this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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one of the few subs I actually remember was a science-substitute (his specialty was biology), and he'd bring his snakes to class and let them wander about the class room and chill with the kids.
He actually cared about the kids he was teaching.
then there was the white South African sub that spent the entire class bitching about "discrimination" because she was denied scholarships for (black) South Africans affected by apartheid. she was just bitchy. (and credit to our history teachers, they found out about it and gave us an impromptu weeklong lesson on Apartheid.)
Do all white South Africans suck? I knew a guy who applied for scholarships for African Americans because he's from Africa and he's American, he was bitching about getting denied during the interview stage for obvious reasons. He knew that African American meant something specific that definitely excluded him, he's just an asshole.
A lot of them have a cultural background encouraging them to suck. It's like white people from the American southeast. Being raised in the privileged race of an extremely racist society where your family may have grievances about being forced to lose forms of political power and explicit domination can make for some really awful people (as well as some really awesome people who grow up with an internal understanding that all this shit is wrong and fighting against it).
I know a white South African who's very chill and kind and he works with Aboriginal Australians and if you ask him nicely he'll do magic tricks with a deck of cards and when I was having a hard time with My mental health he helped Me access a counsellor and followed up to see how I was doing afterwards.
I haven’t met all white South Africans… but, there does seem to a pattern.
Edit to add: it might just be the ones fleeing from the consequences of Apartheid rather than all; and it’s not like I’ve personally met that many of them. (But we can lump musk and trump’s “refugees” into this pattern, too)
The ones I worked with in The Netherlands and Britain didn't seem to be a problem.
Maybe America attracts a certain kind of white South African more than those countries?!
Nah, all but one of the white South Africans I've met in the US have been pretty awesome. In general the people from any country that seek out other cultures are, somewhat necessarily, not the xenophobic or supremacist ones. There are always gonna be shitheads, especially when they feel they might need to "flee" their home country, but the vast majority are just nice folks that like other people (this doesn't apply to tourists in super touristy areas - we just had a family get their kid gored because they tried to pet a bull elk in mating season and they've turned around and are now trying to sue the rangers for not warning them enough)
In my own experience living in other countries and knowing quite a lot of other immigrants (as people tend to more easily bond with those living similar experiences, with the result that immigrants tend to mix more with other immigrants - and not just people from the same country of origin but immigrants in general - than with the locals), people who go live in other countries out of their own choice tend to have two main kinds of drives for that and hence personalities:
From what I've seen in a couple of countries, the former are a lot rarer than the latter, they're also generally more open-minded people. However the latter are not at all open-minded and in my own experience are often very conservative types, possibly even more so than the locals (this is my experience both with most of my countrymen when I was an immigrant abroad and with immigrants living in my own homeland).
Anyways, what you say about you experience with South Africans in the US does match my experience with South Africans in Europe, my point is just that your broader conclusion about openness of immigrants in general does not at all match my own - most immigrants out there are of the second kind and thus they're not at all more open minded than people in general and might even be more close minded (as I said, seen it both with my countrymen whilst living abroad and with immigrants in my homeland - and it seems to me that most immigrants are more conservative and less open minded than average, which is probably what leads some immigrants to form single-nationality communities when living abroad whilst in my experience the "seek out other cultures" kind tends to live amongst the locals).
I don't think our experiences are contradictory - I think I perhaps under-emphasized that it was people who seek out other cultures, rather than the ones that insulate themselves from the culture they live within, that are necessarily the less-xenophobic ones. There may well be piles of immigrants that mix primarily with other immigrants and are at the same time awful people (by host culture standards), but it follows that unless we are members of that community, we're unlikely to have ever met them. Were it a strict rule it might approach tautology (and aside from that it's fairly good example of why anecdotal evidence is unreliable), but it does seem that our experiences are fairly closely aligned.