As a mostly white-ish girl who went to high school with almost no African-American students, even one who grew up in a very left-wing household and was taught not to be racist – there was a certain personal thrill once I hit college and actually had African-American friends. It wasn’t about ‘proving’ anything or even the exoticism of it – it was finally being able to practice what had previously only been theoretical.
Now, I also wasn’t stupid enough to say anything like that aloud, particularly not when hanging out with a group, but I will admit that my 19-year-old self felt a certain smug accomplishment about it.
So, while I snicker at Joyce’s faux pass, and the well-deserved side-eye it evoked, I also understand it. It is very human to find accomplishment in the mundane.
You can only get better in small steps, and I applaud Joyce for trying even when she steps in metaphorical dogshit on occasion. Keep trying, Joyce. You’ll reach “basic humanity” eventually.
Hrm, I guess I read ‘different section’ as in ‘different area of the room, you never saw me’.
Unless it’s a typo and that was supposed to be ‘session’.
Jamie
“Section” means a different time block. It’s a weird bit of jargon.
Nicole
It depends on your school I think— at my college we had a huge lecture (300 students) and then smaller discussion sections led by TAs. So you could have the same lecture but a different discussion section.
Nono
Yeah that sounds about right, though I had the feeling this was a lecture unless all three of the originals happened to be in the same group.
Section is just jargon I never picked up. A US thing?
Yes, Nono! Think of section as an instance of a given course in a given term.
Any given course (Geology 101) can have multiple sections each term.
Most courses only vary the section for a different meeting time/pattern, but like some have said, you might have multiple sections in the same room.
Combined graduate and undergraduate courses (Geography 345/445) are two sections of different courses in the same room. Often the only difference is workload. Then there are cross-listed (Anthology/Sociology) courses, etc. ad nauseum
LuminousLead
Canada too.
Agemegos
300 students in a lecture might not be as huge as you think. My first-year Economics lectures at ANU had 650 students in them. First-year maths at UNSW left the impression of being even bigger than that, but I never got an enrolment figure.
All-Purpose Guru
Some schools pair the lecture with the discussion (sometimes using the name “recitation” and you get eleventy-billion “sections” that all share the same time/room for the lecture, and some will have you sign up a lecture class, a recitation class and (in engineering or sciences) a lab class.
I’ve seen both ways done at different schools here in the US.
Keith T Reilly
Section is a fairly common term for different timeslots in the same class in American Universities. No idea what the etymology of using it as a term for timeslot is.
thejeff
In this case we know the same professor teaches the class at different times, since Dina was in one of those other sections – she got Walky’s doodled on notes accidentally returned to her in an early strip.
Nope! Section is right. It means exactly what Schpoonman said with the addition that sometimes it can be the same time slot but a different classroom and professor.
Chris Phoenix
Depends. Stanford, late 1980’s, I’m pretty sure “section” meant who your TA was, and we’d have said “different class” if it was the same course number at a different time.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
I recalls some college lectures I watched on Youtube where the professor would say “You’ll discuss this more in Section” meaning with your TA in a smaller group.
I’m super confused about this thread but then I was lucky enough to have only taken like one auditorium class in college (it went about as well as you’d expect)
yeah, careful – I’ve seen at least three works of (science) fiction that suggest the end result of this is anything from making yourself completely unmemorable (because you end up never doing anything that might get you noticed, for good or ill) to losing all free will and ability to take risks/act on less than complete information, compulsively save-scumming even the most trivial decisions, like Two Face and his coin.
Of course, the moral of such cautionary tales has an element of “be happy with what you’ve got, even with regrets, because what you think you want would only be worse”, but I do find the logic persuasive.
I was gonna make a comment about Lucy trying too hard to get her way into this friend group but Joyce kinda took the wind out of that sail. i have a couple of white friends I wonder if knowing me is really that big a deal to them?
Well, from personal experience, I’d wager they spend a lot of time doing social calculus instead of socializing with you, because they aren’t sure what’s a line you can relate on vs. a line that is offensive in ways they maybe don’t comprehend.
And if so, then, unlike Joyce, they don’t ask you to help them solve that problem by surprising you with their assumptions – unless they really haven’t learned better.
I still struggle a bit with the math, myself z but mostly because I’m never sure how much folks want me in their business to begin with, regardless of if I share an identity with them.
Among my Black friends there are two who back in single days were treasured by many white people as a sign of coolness and not being racist. They were too nice to call it out or shun people, but I know it dragged sometimes. And that was in a church setting that was mostly white, so, it seems similar.
