I am out of school for the first time in 21 years. I’m discovering that my concept of the “average person” is really warped. I have always tended to think that “most” people are not racists, are accepting of difference, are curious about interesting things, value their intelligence, etc.
I’m feeling rather naive, because now that I’m working I tend to get broadsided by a lot more people that openly display racism, ignorance, apathy, etc.
Mind you, I could care less about a person’s level of formal education. I’m just having trouble adjusting to the world outside of academia.
Anybody have similar experiences? Do you think this is usual/unusual?
Ash, I understand what you mean. Through high school and college, I had come to the belief that racism is a dead issue. I honestly did not believe that there was any significant amount of people that had these warped beliefs.
Once I got out of school and started working, I found out how wrong I was. Not only are there still many people that are racist, there are quite a few that are openly so.
I feel your pain.
Mine isn’t as much academia vs. real world as much as it is metropolitan vs. semi-rural, north vs. south, and maybe a little of the college vs. workworld thing.
I grew up in D.C. in a family that is agnostic, fairly middle-of-the-road politically, at a school that had some decent diversity racially as well as religiously.
I’m living in SC now. I am constantly shocked by the racist comments people feel free to say to me, like I’m going to be in on the “joke” with them. I also am extremely uncomfortable with Jesus Loves You screensavers and like things at WORK!! My husband and I are atheists, but we could never tell anyone around here that. I really think we would be ostracized.
To me, this place is a really weird mix of racism and hyper-religiosity. You wouldn’t think the two would exist in the same space.
I think it depends a lot on what industry you work in. The tech industry is pretty good - so far as I’ve experienced it (though some days, my callers make me wish I could send a team out to take their computers away from them).
I know the feeling all to well. I’ve expressed it on this board on quite a few occasions. I moved from Central New Jersey to Central Pennsylvania 3 years ago. So what I experienced was/(is) the shock of coming from a metropolitan mecca to dairy country. It is beautiful, to be sure, and has many upsides, but it is different from what I have known all my life.
The most notable upon my arrival here was the isolation you feel when you are in a town, almost island-like, the next town usually being at least a 15 minutes drive over a mountain or two. In Jersey, to get to the next town you literally cross the street.
The friendliness was another eye-opener, not to say people in NJ/NY are not friendly, they just sorta keep to themsleves, people really go out of their way up here to greet you or meet you, it’s actually kind of weird, I prefer to be just another face in the crowd I guess.
Things are just at a slower pace all around out here, even with Penn State University here, it’s not city life. Shopping, Dining, Nightlife, it’s all very limited. I like the idea of having just about anything you want within a 40 minute drive. That is one wonderful thing about the NJ/NY area.
I don’t miss traffic though.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
-Sigmund Freud-
Ye gads! Ye’ve discovered the Teeming Millions! Welcome Aboard mate!
Kidding aside, the phenomenon yer experiencing is pretty universal. I think ‘culture shock’ is less the right term for it than maybe ‘cognitive mapping.’ All too often our immediate surroundings come to define our entire world view, and this kind of thing gives rise to all manner of avoidable conflict.
When I first came to this country I spent a few years in the Midwest. Folks out there would drive 45 miles to church every Sunday, and a two hour drive to a party was no problem at all. Then I moved to the more urbanized East, and people have an entirely different concept of distances. Ten miles is considered a hardship, and protests are lodged if there isn’t a supermarket on every corner. You would think that understanding the differences would obviate such arguments as ‘Econo-boxes’ v. ‘Land Yachts’, but the debates get no less passionate.
There are thousands of these conflicts that invariably start with such phrases as, “Why would anybody need . . .(what I don’t need),” or “How could anybody believe . . .(differently than I believe),” and all of them stem from the ‘culture shock’ of simply having spent too much time immersed in a single environment.
Rather than focussing on the things you find shocking in the ‘Real World’, perhaps you’d do better to get out a bit more and find out why people think like they do. Believing differently doesn’t automatically make them morons.
Dr. Watson
“I am one of those people who just can’t help getting a kick out of life - even when it’s a kick in the teeth.” – Polly Adler
I’d like to quote from chapter one of The Bell Curve, that pariah of a book which more people should read. (Very few chapters are about race; it’s mostly just about the effect of intelligence in society.) This quote deals with how partitioned we are by intelligence and education.
The chapter goes on to show that people are more likely to work with, marry, and befriend people of your own intelligence level and education than any other factor, including race, background, financial status, political affiliation, etc.
So of course we college graduates will get a skewed idea of what America is like. We’ll tend to think everyone’s like us, when most people aren’t.
Thank you for giving me new words for what I’m experiencing. It’s just like when you’re a kid and you spend the night at someone else’s house, and you realize that they don’t serve dinner the way your mom does. Shocking!
I was afraid people might have the “morons” take on my OP. That wasn’t my intent, or my meaning. Although I certainly suffer from a bit of the “ivory tower” syndrome, I am not shocked by the real world (I’ve been reading about it with some fascination for years : ;). Rather, now that I have left the community that I’m used to, I’m realizing how lonely it can be to hold certain viewpoints and value certain things. Quadell’s quote really hits it on the head. It is difficult to make friends when I suddenly find the number of people around me who share common goals/values/beliefs so suddenly and drastically reduced.
That’s actually my favorite thing about trips to NYC. I enjoy being surrounded by so many people and noticed by so few. There’s something very comforting about that to me. I also enjoy the country, though. My best friend is from a small Amish town in Ohio, and trips there are favorites of mine as well.
