comment. I didn't exit the conversation, he did. My comment ended with my near universal experience of a truncated response from the black folks around me, some in my own family, when I share the racism my people have experienced. I don't receive a satisfying reciprocation of the caring attention and supported I've lavished on them for a lifetime. I sense an instinct to react to my statements as a competition and dismissal, which is the racist tradition since 1680, at the close of Bacon's Rebellion.

I expected a truncated response to what I'd shared. That's what happened, isn't it? No surprise. I've had to move on with the understanding that will never happen. It will always grieve me, but I must live with it.

It has certainly frequently happened that someone who insists on this definition of racism purely delineated by appearance, has dismissed me and mine, often even turning on me, it being obvious that they cannot hear me, they are hearing Karen. They are hearing what they expect to hear, as per their stereotypes. There is absolutely every bit as much Implicit Bias in black American heads as white in the reverse. I notice this bias more than others since all those adjectives presumed about white American negate me 100%. Culturally genocided people really hate being negated. I mean, REALLY hate it.

Nothing gets the ghetto in the Serb going more than being associated with supremacists. Nobody's had more trouble with those mf's than we have, for refusing to join up with them, and to have it blithely assumed we're associated with them when we get here is a major reason we despise the notion of having to come here.

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Steve QJ's avatar

“I didn't exit the conversation, he did. My comment ended with my near universal experience of a truncated response from the black folks around me”

I thought very seriously about ignoring this comment. Not only is it very obviously untrue, my reply is right there, written months ago, with no response from you, so no, I didn’t exit the conversation.

But also, I find it fascinating that this “near universal response” you get from black people doesn’t make you wonder if you’re the one missing something. You just keep doing the same thing with new black people and demanding different results.

You haven’t “lavished” caring attention on me. The “black community” doesn’t get together and share notes on who we have an obligation to because of some kindness to another “them.”

I’ve never dismissed what you’ve said, I’ve sympathised with the suffering you’ve described over and over again. I simply disagree with you about what word to use to describe it.

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