A few years ago (Wow. Five years, actually. Has it really been that long?!), my father became extremely ill. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that he needed many units of blood. Now, my heritage is of the backwater variety and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about your standard downhome folk is that they’ll come together in a crisis. So, when my father fell ill, even though his father was too old to make the trip, he found someone to bring him to the hospital. Anyway, the point of all this is that not only did he throw a few disparaging remarks at the Vietnamese heart surgeon that saved my dad’s life, he also, rather loudly, hoped that they didn’t “put any nigger blood” in his boy.:eek: Embarassed is not strong enough of a word. I was completely mortified. Now, okay, my dad was pretty well whacked out of his mind on morphine and sedatives for the next couple weeks, and, for a couple of weeks after that, saddled with a ventilator. However, one of the first things that he wondered about upon being able to speak, for the first time in a month, was if he got any “colored blood.” I believe I spoke up this time (Shock has blurred my memory, I think), and he quickly made some explanation that he was grateful and wasn’t actually worried about it, but the fact that he even wondered! I mean, !!! I think he even went on to say that now he can eat “soul food” and “talk jive” (We won’t worry about how outdated my dad’s slang is, because that’s neither here nor there). What the FUCK?! I guess I can just be happy that I didn’t actually inherit that kind of silliness. Thank the gods for Sesame Street.
Well, what did you do? Hopefully it involved the manufacturing equipment in some way.
My dad was looking thru some detergents in the supermarket, comparing qualities and all that stuff (yes, he’s obsessed with clothing cleaning). An old man is also looking at detergents and asks him what is he doing. Dad replies: “Looking for a good detergent.” Old man says: “Yea, but we don’t need the strong stuff, we don’t stink as much as blacks.” Dad replied with something about how he wouldn’t talk or think like that because he doesn’t know where his ancestors lie…ie, if you are gonna blast against others, you should make sure you don’t have those others as your ancestors, else you are condemning yourself!
Actually, dad knows where his ancestors are 
. I think dad met the guy when he(dad) had just cut his curly hair, otherwise the man shouldn’t have said that to him.
This reminds me of a pretty good MASH episode (although in the later preachy years) where a patient at the hospital says the same sort of thing before his surgery. The doctors put brown shoe polish on all his exposed extremities and were playing with his head, always giving him fried chicken to eat, etc.
I am pretty fortunate in that there are no overt racists in my family. I still sorta cringe though when my father says that his small town in Kansas didn’t have any racism, so long as the blacks knew their place and didn’t try to date the white girls. Ummm. Okay.