One since college and one since middle school. Although frankly I only have like 3 or 4 people I would consider real friends at this point. Nothing like the social group Joyce has built up or has been shown in DoA. The whole walking together as a group to class thing was never really something I did in college. It was more like a high school thing. So Joyce’s whole perspective on being surrounded by minority friends is kind of a fantasy to begin with. Like who has four friends to walk to class with let alone four black ones? Or for that matter a whole social network of like 20 people you know intimately and are regularly involved in their lives?
clif
University of Houston was a local commuter school for me, so it wasn’t a walk together to morning class thing. The dormies may have done so. More of a go to out to eat together thing for me. And I had three different social networks of a dozenish each and to a greater or lesser extent we were involved in each others lives. There was the Science Fiction group, the chess group, and for the lack of a better term, the scientific occult group. There were also isolated students I knew from classes we shared. Then I worked for the Student Opportunity Service tutoring mostly smart black kids that hadn’t had the advantage of a high school that offered trig and intro-calc. Some of them became friends as did some of the professors that liked to talk about the non-teaching stuff they were working on. But after college, it was the Science Fiction friends that stuck.
Much later, in grad school, the department was more of a closed community. Also a lot more diverse with many nationalities, though I was partially accustomed to this from working in the oil industry, the mix was quite different. I probably formed many stereotypes based on inadequate samples. But mostly people are people or I’m mostly oblivious or some combination of the two.
But yeah, socializing on campus, whether walking to a common destination or in the reading areas of the library stacks were a big part of my college experience.
thejeff
That was closer to my experience, though I wasn’t a commuter student. I had plenty of friends on campus, even a few in my own dorm, but I didn’t have a group of friends in the dorm who were also in my classes, so while we’d occasionally wind up walking together if we were heading in roughly the same direction at the same time, there wasn’t any kind of regular thing like this.
Might reflect that before college she sort of assumed that all members of an ethnic group were essentially the same, or fell into a few standard types.
One effect of knowing people in [group] is finding out that they are just as variable as anyone else.
See, THIS is why Joyce needs to buckle down and make a deal with Roz.
I know Roz’s style of engagement is like a sand blaster only with slivers of broken glass instead of sand, but at least she’d eventually spell this stuff out to Joyce rather than just rolling her eyes and biting her tongue. Joyce is willing and ready to improve, but she still doesn’t know what improving entails, and no one else is prepared to sit her down and have that talk with her.
Joyce is still in that stage where every step away from her upbringing feels like such a monumental step that it has to be acknowledged, because it’s to exciting and thrilling.
It’ll phase out eventually, like how Becky might eventually stop loudly proclaiming that she’s a lesbian.
161 thoughts on “Over-friendly”
Ana Chronistic
Joyce: “Hey, Past Me, check it! I’m not racist anymore!”
Every black person ever: *ALL the side-eye*
Mr. Random
Well…. less.
It’s something.
Rose by Any Other Name
As a mostly white-ish girl who went to high school with almost no African-American students, even one who grew up in a very left-wing household and was taught not to be racist – there was a certain personal thrill once I hit college and actually had African-American friends. It wasn’t about ‘proving’ anything or even the exoticism of it – it was finally being able to practice what had previously only been theoretical.
Now, I also wasn’t stupid enough to say anything like that aloud, particularly not when hanging out with a group, but I will admit that my 19-year-old self felt a certain smug accomplishment about it.
So, while I snicker at Joyce’s faux pass, and the well-deserved side-eye it evoked, I also understand it. It is very human to find accomplishment in the mundane.
You can only get better in small steps, and I applaud Joyce for trying even when she steps in metaphorical dogshit on occasion. Keep trying, Joyce. You’ll reach “basic humanity” eventually.
deathjavu
Joyce from several months ago also gives herself the side eye: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/perfectest/
Some real backsliding here between Joyce, Sarah and Walky but Joyce’s is definitely stepping the farthest back.
Sai Somsphet
woof that strip did not… oof… so many other things you could warn past you about joyce….
Nono
Oh wow, I did actually call it yesterday when I said that she was in their class but they never noticed her.
Schpoonman
No, she was taking the same Calculus course but a different class/time slot.
Nono
Hrm, I guess I read ‘different section’ as in ‘different area of the room, you never saw me’.
Unless it’s a typo and that was supposed to be ‘session’.
Jamie
“Section” means a different time block. It’s a weird bit of jargon.
Nicole
It depends on your school I think— at my college we had a huge lecture (300 students) and then smaller discussion sections led by TAs. So you could have the same lecture but a different discussion section.
Nono
Yeah that sounds about right, though I had the feeling this was a lecture unless all three of the originals happened to be in the same group.
