the rasx() way with words: the difference between listening and hearing
Listening is for subordinates and hearing is for human consciousness. Since you probably know that a Black guy is writing this, let’s start with William Shakespeare, his Othello Act 2, Scene 1:
We can see that list me translates into listen to me. What this is saying is, “Hey! Get ready for a list of items I am going to dump into your memory! I fully expect to get these items back from you, fully processed, at a later time!” Now, in my pre-millennial Black world, children were trained to listen by memorizing a list of items they must get at the local grocery store for their mother (who would likely beat the child for forgetting anything). Do you notice a trend here? Listening is shit out of slavery! It is a weapon of warfare! To put it in more millennial terms, the invocation of listening is imperative.
There are all kinds of people who do not listen to other people. In my experience, it is the dread of the cognitive load that stops people from even starting to listen to me. In fact, I notice I often teach people to be averse to the sound of my voice because it means work! Simultaneously, almost every “love of my life” has exclaimed something about me “never” listening to them. In my experience, it seems more natural, casual and perceptual to hear people. I often hear a person by listening to them once (but I’ve failed to continually and ritualistically communicate that this single event actually happened).
Here, in the rasx() context, hearing is declarative. I always hear other people—I often do not listen to them. Hearing is part of the process of constructing a ‘conceptual model’ of another person. I do agree that another person may be “unknowable” but this does not mean they cannot be modelled. Racial stereotyping is the worst kind of conceptual modelling—I would prefer to build a model and share it (declare it) with the other consenting person. One would assume that the consenting person must be an adult but I’ve done this sort of thing with children.
My models of children are simple. Children have always been what the documentary (or reality TV show) camera is now: little, playful observers, absorbing things to be processed (often through play) later. So, before they open their mouth to speak, I am ready to hear them within a conceptual model related to this playful absorption. Within my modelling, children hold the promise (or threat) of taking all of this stuff they absorbed over the years and using it (vigorously) for constructive/destructive purposes. These models ‘control’ how I approach children. In the context of listening, the need for control mostly lies with the person being approached with the list—the onus is on them to carefully remember details.
So it is understandable that a listening-biased person (which should be almost everyone in Western/imperial society) would assume that “bad listeners” are careless—they don’t care about you. This could be mostly true but it may be a great and wise thing to check for whether this “careless” person hears you—especially when this person is not doing work for hire.