Spent some time talking about conspiracy theories with K. Not that he believes in them but it was mixed in with histories and theories about Identity and Representation, mostly focusing on blackness and whiteness and jewishness in those terms.
I don't normally have those kinds of conversations. Like I have mentioned before, I don't read newspapers or watch tv news because it's mostly disinformation and propaganda so it tends to make me feel bad about myself, or bad about the world or how I see my neighbours. Its sole purpose seems to me to fuel hatred and fear under the guise of 'intellectual stimulation'.
And that's what happend as I walked home. I felt paranoid and untrusting and wanted to close ranks and not deal with racism across the board but close in more and think only about me and 'my people' - and we were just joking about. No one was pretending to believe these things, but just hearing them was enough to have that effect.
What can I say? Don't believe anything about another person or group of people unless you have personally experienced it - but even then I know how stereotypes operate to frame our experience. I know that we often see stereotypes and ignore experiences that fall outside of them...
I don't know...