Section is just jargon I never picked up. A US thing?
elebenty
Yes, Nono! Think of section as an instance of a given course in a given term.
Any given course (Geology 101) can have multiple sections each term.
Most courses only vary the section for a different meeting time/pattern, but like some have said, you might have multiple sections in the same room.
Combined graduate and undergraduate courses (Geography 345/445) are two sections of different courses in the same room. Often the only difference is workload. Then there are cross-listed (Anthology/Sociology) courses, etc. ad nauseum
LuminousLead
Canada too.
Agemegos
300 students in a lecture might not be as huge as you think. My first-year Economics lectures at ANU had 650 students in them. First-year maths at UNSW left the impression of being even bigger than that, but I never got an enrolment figure.
All-Purpose Guru
Some schools pair the lecture with the discussion (sometimes using the name “recitation” and you get eleventy-billion “sections” that all share the same time/room for the lecture, and some will have you sign up a lecture class, a recitation class and (in engineering or sciences) a lab class.
I’ve seen both ways done at different schools here in the US.
Keith T Reilly
Section is a fairly common term for different timeslots in the same class in American Universities. No idea what the etymology of using it as a term for timeslot is.
thejeff
In this case we know the same professor teaches the class at different times, since Dina was in one of those other sections – she got Walky’s doodled on notes accidentally returned to her in an early strip.
Savail
Nope! Section is right. It means exactly what Schpoonman said with the addition that sometimes it can be the same time slot but a different classroom and professor.
Chris Phoenix
Depends. Stanford, late 1980’s, I’m pretty sure “section” meant who your TA was, and we’d have said “different class” if it was the same course number at a different time.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
I recalls some college lectures I watched on Youtube where the professor would say “You’ll discuss this more in Section” meaning with your TA in a smaller group.
Ana Chronistic
I’m super confused about this thread but then I was lucky enough to have only taken like one auditorium class in college (it went about as well as you’d expect)
Alongcameaspider
Joyce thats the sort of thought that should really stay in your head
JetstreamGW
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahah Joyce is just so delightfully dipshitty sometimes.
Chris
In six more months, she’ll be wishing she could travel back to this moment and shut herself up.
StClair
this is most people’s lives.
Nicole
I want to go back 6 minutes and shut myself up half the time
BarerMender
I’d spend the rest of my life searching back in times for occasions where I needed to shut up.
clif
Personally, I’d settle for an edit function for my latest comments.
elebenty
And 3 levels of undo.
Ana Chronistic
That’s why my preferred superpower is Undo
StClair
yeah, careful – I’ve seen at least three works of (science) fiction that suggest the end result of this is anything from making yourself completely unmemorable (because you end up never doing anything that might get you noticed, for good or ill) to losing all free will and ability to take risks/act on less than complete information, compulsively save-scumming even the most trivial decisions, like Two Face and his coin.
Of course, the moral of such cautionary tales has an element of “be happy with what you’ve got, even with regrets, because what you think you want would only be worse”, but I do find the logic persuasive.
Cmasta1992
JESUS CHRIST JOYCE
ktbear
LMFAO, that’s hilarious.
Proto_Eevee
Lucy even has an iconic smile like Joyce. A pleasant half circle. 😀
Jude Deluca
Joyce maybe just not say anything.
For the rest of the semester.
kat
yikes-aroonie
Bogeywoman
It’s so nice that white girls can see themselves accurately represented in media these days *sage nod*
Chris Phoenix
Biggest laugh all week. Ow, that hurts. Well deserved…
Johan
Glad they’re still letting her exist with them lmao
Kravis
Oh, uaw, so progressive!
Maybe YOU should be the one running for congress, Joyce!
I’m sure Becky would run your campaign for free!
Stephen Bierce
Well I said come over baby
We got chicken in the corn
Who’s corn? What corn?–My corn!–Jerry Lee Lewis
CrazyJ
Joyce is definitely the Pee-Wee Herman of this Black Pack, except not as cool.
FacelessDeviant
Lets hope Joyce’s career doesn’t end like Pee-Wee’s then.
He Who Abides
Considering how repressed she is, it might.
timemonkey
Oh, Joyce, someday you’ll learn to keep that kind of statement on the inside.
Sirksome
Or hopefully not think it to begin with.
Sirksome
I was gonna make a comment about Lucy trying too hard to get her way into this friend group but Joyce kinda took the wind out of that sail. i have a couple of white friends I wonder if knowing me is really that big a deal to them?
TachyonCode
Well, from personal experience, I’d wager they spend a lot of time doing social calculus instead of socializing with you, because they aren’t sure what’s a line you can relate on vs. a line that is offensive in ways they maybe don’t comprehend.
