I have a new job. Among other things, my new employers are paying for me to obtain Red Hat certification. So I have been going to class this week. I have learned stuff I didn't know, like RHEL's weird journalctl thing, stuff I already knew, like ssh, and that the old guy sitting next to me has some ever so slightly racist attitudes toward life. I know this because, while making idle conversation, it came up that I served in the Peace Corps. This gentleman doesn't understand why anyone would do such a thing because:
- Kennedy is dead.
- There are a lot of Americans who need help.
I responded that it's hard to get the government to fully fund domestic volunteering, which is a far more politic answer than a lot of things I could have said. Conversation moved then to the problems with Americans, his example being that the Americans of the south side of Chicago have shootings all the time, and what can one possibly do? I suggested access to better education and infrastructure. He told me that that wouldn't work because "those people" had been violent and poor so long it had been bred into them. I'm reasonably sure that those aren't even heritable traits, genetically, but I guess the overarching conclusion is really that only the right sort of Americans need helping. Since his example is the south side of Chicago, I am guessing that the right sort of Americans aren't people of color. Of course, if this gentleman had talked about the mass shootings that have been making the news recently, "those people" would have been well off white people having violence bred into them, but for some reason no one suggests that white people are really inherently anything, except possibly superior in a master race kinda way.
I decided I was done with the conversation at that point and walked off to make a phone call. There may have been a better way to respond to that.
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