I do go to the grocery stores after midnight, at least twice a week, and I haven’t witnessed this either.
. . . which was, in turn, stolen by Ohio State.
There has only bee one time in my life where I got to shut one of these people up.
The kid and I were in a taxi coming home from her ballet class. She was about five and looked just adorable in her tutu.
The taxi driver complimented us both on being so active in the arts and then slid effortlessly into a racist tirade.
When he paused for breath, the kid asked what he was saying.
“Well, my love, I think he’s saying that you can’t really be a good dancer because your father is part maori.”
“That’s just silly, mum.”
“I know.”
He didn’t speak again. That was nice.
Oh god racist or non-politically correct opinions are not much of a bother to me an adult, but I really REALLY hate to see someone subject a child to that. You handled that situation a lot more mature than I would have.
My wife told me about how a girl in her elementary school was fathered by a white foreigner an Australian I think she said the girl said, and the girl had the “misfortune” to look fully white. She said the teachers would torture this poor girl with crap like “why are you here” “who is your father” until the girl would cry and she dissapeared from school one day. Adults torturing a child about her appearance :mad:
Yeah, it’s a crappy way to behave. My kid tends to get it from both sides as she looks european and “full” maori kids don’t want her identifying with them. Luckily she’s got the confidence in herself to dismiss bigotry for exactly what it’s worth.
That’s the only time I’ve managed so well. Usually I just stare in shock and say nothing while my brain does whimpering laps of my skull, fruitlessly searching for a response.
Please pardon the tiny hijack.
9:00pm on Saturday at my local store - not free, but lots of meat and fish half price.
I live inside a different Beltway (Baltimore) and am flabbergasted on a fairly regular basis at examples of overt racism.
Your description of the woman as wizened leads me to speculate that she might have lost the edit feature. That happened to my great aunt. She didn’t express any anti-semitism, but she would blurt things that would have us thinking she had forgotten the whole civil rights movement happened. (which was especially odd because she dated a black man for a number of years) Her (your grocery store lady) may just have been visiting a different time and place.
I always want to respond to this stuff “what the fuck is wrong with you?” Mostly, I just look at them and give a sheepish half-chuckle and try to extricate myself from the situation. That said, had what happened to Tom happend to me, I think mostly I would have laughed my ass off.
–Cliffy
Oh, also, TriPolar, who knows the secret heart of any person? But overt racism and anti-semitism to someone you just met is so much more common in other parts of the country it’s not even a comparison. I have lived here 15 years and have had the genre of experience described by the OP exaclty once. I lived in Memphis for 9 months and go there to visit my folks maybe once a year and the same type of thing happens quite a bit.
–Cliffy
As a descendant of Ukrainians? They are drunk most of the time. It isn’t even offensive. 
Also, I still say ‘the Ukraine’. Well, actually, I usually say ‘the old country’. I didn’t say I was recently descended from Ukrainians!