after a point we get tired of the shit. We get tired of explaining our selves, our languaging, our music, etc etc etc. It is "hard work" living in a world that is generally hostile to you & your people. Sometimes we just want to get away from it all, relax, and forget about it ["it" being "racism"] As I put it in that deleted thread, when African Americans want to let our hair down, we don't want to have to answer any questions about why we use grease it our hair.

Is explaining to people from other cultures *really* shit?

I grew up in a small town in Lancashire (UK). When I was growing up, I knew precisely one black family, who were African immigrants. So what are the chance of me knowing about black American language, culture and music? But that doesn't make me hostile to you, or to your culture - it just makes me someone who doesn't know it. How do *you* know about the English? :-)

Now the music is do-able - anyone can go and buy CDs. You can even read up on the various people involved and find who influenced them. History-wise, anyone can dig into that with the best of them. But what it's impossible to get is the culture, which is the detail of how people live and behave, and all the unwritten rules around it. And the only way to get that is to explain to people from different cultures why you do stuff when they ask, bcos it's only when they ask that you find out they do it differently, and both of you learn something. That's why Bill Bryson is so popular in Britain - he's dissecting British strangeness *and* showing us how a typical (white, educated, middle-class, male) American mind works in the same moment.

Even as far as your posts go, you're making assumptions too. "People of colour" elsewhere in the world will almost certainly have had similar experiences from racists as you, but the chance of them having the same cultural experience as you is low. So I guess you're looking at comparing experiences and opinions with them to see what's the same and what's different, yes?

What I'm trying to get at is that colour-blindness doesn't mean ignoring the facts that we have different backgrounds and a different colour skin - it just means that each of us has an equally valid background and experience, even though they're different. Asking someone else about their background and experience, or even commenting that it doesn't seem to make sense to you, isn't hostility. Now not *caring* that someone has a different background, or not considering that their different background would make them see something differently - that's a different matter...

Graham.