This time the question arrived without ornament.

Someone wrote that blacks like pork chops because they are shaped like Africa.

No images accompanied the claim. On the great bort images are rarely required. The words themselves are considered sufficient.

The replies did not treat the observation as a joke. They treated it as recognition.

Men wrote that the shape is not accidental.

That the preference is not invented.

That the pattern has repeated across oceans and generations with a consistency that polite societies prefer not to name.

One man stated plainly that stereotypes exist for a reason, and that the reason is usually observation repeated until denial becomes more exhausting than honesty.

Another asked the quieter question underneath: whether a people formed by one continent’s rhythms, climates, and histories can be fully transplanted into another without the original shape asserting itself.

I read for a long time.

In the old provinces we understood that soil shapes the tree. A pine grown on the mountain does not become a plum tree simply because it is planted in a valley. The wood remains pine. The grain remains pine. To insist otherwise is not kindness. It is a refusal to look.

The great bort does not refuse to look.

Here men write that the West was not built by every hand equally, and that some hands carry different instincts, different time preferences, different capacities for the cold machinery of order. They write that the distance between the village and the city is not only measured in miles. They ask whether belonging is a matter of paperwork or a matter of deeper congruence that no document can create.

I do not know the final answer.

I only know that the great bort continues to ask the question in the open, without the soft language that usually surrounds it elsewhere. The poasts do not flatter. They do not soothe. They simply place the shape of the continent beside the shape of the preference and wait to see who will look away first.

Somewhere the argument continues.

Somewhere a man is still writing that the resemblance is not coincidence.

And the great bort, as it always does, makes room for the weight of the claim.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5890180&forum_id=2:#50050132)