When I was attending High school I got a lot of Indian/Pakistani slurs thrown at me, which was strange to say the least since I am a Black African from Eritrea who looks/speaks like any-other African Canadian. Since they knew I was foreign I guess that was enough.
Also once, my brother was playing with this 12-year-old down the street (he was a troubled white kid), and they got into a fight. About two hours later the kid down the street had scratched the word “NIGGER” in metre high letters on the front of our house. We washed it off and had a little talk with his mother (we always felt sorry for her, she was a working single mom and her kid was an ass).
Growing up “white” (as others see me, I self-ID as Jewish most of the time) in a “black” (actually mostly West-Indian) neighborhood I got my share of crap. I had sticks and stones (and words) thrown at me a number of times.
After I moved out of my parents’ house I got an appartment in the next neighborhood over, which is even more predominantly black. It’s a lower-income neighborhood (so I can afford to live there) and it used to be fairly dangerous, but it’s gotten much better in recent years. On moving in, I was concerned that my family would worry about my safety so I was talking up how much better it’s gotten and how there’s plenty of young professionals of all colors moving in for the low rents. As we’re driving over with my stuff, a little girl on a bike pulls up next to our mini-van points her finger right at me and yells “Look, white people!”
In college I was in a “culturally Jewish” fraternity. One year we were rushing this guy (trying to get him to join our house) and we were in close competition with another house. We thought we were going to lose him when all of a sudden he called us up and said he wanted to come and stay with us. Why? Because the idiots at the other house were telling him a story about how they “jewed [someone] down.”
I’m Jewish and I look Jewish. I grew up in West Los Angeles which has a large Jewish population. I’ve had many, many racial slurs thrown at me, especially when I was a kid.
I really don’t feel like going through all of them. I probably don’t remember all of them. One of the first times was when I was around 11 years old. I was standing in front of my synagogue before the start of Hebrew School. I lady in her 50’s or 60’s walked in front of my with her large dog. The dog made a lunge at me and I told her (admittedly a bit rudely perhaps) to be careful. She said, “you just stay out of the way, you stupid Jew.” An adult to a 11 year old little boy!
Thanks for the tip. I’ll remember that…if I ever become a backpacker. I’m actually living in Japan, and I think my kids would kill me if I wore my Akubra everywhere (if they didn’t die of embarrassment first).
The same night my family and I moved into “the projects” (I can say that, I lived there), we had rocks and bricks thrown at our door by the black teenagers who lived there. Cops were called, and couldn’t do anything if we didnt know who it was. This continued for 6 or 7 years,escalating to things like slashed tires and broken windows. It seeped into everyday life at school, my dad was the “prejudiced racist”. WTF??? We knew nobody when we moved in, but we were being racist? By calling the cops? Being scared? Jesus, it was horrible.
And just to throw in a bit of comic relief…
Once on a crowded train platform I was called “nigger” by a black woman who apparently thought I had unnecessarily violated her personal space.
I’m white. Really white.
Gook might also come from Cantonese, where country is pronounced “gwok” or something like that.
My father was a WW2 pacific theater and Korean War combat vet. He doesn’t remember when he started using gook, which would maybe provide an indication if it’s from the cantonese or korean. That doesn’t excuse his word usage, but does explain it.
Growing up, my father used the word gook for all asians. Now, if he knew someone was Chinese, then it became chink or chinaman, and Japanese were nips or japs. He never used these words to someone’s face, and had some pretty good friends who were Chinese and Japanese in the US.
rjung, gweiloh has become such a common word in HK, most people just use it unconciously. But glad to hear you’re not using it at home. Black devil (hak kwei) is one I’ve heard in the US and HK. Although a lot of my canto friends made a point to say they were raised in the US to say Black Person (hak yan).
I rarely hear stuff here in China. Laowai (which is an honorific term for foreigner) is the standard term or waiguoren (foreigner). Rarely hear a slur towards white people. Japanese on the other hand, get quite a bit, especially in the dialects.
I grew up in what amounts to a reserve, and now live in a city with a large population of First Nations. I think it’s very close to an even split at the moment. We have a sprinkling of other minorities, chiefly East Indian and Korean.
I’ve been called “white bitch” more times than I care to think of, usually when I don’t give out cigarettes or change on demand. Well, and by losers at parties when I wouldn’t go home with them. I’ve also been called a racist myself a few times under those conditions. Newsflash: I’m prejudiced against you because you’re an asshole, not because you’re any particular colour.
