Do people of various ethnicities pick up "racist vibes"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been wondering about this.

My mother had a very negative experience with a Pakistani doctor she used to work for. Without going into a lot of detail, let’s just say the dude was evil. Unfortunately, it left my mother with a very negative perception of Pakistanis that also extended to Indians, Iranians, and assorted Arabs.

I on the other hand, do not allow my perceptions of an entire ethnic group to be colored by a bad experiece with one person. Also, I’ve worked with a couple of Iranians, both of whom were very sweet guys, and there are a couple of Arab families in my church, Lebanese and Syrian, and the whole lot of them are really sweet people.

I also love Middle Eastern and Indian food.

Soooo… I am a frequent customer at my favorite Middle Eastern market. I walk in the door with the attitude that these warm, wonderful people are going to sell me yummy things to eat, and guess what? These warm, wonderful people sell me yummy things to eat, and bend over backwards to make sure I get what I want.

My mother, on the other hand, expects rudeness. Whenever she stops in there to pick things up for me, she complains that the staff was rude, wouldn’t help her, pretended not to speak English, etc.

Sooo…

Do people just have a sixth sense about whether someone is racist, or prejudiced against their particular ethnic group, and treat them accordingly?

Seems to me that my mom and I both get exactly what we expect from “those people”, and since my perceptions and expectations are positive, my experiences with these people are positive. My mother’s expectations and perceptions are negative, and, well, she has yet to be pleasantly surprised.

2

I’m a foreign student from India. So, I can probably comment a bit on this.

What your mother probably did was appropriate the doctor’s character as his cultural traits rather than just his personal deficiencies.

I’ve often had Americans assume things about me simply because some other Indian behaved that way. Some examples are notions of lifestyle back home, opinions on Christianity and mistrust based on a perception of a different set of moral ethics..

3

Gyan9, yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

What I’m really wondering, though, is, can you (or any other randomly selected human being, for that matter) sense that someone has a negative bias toward you because of your nationality? Something in their body language or facial expression? Tone of voice when they say hello to you?

4

I can sometimes sense it. But unless the interaction is long and persistent, I can’t find out if that sensing is accurate.

But sometimes it’s instantenously confirmed. Once, I was playing table tennis (ping pong to you Americans) in a round-robin format in my dorm. In other words, winners stay. There were about 8-10 guys in the room and it was the first week of Fall. There was this guy with his Dad. I had just won and it was this guy’s turn. We start the game. Early into the game, the father starts encouraging his son. Nothing wrong in that, by itself. But, it was the nature of the encouragement that sent bad vibes.
Things like “Come on, you can take him”. His tone didn’t just sound like simple sporting enouragement. To me, at least.

5

Well, if you’re trying to find faults in a person based on skin color, you probably can. After all, people have faults.

6

I would imagine that anyone living or staying in another country would be sensitive of people’s reaction to them.

I know when I was in Germany I learned to discriminate between the types of looks on people’s faces when they saw me, and seek for help accordingly.

After a short while, you know you’re either going to get shit from someone or that they’re going to be nice to you.

I’m not sure its something that can be classified as strictly a race/nationality basis, but a friendly face is a friendly face.

Why does it have to be defined in terms of different nationalities? Don’t we experience the same thing every day with people of our own? Have you ever walked into a store, looked at the cashier and thought, “Gee, this person looks like they’re going to be an ass” and they are?

In any type of interaction, we pick up behavioral cues from the other person. Usually we don’t even know we’re doing it. When I worked retail, I could spot a snotty customer as soon as they walked in. They usually entered in a huff, gave disparaging glances at the merchandise and generally acted as though they expected to be disappointed. They usually were.

7

I bet you’ve never had many bad experiences with bureaucrats. I haven’t. I doubt it’s racism they pick up, so much as hostility, or whatever. I worked for local gov’t. for about three years doing traffic studies. The automatic hostility of any citizen I dealt with was really striking. I recently had to go to the soc. sec. office and chatted with the lady working the counter. She said the same thing. Some people are immediately hostile, and after a while one begins to give them what they want.

I almost always say hello, ask how the person is doing, and try to be nice. I think projecting sincere niceness/kindness/whatever vs. meanness/dislike/negativity is what is picked-up rather than detecting racism.

I guess I’m basically agreeing with XJETGIRLX on this.

8

In New York City gentrification is highly resented by the people who are being “gentrified away”, I live in one of those communities and we white people ARE considered prey by a certain number of people that were in the community longer than we were. You can definitely sense when this feeling comes up.

The thing is gentrification is a VERY REAL problem here, slumlords will do horrible things to their previous tenants to get them out. They will start to refurbish the place, but in the process of the refurbishing they will make occupation almost untenable for the current tenants. I lived on a street where the same landlord owned all four tenements in a row, and the one I lived in was known as “the white building”. That neighborhood is now successfully gentrified, whereas it wasn’t when I first lived there over 5 years ago. Conversely some of the people there were HAPPY to see white people moving in because it meant that the neighborhood became safer, I had people tell me so.

However back to the point, whenever I come across this, I can most definitely tell that I am instantly disliked, and it’s not universal. I walked to my place the other day, and a black guy was standing on my stoop, I looked him up and down and decided he wasn’t threatening, and ended up talking to him. He was locked out of his place and there was no pay phone anywhere. Because I had already assessed that there was no threat I gave him my cell phone. He was extremely appreciative and we ended up talking for a while about music, he lives upstairs from me. I use this example as a counter-example to the point, that I was also able to tell when he WASN’T a threat.

Also, you can defuse the situation, just as the OP was saying about the middle eastern store propietors matching hte attitude of the customer. On the way home from Manhattan, (to Brooklyn) there was this guy dressed the way people often do when they are very serious about their “blackness” and was saying stuff like “Black is beautiful” etc… he sat down next to me and started talking to this young black guy across from him about how he should protest the war because they were sending brothers and hispanics off to die like they did in Vietnam. To which I pointed out that there is no more conscription. I was expecting some hostility as he wasn’t talking to me and had given me such a vibe, and while he was gruff and dismissed me, there was no hostility in his response. So I don’t think there are hard and fast rules, but I definitely think it is possible to pick up a threatening vibe, and in cross-cultural situations if there is some sort of threat to you, and you are fairly self-aware you can tell what kind of vibe you’re giving off, and therefore you know what the threat is in response to, and oftentimes it’s race related, unfortunately. However, you can get past that and diminish the vibe through communication and treating them appropriately.

Erek