Myself, I’m from Suburbia–the worst of all possible worlds. You get neither the bussling anonymity nor the “everybody knows your name” feeling. Instead, everybody just remembers your face, has no idea what your name is, and resents where you park your car :).
** southern truck drivers ** are not the only racists in the world, nor are the southern states of the good old USA the only place where there is racism. I find it rampart in most of the world, based not only on color of skin, but on religion, beliefs, etc.
The south is definitely the ‘Bible Belt’. I’ve heard many “Yankees” make the statement that while up North you have a bar on every corner in the South you have a church. Seems that may be a racist statement in itself.
Seems that sometimes we may need to look a little closer at ‘culture differences’ than to automatically label an area or a person as a racist.
I’ve learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it.
It is lonely sometimes to have a viewpoint different than those around you. You have to learn when it’s important to take a stand and when it’s better to just shut up and let it ride. That’s a very personal thing that everyone has to work out for himself.
Android, “could care less” and “couldn’t care less” are used interchangeably. “Couldn’t” makes more sense, but some people use “could” because they’re being sarcastic or because they like the cadence better.
** southern truck drivers ** are not the only racists in the world, nor are the southern states of the good old USA the only place where there is racism. I find it rampart in most of the world, based not only on color of skin, but on religion, beliefs, etc.
The south is definitely the ‘Bible Belt’. I’ve heard many “Yankees” make the statement that while up North you have a bar on every corner in the South you have a church. Seems that may be a racist statement in itself.
Seems that sometimes we may need to look a little closer at ‘culture differences’ than to automatically label an area or a person as a racist.
I’ve learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it.
I had sort of the reverse when I moved from Tucson to northern VA. In Arizona, it’s at least an hour between anywhere and anywhere else, and often more like 2 or 3. Then I moved here and you wander between a dozen towns just in the course of doing a day of chores! Walmart is in one town, the grocery store is in another, etc. It’s really weird. Kinda seems like… why bother? Why not just call it all one thing? shrug
It was funny though, one of my husband’s co workers went to Tucson once on business. He took a cab from the airport to the call center, which is a 45 minute drive if you hit all green lights. He kept asking the cab driver “are we still in Tucson??” Ha! See, as long as there are still buildings and stuff, you’re still in Tucson. Once you hit desolate desert, you’re not in Tucson anymore.
Oh, except that Marana just annexed part of what used to be Tucson… that is just wierd. Marana is full of freaks!! ;D
Growing up in Tucson I didn’t experience that much racism. A little bit, but usually among the minorities themselves… for example, at my high school, the only racial conflicts I ever saw were between the Mexicans and the Vietnamese. But then I went to Florida for a semester at the end of high school… oh man!!! Totally freaked me out. They referred to a particular neighborhood that was mostly black as “jigaboo town” and that was just accepted. All the black kids had their lockers in the same area. I knew a white girl who was dating a black boy, and they’d walk around holding hands and people would SPIT AT THEM!!! And shout things at them! I was totally floored.
One day after school we were hanging out at McDonald’s when fight broke out in the parking lot nearby. We sort of wandered over as a group and I tagged along just to not get left behind. It was two girls, and I casually mentioned to my friend’s girlfriend “man, I’d kill for butt like hers” referring to one of the girls in the confrontation … I don’t know what I expected her to say. Maybe sort of nod, or make a joke… instead she said “oh you don’t need to be jealous of her, she’s a nigger lover”
I just stared at her. I was too confused and surprised to even say anything. Here she had seemed like a normal person up til that minute, but when she said that she turned into something less than human in my eyes… and sooo many were like that. It was just freaky.
I am really glad that I live where I do now. This area is so culturally diverse… my son is being raised to not think twice about what color someone is, or whether their mom wears a veil or their dad wears a turban or they’ve got big red clown noses or whatever. He sees it all the time and it doesn’t even occur to him to think it’s anything. Recently we took him to a birthday party for one of the kids at his school… I’d never met the kid, we just got the invitation and I RSVP’d… so we show up and find the table (Chuck E CHeese) with her name on it and it turns out that she is a little black girl. Named Tyler. I thought it would be a boy, actually. ANyway, Nicky was the only white kid there after everyone arrived, and I watched him carefully because I was curious to see if he would have any reaction at all… He didn’t. I think skin color means about as much to him as sock color. I really want it to stay that way.
Some people would say that in an ideal world I wouldn’t have even notice that he was the only white kid… but I don’t think that is true. People sometimes get up at arms when you describe someone as “well it was a black guy in a red shirt” … like you should have been describing him wihtout having to single out race. That is silly. I don’t think we need to be or even should be colorblind to skin color anymore than we should be to hair color or anything else. I think that in a perfect world, we’d all still recognise the races, but there would be no value judgements assigned to them in our minds. There is beauty in every race that is unique to that race. A statuesque black woman is a kind of beauty that wouldn’t work on a white person. The whole geisha look wouldn’t work on a non-asian person. There are wonderful things about each race on a visual level and I hope that to achieve a truly equal and hate free society we don’t have to lose the ability to recognise the outward differences between each person and each group of people…
…man did this get off topic… sorry for the long, boring ramble guys. Sheesh. Someone shoulda stopped me.
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When I moved to the east, I found a similar culture shock. It’s been a few years since I left the west, and I am still regularly struck dumb by the reality of racism here.
Each time I hear a casual racist remark, some sense of isolation follows—as though I’m being reminded that I am no longer living amid likeminded people.