And if so, then, unlike Joyce, they don’t ask you to help them solve that problem by surprising you with their assumptions – unless they really haven’t learned better.
I still struggle a bit with the math, myself z but mostly because I’m never sure how much folks want me in their business to begin with, regardless of if I share an identity with them.
sultryglebe
Among my Black friends there are two who back in single days were treasured by many white people as a sign of coolness and not being racist. They were too nice to call it out or shun people, but I know it dragged sometimes. And that was in a church setting that was mostly white, so, it seems similar.
He Who Abides
Might depend on how long they’ve known you, Sirksome.
Sirksome
One since college and one since middle school. Although frankly I only have like 3 or 4 people I would consider real friends at this point. Nothing like the social group Joyce has built up or has been shown in DoA. The whole walking together as a group to class thing was never really something I did in college. It was more like a high school thing. So Joyce’s whole perspective on being surrounded by minority friends is kind of a fantasy to begin with. Like who has four friends to walk to class with let alone four black ones? Or for that matter a whole social network of like 20 people you know intimately and are regularly involved in their lives?
clif
University of Houston was a local commuter school for me, so it wasn’t a walk together to morning class thing. The dormies may have done so. More of a go to out to eat together thing for me. And I had three different social networks of a dozenish each and to a greater or lesser extent we were involved in each others lives. There was the Science Fiction group, the chess group, and for the lack of a better term, the scientific occult group. There were also isolated students I knew from classes we shared. Then I worked for the Student Opportunity Service tutoring mostly smart black kids that hadn’t had the advantage of a high school that offered trig and intro-calc. Some of them became friends as did some of the professors that liked to talk about the non-teaching stuff they were working on. But after college, it was the Science Fiction friends that stuck.
Much later, in grad school, the department was more of a closed community. Also a lot more diverse with many nationalities, though I was partially accustomed to this from working in the oil industry, the mix was quite different. I probably formed many stereotypes based on inadequate samples. But mostly people are people or I’m mostly oblivious or some combination of the two.
But yeah, socializing on campus, whether walking to a common destination or in the reading areas of the library stacks were a big part of my college experience.
thejeff
That was closer to my experience, though I wasn’t a commuter student. I had plenty of friends on campus, even a few in my own dorm, but I didn’t have a group of friends in the dorm who were also in my classes, so while we’d occasionally wind up walking together if we were heading in roughly the same direction at the same time, there wasn’t any kind of regular thing like this.
Whosits
Sirksome, it probably depends how many other black friends they have. If I went from zero to four, I’d think it was a big deal, too.
BlackScarabFilmZ
Jeez, Joyce!
Romanticide
well that problem of niches solved itself fast…
BBCC
See, Sarah? It didn’t take her long to find her niche at all!
goggleman64
Aaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaah
*wheeze*
DailyBrad
Oh god, Joyce.
NinjaNick
That was a cringy statement, Joyce.
ADLegend21
my vision went blurry at Joyce in the last panel. I think I blacked out.
Lawzlo
“…Four different black people…”
Wait, was Joyce expecting to be walking to class with four of the same black person? Like clones?
JessWitt
Well, Sal and Walky are sorta like clones but that’s beside the point.
King Daniel
They’re not identical twins, so the only way in which they’re like clones is the fact that they share a birthday.
MK15
Lol glad I’m not the only one.
Four Jacobs in her dreams I guess?
Slartibeast Button, BIA
Might reflect that before college she sort of assumed that all members of an ethnic group were essentially the same, or fell into a few standard types.
One effect of knowing people in [group] is finding out that they are just as variable as anyone else.
Reltzik
….
See, THIS is why Joyce needs to buckle down and make a deal with Roz.
I know Roz’s style of engagement is like a sand blaster only with slivers of broken glass instead of sand, but at least she’d eventually spell this stuff out to Joyce rather than just rolling her eyes and biting her tongue. Joyce is willing and ready to improve, but she still doesn’t know what improving entails, and no one else is prepared to sit her down and have that talk with her.
Nono
Joyce is still in that stage where every step away from her upbringing feels like such a monumental step that it has to be acknowledged, because it’s to exciting and thrilling.
It’ll phase out eventually, like how Becky might eventually stop loudly proclaiming that she’s a lesbian.
SillyGoose
Wait, Becky’s a lesbian? She could’ve said.
clif
You’d think.
StClair
She’s been pretty circumspect about it.
RedCat
Roz doesn’t seem like the kind of person who wants people to do better, she seems to like it more to just be mad at people NOT doing better.