I’m really looking for what may have been the driving motivation and reward. The focus is on your personal drive for the interest and what you gained from it.
We can’t have meaningful conversations if people are scared to be honest, so please be authentic, forthcoming, and respectful. Conversely, please respond to others with compassion so that users feel safe enough to be vulnerable.
I went to a 90% black k-12 advanced magnet school from 9th-12th grade in the Southeastern USA. I’m white. I never really got like an intense interest or anything. This level of stereotype culture is of limited interest to me personally. It was just my culture group for a time. I dated a black girl for awhile, and a Persian girl for awhile too. I even picked up a few lines of Farsi, although I don’t remember any of them now.
The culture is very different in the black American south. Probably the biggest takeaway I have is that poverty culture largely forms the flavor of any community, and communities without poverty have no flavor to them. The struggles are very real, but the solutions are never straight forward. Neglect and abuse causes irreparable harm and scaring as deep as a community and cultural level. Only persistent change and time can heal those wounds. No outsider has a right to minimize or belittle those traumatized by abuses and neglect.