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Hello {{ first name | friends}},
Here's another tale from the past, this time from when I was living in England. A friend and I had rented a downstairs flat from a family (which it later turned out they weren't supposed to rent out, but that's a story for another time. Our upstairs neighbour was racialised as white, as were most of the people in that area. We were two of very few people either racialised as Black or belonging to the Global Majority.
One thing we noticed is that our upstairs neighbour was a little bit standoffish. Admittedly, many Brits won't welcome you immediately with open arms but even the regular pleasantries seemed a little bit forced. We had no idea why. We paid our rent on time, we both had jobs and our lives at the time were fairly sedate, if only because we were on a limited budget and possibly also because we were in our late twenties and coming out of that "party hearty" phase that we had never really been in.
After we'd been there for a month or so we ran into our upstairs neighbour one day, greeted her and started to chat. And that's when she said it: "You're much quieter than I thought you would be. I thought you'd be playing loud music all the time."