Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
As TM said, spending time trying to make conversation with other parents on youth sports teams is one of the lower circles in Dante's Inferno. That was similarly true when I lived in a city, though.
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Yes and no. And this may just be my experience, but the parents of kids on suburban teams say shit like, "Well, if they really want their kids to be good, they should pay the extra to have them on a good travel team." Explaining how travel teams have taken something that everyone used to be able to do and have fun with, and monetizing it to give rich kids yet another advantage doesn't fucking compute. I've also heard "This is one of the city teams where the kids are all from bad neighborhoods," talking about fucking 9 year olds. This shit is constant. My ex-wife and I spend all of our time talking to just each other at games because the parents are so awful. So, that's saying something (although, we're pretty good friends, so maybe it's not.)
It's the isolation that's the problem. It's a manufactured, sheltered experience in which stereotypes and bad experiences one person had with a black person that one time become gospel and shared and re-shared until there is no tolerance for people who look different at all. These are the people who carve the black people they know out of what black people are allowed to be in their minds because they're different somehow. How someone feels comfortable enough with me to talk about how awful the neighborhood is they had to drive through to get to a tournament is beyond me. I look at them like they're fucking crazy, but they don't get it.
To be fair, there are people who do this in the city too, but they're mostly rich assholes who are going to look down on people no matter where the fuck they are (and always have).* In cities, we isolate ourselves with buildings people don't belong in, or schools in districts drawn up specifically to exclude, etc. There is no avoiding it. It just feels like the
norm in the suburbs (at least the ones I'm familiar with) is a level of segregation by race and by socio-economic class. And I hate it. At least kids can just be kids at the playground and parents tend to be open to talking to other, different, parents there. The subway is the great equalizer. And we can all bond over our collective hate for tourists.
TM
*See:
https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/class-divide, about Avenues, which they put in my neighborhood (the same one I grew up in), which just turns my stomach. (And the amazing little girl they spend some time on form the projects down the street from Avenues was rejected
after the making of this documentary, I think.)
