Longer-time members may recall that I was significantly ignorant about the state of racism in America when I joined the Dope.
When I started my current job, I had a colleague who had grown up and spent much of his life in America. Initially, all seemed well, but he gradually revealed himself to be quite the racist, with a particular bias against Amerindians - he had a t-shirt with the slogan ‘Pest control since 1492’ - and the Chinese. This did not go down well with any of us but in particular one of my colleagues whose mother is Chinese… I escaped pretty much all of it, I think because I had described that in a previous job, the Chinese were the #1 threat and therefore he didn’t need to ‘convert’ me. I don’t think he twigged that I was speaking professionally, not personally. Anyway, it got to the stage where he made the mistake of inveighing in the open office, overheard by all, making some particularly nasty racist remarks. He was dismissed shortly thereafter. But it was a real lesson for me, putting real flesh on what I’d learned here. It’s really sad that such attitudes persist.
I taught high school for a few years in the southern US in the early 1990s, and saw institutionalized racism up close a number of times. When I started teaching, it was a half time gig taking over a science class for a guy who had been made department head. Me taking over his class freed him up to do planning and overseeing of other science classes. Since I was out of my element, he did grading for the first quarter allowing me to focus on figuring out how to teach a high school class.
At the end of the quarter he showed me his spreadsheet that recorded the grading. It was a weighting between labs, homework, quizzes, and tests. If a student didn’t hand in a lab or homework, it could be left blank or made a zero, which could really effect the final grade. Example: there are 4 labs, and a student hands in two of them, for which they get a 100 for each. If the two they didn’t hand in are treated as blanks, the lab average is 100. If the two they didn’t hand in are given a zero, the lab average is 50. Big difference.
So second quarter, I assume grading duties. Just to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, I compare my second quarter grades against first quarter grades. One jumped out, a guy who I gave a solid B to who received a D the first quarter. He had not turned in a lot of homework and labs during the first quarter, and he received zeros for that work driving his grade to a D.
Then I looked closer at the first quarter grades and saw 5 guys who had almost identical work, from labs and homework turned in, as well as quizzes and tests. Three had almost all of their missed work recorded as zeros and they got Ds. Two had all of their missed work recorded as blanks and they got Bs. All were on the football team. Three were black, two were white. You can figure out which group was which.
Anti-Amerindian racism tends to be highly localized in the U.S., probably most common IME in parts of the American Southwest where there are some very large reservations, particularly the massive ( in sq. miles, not population ) Navajo nation. However I don’t think you see it all that much on average - most Americans don’t have a chance to cultivate or maintain that particular bigotry due to lack of exposure.
Similarly I think anti-Chinese racism would maybe be more common, but tend to be kind of localized as well. There aren’t many East Asians in large swaths of the interior United States. By contrast IMHO anti-Black racism seems a bit more pervasive as a cultural meme, even if that does vary a lot in intensity as well.
Or in other words you really “lucked out” experiencing this douche ;).