Little blonde-haired blue-eyed me also happens to be part Salish. (Attention: First Nations Assimilation of the White Man Program - There are some serious flaws in the practical applications of this theory you may wish to consider… )
I have never knowingly used a racial slur to offend anyone. Lotsa other slurs, possibly even slander, but no racial insults. My parents trained me right.
Actually, that reminds me.
When I was a kid growing up, my parents forbade me from speaking pidgin, as it was racist and insulting to the First Nations. So the kids wouldn’t play with me anymore because I was “too stuck up to talk good”.
The year the American hostages were taken in Iran, I was in the 6th grade. One day on the bus ride home, some meathead 8th graders started harassing me for being Iranian. I don’t have an ounce of Semitic or Persian blood in me! (I have Italian features). I was mature enough to see the humor in it all, but that experience conjures up sympathy in me for people who are made fun of for their actual race.
That just made me think of something. I had a job delivering papers around that time, and one of my customers (a nice old guy who kept bees and used to give me jars of honey) asked me, “What do you think of the Ayatollah?” Like a good American, I said that I didn’t like him. Later he asked me if I was “that Eye-talian woman’s son” and I said yes. Perhaps that eased his concern.
I’m a straight white Christian male American, so the only people who hate me are too politically correct to say so.
Ironically however, despite being born and raised a Roman Catholic, I’ve been mistaken as being Jewish on a few occasions. The funniest time was when an inmate was complaining about me as “that Jew sergeant” to another sergeant who was actually Jewish.
In college, I worked at the front desk of one of the nicer hotels in Daytona Beach. In the winter, we would get the “winter guests”, old folks who spent 2 or 3 months at our hotel every winter. Most of them were exactly like your stereotypical old Jewish people from New York/New Jersey who winter in Florida. Anyway, they were constantly calling me a Nazi and things like that. If there was any little problem or something they didn’t like, then suddenly I was an anti-Semite and they would bring up the Holocaust so the world now owes them and so on. Getting compared to Hitler on a daily basis gets old after awhile, so it didn’t really bother me.
Oh, and there was a time at an Asian market where I went to check out my items, and the register was in the exact center of a long counter. There was nobody in line and no indication of which side of the register to put your stuff, so I arbitrarily picked one side. The woman at the register angrily told me “line starts HERE, round eyes”, pointing to the other side of the register, and wouldn’t check me out until I moved my stuff. I’m still not sure if that was racist, but I know I get better treatment at that market when I’m with my wife (who is Chinese), than when I’m by myself.
I grew up in a small town in Illinois in the seventies. When my mother started dating my stepfather (she’s white and he’s black), people used to stare and make comments. When I was six, I was told by a neighbor that if my mother and father (that’s what I call him. He’s been my father since I was four and more of a father to me that my biodonor was) had babies, they would “be spear chuckers too.” Lovely sentiment, isn’t it? :rolleyes:
I’ve got a question: I’ve been referred to as a “pagin” (or perhaps bhei-gin - I don’t know how to properly spell the term) by Koreans many times. From context, this seems to be a racial term for “white person.” Does anyone know if this is a derogatory term or not? I’m not sure myself.
Aside from that, I had an odd experience in St. James Park in San Jose one day when I said “excuse me” to an African-American woman as I passed her on the path. Another African-American woman said: “Those white niggers are so polite.” I never figured out whether she was being sarcastic or not.
I’ve also been called a gweiloh in Hong Kong, but at the time I was blissfully unaware of its meaning.
wevet: I think the closest would be “bek-in” or something along that line. Anywhoo, it’s not an derogatory or racist term. It simply means “white person” and has no positive or negative connotations to it.
I grew up in an apartment complex that had lots of kids from all kinds of different backgrounds. I grew up next to people of all races, and always had friends of many different races and ethnic groups.
So it was pretty shocking when one day, around fifth grade, a black girl my age walked up and started hitting and kicking me. I’d never been in a fight before, so I just curled up and waited until she stopped and went away.
Later I went up and asked her why she did that. She said that it was because I was white and probably stuck up. I told her that I wasn’t stuck up and that I was a pretty nice girl. She agreed, and said she hadn’t realized that white girls could be nice.
I don’t know what you were called, but if you didn’t know, “Euro Trash” isn’t a slur against Europeans in general. It’s an American term for the European equivilent of the American “yuppie” (young, urban professional). Typically seen as having “too much money for their own good”, driving a luxury car, listening to Euro-pop, that kinda thing. Less a damning slur than a winking “those wacky Euro-trash types!” kinda thing, FWIW.
I’m actually living in Japan, and I think my kids would kill me if I wore my Akubra everywhere (if they didn’t die of embarrassment first).
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