For background, I'm a 22 year old white male college student in Mississippi. I'll be home soon since the year is ending soon, but for now I need help dealing with some lingering effects of living in very aggravating conditions.
Basically, I have had to live for a year in a very low-quality college dorm. The bathrooms are nasty, the walls are thin. for various reasons, one of them being that it's Mississippi and another reason being that our college seems to care more about it's awful football team than what it's actually known for, the dorm is full of black men.
As I'm typing this right now they're playing rap music in the room next to me and yelling loudly. Keep in mind this is the time people are trying to study for exams in my case write papers. Now, white people could very well be this disruptive, but in this college, at least among the guys, it's geeky white guys like myself and loud, huge black men.
It ticks me off. I hate them. I've had racist thoughts against them and my black roommate, who is not one of these football players but is equally annoying in a different way. It's not fair to me and all of the other people who are actually trying to get through college and aren't lazy like these black men for them to be so loud, obnoxious, rude, and uncaring. We're here because we're Christians and want to learn about something. They're here because they got some useless "scholarship", I.e. Our president wanted a football team, because it would make money so he recruited them for that purpose. And then all the black guys get outraged when they find out this is a Christian school and they can't just bring in weed, beer or random women into the dorms, as per our rules. Why are they still here if they hate this place?
Most of them are probably the ones that foul up the bathrooms by leaving their toiletries in the shower stalls or not flushing the toilets. Just last night someone emptied a ramen bowl in the bathroom sink. There was a huge group of ants marching around trying to claim the food. I have to put up with this for a year now.
Conditions aside, my roommate is the worst. I ended up rooming with him, because my friends were leaving the nice dorm I was in last year for the crappy dorms and I didn't want to be left alone. This guy was sort of an acquaintance but I've found now that he is a terrible roommate. He is spoiled, lazy, inconsiderate and above all very arrogant about his supposed Christian faith. He is also very stupid. I don't exaggerate. I could spend days telling you all of his antics, but the thing is, deep down he tries to be a good person. He just has little intelligence or social skills and was possibly coddled his whole life by his parents, who taught him all of these superstitious unbiblical things. For example, he clearly has OcD and paranoia issues but he refuses to see a doctor and get prescribed some medicine because he "doesn't believe in it". He's ok with taking protein supplements, vitamins, "organic" food, or medicine for something like a cold, but nothing for mental issues, which he clearly has. So it's not like he's a Christian scientist or anything--his beliefs don't fit any denomination. He mostly just believes everything random YouTube videos tell him about Jesus and I'm relieved he likely hasn't discovered the crazy people on CF.
The biggest thing, though, is that he is basically nocturnal and stays up at night when I'm trying to sleep during the day. I am a bit of an insomniac and need long hours of sle each night and he makes sure I don't get it, one way or another. Hence why I said he is inconsiderate of my needs.
I call him the n-word in my thoughts all the time. I have been surrounded by black men who either have had little education or completely disregarded it because they have been too lazy to care about anything except their hedonistic lifestyles and football. And like I said, the one thing they are supposed to do is something they fail at. Our college is known for its poor football team. We shouldn't have one, this is a Christian liberal arts college. We just have it to try and get money, like how recently our president got donations for a football stadium when he could have used it for better facilities for our theater department, or, well, a better guys' dorm. But nope, the black men and their interests at this school that they hate outnumber the genuine students 3 to 1, at least.
I'm trying to put all of that behind me. But it's all so frustrating. Why should my concerns be invalidated at my college? Why is it that people who say "don't be racist" or usually left-leaning people who live in states with tiny black populations. It's very easy not to be racist when you have no black people in your area, particularly no black men. And that's not even touching on violent crime, which thankfully doesn't happen on campus.
It makes me wonder what Martin Luther King would think. He strove for equality for black people and his legacy seems to have been poor, at least in places with the most racism like Mississippi, my home. The vast majority of black people in my state are poor and have little education. And frankly, I hate having to deal with people who are stupid by choice and refuse to learn. It's one thing to be mentally handicapped, it's another to be like my roomate and do things like get a job (other people even put in a good word for him) and then quit the next day because you didn't like working.
I know that most black men probably aren't like the awful ones I have had to be around lately. I can think of three that are good friends and are educated. But it seems like they're a small minority among the black guys who attend this college.
I guess I'm asking how I'm supposed to let it all go and not think racist thoughts about black people, particularly black men. I feel like I can't relate to them at all. The racial divide in Mississippi is enormous, and black and white people have essentially lived in separate parts of the state my whole life.
All I ask is don't tell me to go to a black neighborhood (I would likely be robbed and shot if I wandered aimlessly) and don't tell me that I must have been "taught racism" by my parents. My parents have nothing to do with this and if they knew what kind of racist thoughts I had they'd be furious with me.
