<p>okay … i liked the vein of that post IceCube. :). </p>
<p>i’ll be honest, up until hs, i never felt scared or threatened by anyone (i felt scared of the unknown, of doing things i had never done before, but not because people were going to hurt me).</p>
<p>When i got to hs i started to see that the thing to be scared of about the unknown was what strangers might do to me. I took the public buses, walked on the city streets, learned to avoid black people with hoods, and so on. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t be scared of people if I were in a setting where I knew people didn’t hurt each other or single out people for emotional abuse.</p>
<p>and i feel it’s the being scared of people part that (for me) made me try to categorize people as potentially harmful or positively harmless. naturally, this sort of discernment, influenced by external sources (the media and so on) and some of my own observations, ends up as a reflexive judgement of strangers, one which correlates with many well known stereotypes. </p>
<p>but i agree - I saw some people from middle school this last year (there was a reunion) and I ENVIED how i had seen them all as nice beautiful humans back then (i really did), and felt REPULSED by how now I saw them for the intelligence i suspected they had, for the outlooks and world views I associated with that intelligence, and all sorts of other things. the group was, overall, a lot more ugly to my eyes, and the innocence of my previous conceptions of them was lost. it was truly heartbreaking to see what i saw, and to not be able to see what I had seen.</p>