{"id":10659,"date":"2007-10-20T21:05:51","date_gmt":"2007-10-21T01:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/20\/10659.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:00","slug":"people-like-me-they-really-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/20\/people-like-me-they-really-do\/","title":{"rendered":"People like me, they really do"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger found John Scalzi’s recent note A Little More on People Like Me<\/a> 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<\/I>, but that for him, there is no racial component to people like me<\/I>ness. 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 me<\/I>ness was set, at that point, to other concerns, including sexual preference, which he says he has worked to overcome.
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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 me<\/I>ness. 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.
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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<\/I> and the ways they are not people like me<\/I>. 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.
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Sex is the other major one, the assumption that women are not people like me<\/I>. 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.
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There are others. Probably, in some sort of order, the things I notice and slot into people like me<\/I>ness 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<\/I> have average looks, are neither stunners nor yug-uggs. Someone very far to either side gets negative people like me<\/I> points right off, I suspect. Also, I think I do not expect very tall people to be people like me<\/I>.
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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<\/I>, because I put some aspects of myself into that character. I can’t imagine meeting<\/I> those people, and immediately slotting them into people like me<\/I>ness. The way I read it, Mr. Scalzi is saying he does both, but I could have the wrong end of that stick altogether.
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Second, and most important, I like non-people like me<\/I>. I find them interesting and fun. If YHB had to spend much time with people like me<\/I>, there would be a lot of very cranky people like me<\/I>, and YHB would be the crankiest. Not that we’re bad people. We’re just all the same.
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I should, by the way, explicitly state that of course<\/I> people, being different one to another, are different even from people like themselves. And of course<\/I> there are people who I never would suspect would be people like me<\/I> who are like me in lots and lots of ways. This would be a sad, bad old world, if that weren’t true.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger attempts to examine his assumptions, and finds that the assumptions get in the way of the examination, like when you kill a cat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18136,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659\/revisions\/18136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}