action reaction

I should know better by now to get embroiled in those arguments, with those kinds of people, who turn everything into an issue of degrees of melanin and presumed cultural order, because while that may be a component, it's definitely not always the defining issue. Maybe no one's talking to you because you're not a very nice person, or because they're so used to getting their heads bitten off that they've stopped trying. Especially those of us younger folk, who have plenty of issues of our own, but seem to get way less hung up on these things.

Crackers might be clueless on the finer nuances sometimes, but I know that's not the issue here. It's easier to have an abstract hulking entity to lob accusations against and in this case, among a group of people who have way more integrated lives than most of the general populace, it holds even less water. And I get so tired of listening to this  that I shot off an extremely inarticulate reply saying that this is getting old, if there's something wrong why don't you just say it instead of getting bitter or "you wouldn't understand," that my accident of birth is no more my fault than yours, and if I wanted to be in a homogenous world, I sure as hell wouldn't live in the neighborhood I live in, work at the place I'm employed at, or hang out with the people I hang out with.

Our city may be segregated but the part where we hang definitely isn't. It doesn't mean that the neighbors mix all that much socially but in general there's some degree of coexistence between the younger arty twentysomethings and the older gay gentrifiers and the blacks, whites, Latinos, refugees from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, of every economic and cultural stripe. So please stop acting like it's Alabama in the 1950's, okay? Because you know damn well that people in this room have intermarried, play music together, eat dinner together, share apartments together, and socialize in each others' circles where they're respective minorities. Sometimes the problem isn't me, or those who look like me, sometimes the problem is you.