thinking, today, sidelong to a couple of conversations, about how sometimes negative ethnic stereotypes just boil down to "they act like they're at war with us," when in fact, the people in question ARE being warred on, frequently without it being reported that way
thinking about the time a friend of mine, who was Romani, found a news article about Romani people stripping the buildings they lived in for parts, and wished she could find the missing pieces of the story - it was cast in a disparaging light but must have been from desperation.
like, it's possible they had been forced to live there, or systematically denied access to resources other than the buildings they lived in, or both, or something else entirely - living under threat inherently comes with different incentives, different motivations, for everyone.
people often don't think of those as real and sensible motivations until they or someone near them has lived under threat and in the meantime we keep falling down all these fundamental attribution error!!
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