A comparison between public care, civic discipline, and the cultural meaning of indifference in Black America and Japan.
When I was in Japan, one of the first things that struck me was how clean everything felt. The streets, the public areas, and the general environment all carried a sense of freshness and order. What stood out even more was that this cleanliness did not appear to come solely from formal institutions. I saw ordinary citizens, both young and old, organized in cleaning crews, going out together to clean their surroundings. The impression it left on me was immediate. I began thinking about Black America.
Anyone who knows me knows that I strongly dislike littering. It is one of those habits that reveals something larger than the act itself. When I drive through Black American towns, neighborhoods, or city sections, I sometimes imagine how a person from Japan would interpret what they were seeing. I wonder what conclusions they would draw about a people from the visible condition of the environment. That thought returned to me recently while I was driving with a friend. I saw two men walking across the street from a high school. One of them stopped, lifted both hands, and threw whatever trash he had into the air, then watched it fall to the ground and join the surrounding litter. I shouted out of the car window for him to pick it up, but what stayed with me was not only the act itself. It was the mindset behind it.
Black America culture teaches us that not caring for power, while Japan more often treats caring as a form of public responsibility.
The contrast, to me, is not simply between cleanliness and dirtiness. It is between two moral attitudes. In one setting, there appears to be a widespread ethic of public care. In the other, there is too often a cultivated attachment to indifference. Black America has, in many ways, normalized a version of the phrase “I do not give a fuck” that is tied to social identity. Not caring is frequently presented as strength. Disregard for consequences, rules, and communal expectations can be framed as empowerment. This helps explain why terms like “savage” have been embraced in some spaces as markers of authenticity, boldness, or status. The person who appears least restrained is often read as the freest.
That cultural coding carries consequences. When indifference becomes admirable, public decay follows. The street, the sidewalk, the school zone, and the neighborhood cease to be treated as shared spaces deserving stewardship. They become backdrops for performance. The problem is not only litter. It is the deeper assumption that care is corny, while disregard is powerful. By contrast, what impressed me in Japan was the sense that civic responsibility had dignity attached to it. Cleaning was not treated as humiliation. It was treated as normal participation in social life.
This is why the issue matters. Communities do not merely reflect budgets or government intervention. They also reflect the values that are socially rewarded. If a culture trains people to admire carelessness, it will reproduce disorder. If it teaches people to respect maintenance, discipline, and public responsibility, it will reproduce stability. Black America would benefit from reexamining what it has allowed to symbolize freedom, because no community can rise while contempt for shared space is mistaken for power.
A people cannot build stable and dignified environments if disorder is continually coded as freedom and care is coded as weakness. The condition of a community is shaped not only by policy or economics, but by what its people are taught to admire, excuse, and imitate in everyday life.
We have a lot of cleaning up to do
