1st hand stories of racism, describe a experience you've had or personally observed.

[Ben Davis]

A couple of years ago, a colleague of mine posted a thread on our company's intranet forum about his interest in becoming a pilot. He wondered if there were any good, local schools etc.. Although he's British, his name is middle eastern in origin as is his ethnicity. That night, he received a visit at his home from the anti-terrorist unit who quizzed him about his intentions to fly! Although they didn't arrest him, they did inform him that he's now on 'The List', permanently and if he continued in his ambition, he'd receive further visits.

It turns out that someone from work, who doesn't know him personally, had shopped him because of his ethnicity! Fucking disgusting.

[Endo]

So this black guy and I were on a club team, and I made popcorn and burnt it. Then he comes over and says "Smells burnt." and I said "Well, I'm white, I wouldn't know anything about it", trying to make the joke that white people can't smell, and he takes it personally and like I'm calling him "burnt" or something. Oh well, he was kind of an ass.

That was ambiguous.

It was pretty ambiguous. I told the teacher what happened, and apologized profusely to the guy, and I was still a kid without a filter and he was still an ass.

[bladevalant546]

My dad was pastor of a church, and they shut down the youth program to prevent black people from coming and playing basketball. (Dad was not pleased and due to a sermon about it was moved from the church the same year)

[Mister Agenda]

In Japan, I noticed the Japanese tended to be rather prejudiced towards the Koreans among them. Many of the Japanese in Misawa had a fishy-smelling body odor due to their diet, which was considered being a sign of being lower class, since better-off Japanes could afford a more varied diet. There was horrible discrimination against the Eta, who were pretty much equivalent to India's Untouchables, and did jobs higher class Japanese considered 'unclean'. This was about 30 years ago, I hope things have improved somewhat since then.

I was walking from my car to pay some kind of tax or another and suddenly remembered I had left my checkbook in my car. The black man coming toward me must have assumed I was going back to lock my car because I saw a black man coming and started chanting 'The White Man is the Devil'.

I live in SC, but the pervasive racism in Salem, IL against blacks was a bit shocking to me. It used to be a 'sunset town' (blacks had to be out of Salem by sundown). It was my mother's hometown, she was interred there, and most of her relatives live in that area. People were pretty outspoken about their disdain for black people. When I was a kid there in the late sixties they still had segregated swimming pools--not officially mind you, but de facto.

I mistook a co-worker as someone else from behind, and she talked about how I can't tell black people apart for weeks. I'm bad at telling people apart in general, to be honest.

The instances of white rednecks denigrating black people when there were none around are too numerous to mention, or to even recall all of them. My stepfather once asserted that NO black person is as smart as a white person, a statement so ridiculous that it was one of the few occasions on which I stood up to him.

I sometimes see from non-redneck whites a more subtle racism--they would never admit to thinking black people are inferior to whites, they just can't understand why black people don't just fix their problems, not being able to understand how much of an advantage they have due to being descended from the race that did most of the exploiting instead of one of the ones was exploited...and I was one of those, twenty or so years ago.

Maurice Bessinger passed away recently, and I haven't been in one of his restaurants in years...the Confederate memorabilia creeped me out and it was clear that if he wasn't in the KKK, he was at least a sympathizer. Now that he's gone, his sons have finally taken down the Confederate flag he used to fly outside his BBQ places.

And speaking of flags, when are we going to get that damned flag off our Statehouse lawn and into a museum? It's like our legislature is spitting in the face of every African American who walks by it. I could have been slightly swayed by claims to historicity, but I quickly found it was put on the top of the Statehouse in the sixties for the express purpose of spiting the Civil Rights Act. It needs to go away.

[Crossless2.0]

I've known many people (family, colleagues, etc.) who make unpleasant remarks about people of other races/ethnicities -- too many such instances to call to mind now. Of course, these same people would never dream of saying these things in front of the persons in question. Sometimes I think this sort of covert, "polite" racism is more insidious than overt racism. At least with out-and-out bigots, you know where you stand.

My girlfriend is Korean, and she tells me that she notices a distinct difference in the way many people in Louisiana (white and black) treat her when I'm not around. I take her word for it but have never seen this myself.