Massachusetts is ranked one of the rudest states in the US

[bostongymjunkie]

Originally Posted by Bettafish

Come on, Boston is not the most diverse city in the world. Even in the US we can find NYC, SF, LA,, Seattle... equally diverse or more.

Never said it was. But it's also not homogeneous. Even many immigrants come from places that are VERY homogeneous in terms of ethnicity and VERY traditional. As such, they find areas of the US that are traditional and family-oriented and sometimes rural quite comfortable. It's all perspective.

Originally Posted by Bettafish

Also, many immigrants are highly educated with multi-national experiences. They are not some self-indulgent peasants demanding Boston locals to accommodate them in crazy ways. However, they could provide a perspective some locals fail to see.

Who said they are? You are the one bringing sweeping generalizations. Immigrants are no better and no worse than anybody else. There are things to be learned from most people if one is willing to learn. If you think that making friends in any Northeast city is difficult because you're an immigrant or because people are "rude" in your eyes, you are misguided in my view. I'll be the first to cede that the level of civility (ie: consideration of others) in the public square is atrocious. But that's not just locals, it's many people including immigrants and probably attributable at least in part to the multicultural nature of this city as well as general self-centeredness made worse from technology.

[415_s2k]

I wasn't an immigrant from a foreign country, but I was a teenager from within the US and recall that the tendency toward provincial behavior was greater in Mass and New England at large than in other places. Combine this with the gruff/standoffish attitude that you are more likely to see and you have a potentially off-putting social situation that can rub people the wrong way - versus some parts of the South or Seattle where people are provincial but polite, and people come away speaking pleasantly of how they were treated.

An interesting trend I noticed in Seattle was that people tended to be more welcoming to immigrants than to fellow Americans from other areas. A lot of people believe that Seattle is the most diverse and welcoming place in the US, and while that's not true, the fact that so many sincerely believe it means that they act accordingly; while they could care less whether a doe-eyed ginger kid from Salt Lake City feels welcome, they will go out of their way to make an African guy with an accent feel welcomed in their fair city. In MA, they're less likely to care where you're from regardless of whether it's Louisiana or Laos - "yeah? Whattaya want?"

A couple weeks ago on the FB page for my parents' town, someone posted that overnight, someone came and kicked over some of the Christmas decorations and pulled down the lights on the gazebo at the public park. About 2/3 of the posts blamed "stupid kids" (probably accurate), and the other 3rd blamed "outsiders" (a few people actually using this word). Then, the discussion devolved into a debate as to what constituted an "outsider" and why they would target a sleepy New England town in north central Mass. What I thought was interesting among the people who blamed "outsiders" was that some said they thought it was people who did it because they came from cultures that didn't celebrate Christmas. Some of them took a typical xenophobic attitude ("they hate god and jesus and our freedoms") and others taking a sympathetic attitude ("can you blame them for being upset that we are throwing Christianity in their face?").

[Bettafish]

^^ That is interesting.
Maybe one reason is that very few people in Seattle are multi-generation locals? In Boston, there are still a lot of people who have been in New England for many generations.

If people already have lots of friends and family members nearby, there is relatively low interest in making new friends or being deeply involved in other people's activities, no matter from Africa or Louisiana.

[thenewtexan]

Originally Posted by Cape Cod Todd

I have always lived in Mass but my wife is from Europe and she has lived in different states outside NE and she always tells me how rude in general people are here.

I think for the most part it should be a case by case study because I think people want to do the right thing but blame it on the weather, blame it on us being uptight or we could blame it on being a political Blue state?

Several of those states on the list are a majority Democrat so maybe that is part of the problem?

Four of the ten least rude are Blue. Six of the ten most rude are Blue. No political pattern here. So, no that's not part of the problem.

[charolastra00]

I moved to Boston from Georgia when I was 18 and have stayed, aside from pit stops for 4-6 months each in Iceland, London, and southern Mexico. I've also traveled pretty extensively through Europe and Israel. It's because of my time traveling and living in different cultures that I know I'm much more comfortable in Boston, the UK, and Northern Europe than the Southern US or Southern Europe where people are more outwardly "friendly." I appreciate the introverted nature of New England, but that's probably pretty difficult if you're an extrovert. Introversion can easily be mistaken for rudeness, but I have always found people in Mass to be quite polite.



To me, interaction in Boston feels good because friendliness exists in short, genuine bursts. In the South, my relationships were more plentiful but much more shallow. Some of that was out of sight, out of mind when I left the South, but I have friends who I met early on in Massachusetts who I might only see every other year who I stay very close to through phone and text. When I had tough times in my life right out of college, all those people I knew my whole life disappeared while New Englanders I had known only a few months at work had a modern day barn building to support me. Of course everyone doesn't fit in that mold, but expectations are just different for who is defined as a "friend" in different parts of the country.


Iceland and the UK were similar. Some of my dearest friends in the world live in those countries and we met not because of casual interactions at work or class, but because of deep connections over shared interests. Even if people wouldn't make small talk or chat around town, people were incredibly helpful. I lived in a town that was big enough to have a university, but small enough that people more or less knew each other on site. Most of the time, unless at a bar, people kept to themselves, but on more than one occasion someone approached me in the grocery store to ask me if I needed help translating something. One woman even called her niece - living in Boston, interesting enough - right there in the store to get the English translation of a fairly obscure Icelandic word on a cereal box.



I find it interesting that someone mentions not getting invited to coworker's houses. In the 10 years I've lived in the area since college, it hasn't occurred to me to expect to be invited to someone's home or to invite someone to my home. I asked a few friends and that's just not something we tend to do - we socialize outside of the home. Part of this is cultural but also practical - with the cost of living so high, many people live with roommates until their late 20s/early 30s, live in small apartments, and are pretty scattered from work. I'm friends with my coworkers, but even if we wanted to go to another's house, it wouldn't make sense because we all live 45 minutes to an hour from work in all directions, ranging from Worcester to Boston to Lowell to Providence. We instead play trivia at bars close to work.

[Space_League]

The best educated and the rudest. A lovely coupling if you ask me