People like me, they really do

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Your Humble Blogger found John Scalzi’s recent note A Little More on People Like Me interesting in a bunch of different ways. He has, in the past, mentioned that he thinks of the characters he writes as people like me, but that for him, there is no racial component to people like meness. He attributes this to his own specific background, and in particular to his schooling, being the only poor kid in a class of affluent people of a variety of races and mixes. His people like meness was set, at that point, to other concerns, including sexual preference, which he says he has worked to overcome.

I’m a bit skeptical, myself, although of course I don’t know the man, and even if I did I wouldn’t know how his brain works. My skepticism is largely based on the fact that I cannot actually imagine what it would be like for someone in this country to not have race as a major part of people like meness. I try. But all I can imagine are either white people who don’t interact with non-white people in any but the most cursory fashion, or white people who are kidding themselves. This is, presumably, a failure of my imagination.

I have met a lot of new people in the last two months. I’ve been aware, over that time, of the ways in which the people I have been meeting are people like me and the ways they are not people like me. Race is a big one—when I meet someone who grew up black in this country, I assume that the person has a whole raft of experiences I’ve only read about. I don’t, you understand, assume that the person is dumb, or ill-educated, or angry, or touchy, or has no money, or has good rhythm, or likes jazz. But I do assume a substantial difference in the worlds we perceive.

Sex is the other major one, the assumption that women are not people like me. There are many aspects of our universes that do seem to overlap better for me with women than with men, but I have to believe that there is another raft of experiences there that I’ve only read about.

There are others. Probably, in some sort of order, the things I notice and slot into people like meness are whether the person is white, male, early-middle-aged, American-born, Jewish, gay-friendly (or whatever you call it), quick-thinking, liberal, and then probably things like interests in sports, politics, books, religion, and music. You’ll notice that the earliest ones are the ones I find out before speaking to them, and the later ones are the ones I may not find out in the first several conversations. And, to be honest, I don’t claim that I really know the order of things. Physical attractiveness, to be honest, is pretty quick on the list; people like me have average looks, are neither stunners nor yug-uggs. Someone very far to either side gets negative people like me points right off, I suspect. Also, I think I do not expect very tall people to be people like me.

There are a couple of points I should make, concerning this. First, YHB is talking about meeting actual people, and Mr. Scalzi is talking about inventing fictional characters. I can imagine inventing an African-American character, or a woman, or an alien, and thinking that he, she or it is a people like me, because I put some aspects of myself into that character. I can’t imagine meeting those people, and immediately slotting them into people like meness. The way I read it, Mr. Scalzi is saying he does both, but I could have the wrong end of that stick altogether.

Second, and most important, I like non-people like me. I find them interesting and fun. If YHB had to spend much time with people like me, there would be a lot of very cranky people like me, and YHB would be the crankiest. Not that we’re bad people. We’re just all the same.

I should, by the way, explicitly state that of course people, being different one to another, are different even from people like themselves. And of course there are people who I never would suspect would be people like me who are like me in lots and lots of ways. This would be a sad, bad old world, if that weren’t true.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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