So what did I learn during a year at p6?
Distrust
Can an anonymous person be trusted at all?
I had imagined so. I had imagined that by supplying lots of details about the real me, that I could become trustworthy, in the sense that my thoughts would be accepted as my own, and not part of some malevolent effort.
It didn't turn out that way.
One might observe my treatment as simple hostility to a libertarian agenda from die hard liberals, but ultimately I took it to be different than that. P6 was never too upset by a straight out debate. What upset him (and ptcruiser, in the extreme) were my attempts to "be one of the guys". To discuss contentious issues as a friend rather than a sterile debater.
I did that, to be sure. I sought friendship.
Nor do I believe that P6 is incapable of being friends with a libertarian. I suspect he actually is friends with libertarians. And conservatives. He's quite comfortable with cobb, despite important disagreements.
Or maybe it's that I'm a white guy.
But it's not that simple either. P6 is a mature adult who's broadly participated in New York City all his life. He's had plenty of good experiences with white guys.
Being a white guy did have an important part of the distrust.
Several times, it was strongly suggested that I have had experiences which I simply have never experienced. That I would deny such experiences became the basis of a belief that I wasn't being honest, that I must have some hidden agenda.
In some sense, maybe I did. Do I hope to communicate with hard-core-liberal-blacks? Indeed, yes. Does it help to have your arguments tested in the fire? Of course. Was P6 such a fire? You bet. I was quickly convinced that some of my initial beliefs were simply wrong, and some other ones lacked sophistication.
In return, I offered myself as a "typical" white guy. Willing to explain white behavior, willing to work with P6 and his posters on enhancing their ability to communictate to white people. Maybe it was a bad bargain for them, but on a human level it felt fair.
In the end, I was not trusted.
And since one cannot communicate with people who one doesn't trust, it was broken.
Can an anonymous person be trusted at all?
I had imagined so. I had imagined that by supplying lots of details about the real me, that I could become trustworthy, in the sense that my thoughts would be accepted as my own, and not part of some malevolent effort.
It didn't turn out that way.
One might observe my treatment as simple hostility to a libertarian agenda from die hard liberals, but ultimately I took it to be different than that. P6 was never too upset by a straight out debate. What upset him (and ptcruiser, in the extreme) were my attempts to "be one of the guys". To discuss contentious issues as a friend rather than a sterile debater.
I did that, to be sure. I sought friendship.
Nor do I believe that P6 is incapable of being friends with a libertarian. I suspect he actually is friends with libertarians. And conservatives. He's quite comfortable with cobb, despite important disagreements.
Or maybe it's that I'm a white guy.
But it's not that simple either. P6 is a mature adult who's broadly participated in New York City all his life. He's had plenty of good experiences with white guys.
Being a white guy did have an important part of the distrust.
Several times, it was strongly suggested that I have had experiences which I simply have never experienced. That I would deny such experiences became the basis of a belief that I wasn't being honest, that I must have some hidden agenda.
In some sense, maybe I did. Do I hope to communicate with hard-core-liberal-blacks? Indeed, yes. Does it help to have your arguments tested in the fire? Of course. Was P6 such a fire? You bet. I was quickly convinced that some of my initial beliefs were simply wrong, and some other ones lacked sophistication.
In return, I offered myself as a "typical" white guy. Willing to explain white behavior, willing to work with P6 and his posters on enhancing their ability to communictate to white people. Maybe it was a bad bargain for them, but on a human level it felt fair.
In the end, I was not trusted.
And since one cannot communicate with people who one doesn't trust, it was broken.
posted by dwshelf at 6:20 PM
1 Comments:
I chose not to respond to you after awhile because you kept attempting to fit our experiences as black Americans in to your abstract notions of libertarianism rather than permitting our experiences to expand your view of what libertarianism means in a country that enslaved human beings and then forced them and their descendants to live through the long, long night of Jim Crow and American-style apartheid.
Fair enough, pt, if exaggerated. No doubt I'm guilty of being dogmatic, as we all are.
But here's the example:
You wanted absolution
Now I can tell you that I have not had the experience you believe I had. I spent all of the first half of my life isolated from black people, and the second half in their professional company.
Could it be that you are failing to see an individual white man as distinct from your notion of what white men are like?
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