Maybe he should have tried the White Album.
Wow – I remember you sharing this anecdote the first year I joined the SD.
Time flies.
But it was actually the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity. 
Hohum. First world jibes at anything third world can be much worst. And a lot of those given above aren’t racist at all, though they might mention a certain race.
No message.
Cree el ladrón que todos son de su condición; a thief believes everybody is also one. Used as advice that if someone’s default mindset is to think ill of others… he’s giving you warning. And of course, for those more obvious ones you mention.
There were four walking mummies in the supermarket yesterday who kept bumping each other up on the subject that there is no need to have laws against rape and sexual assault, because according to them “someone rapes your little girl, you just beat the crap out of him”. They didn’t even notice the Silence of Doom that formed around them.
On time at a card table, someone broke one of the informal rules of the table and the guy next to him got mad and said “you just cost me $200, why don’t you go back to your country?” to the Latino guy. I was dumbfounded and didn’t say anything because I thought they might have known each other.
Another reason I didn’t say anything: this was in Miami. The remark, in context, was hilarious.
I’ll balance that with an incident where it was right to not say anything: another time, a player was ranting about Obama, and at some point in his rant, pointed at the only black guy at the table and said “YOUR guy did that!” I was taken aback at this again but said nothing, only to see more clearly later on that the black guy was wearing an Obama cap :smack:
I went from Northern VA to Austin TX for a job interview with EA (Electronic Arts). As part of the terms of agreeing to the interview, I asked that they fly me in early so that I could check out Austin and be sure I wanted to move there. This included looking at barns where I could keep my horse.
The first barn I went to, when I left and told them I was heading to barn B, said “that place always looks great because they have lots of Mexicans”. The third barn I went to, the owner told me that I would want to live on the west side of Austin because “All of the Blacks and Mexicans live on the east side”
My main thoughts included: “WTF. I am a complete stranger!” and “At least in Texas most of the Hispanic folks are actually Mexican”.
Those two conversations were definitely part of the reason I turned down the job. I went into the interview after 2 days of wandering around non-tourist Austin and thought that “I had better LOVE the job if I am going to relocate here” and while I thought the job sounded pretty cool, it wasn’t cool enough to pick up my entire life and move to Texas.
You tell us, Livingstone.
Yeah, it actually doesn’t seem to be as bad now. At least I haven’t had anyone assume I’m a racist white guy lately 
Fifty some posts later and i’m still wondering how overwhelmingly racist you’d have to be to call the Beatles “jungle music”.
Reminds me of my fundie pastor railing against “Satanic Rock and Roll!” (right in my face, I guess he grabbed the first “youngster” he could find after the service), and he rears back and says “As practiced by bands like the Eagles!” I started laughing, covered that by a coughing fit, and had to leave before I started mocking him: “The Eagles? What about Megadeth?” And quoting lyrics from the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s (this was 1982).
And the corollary is that people who look for racism find it everywhere at all times. It must be exhausting to find/notice/imagine/construct racism all day, every day.
Are you saying that this is what happened in the OP, or are you “just saying”?
There’s a chance he wasn’t being racist at all when he referred to The Beatles as “jungle music”.
Likewise, there’s a chance that when someone I knew a few years back pointed at some young African-American women across the street and referred to them as “jungle bunnies”, it was because he had met them before at a Rwandan Playboy Club.
A little of both. The Beatles are the most famous musical act of the last century, and everyone knows they are all white. How could it possibly be racist to refer to “jungle music” in reference to the Beatles?
OK, perhaps the other guy didn’t recognize that the music was the Beatles. I’m hard-pressed to think of many songs by the Beatles that sound like what most would consider to be traditional black music - R&B, gospel, funk, hip-hop, etc. It seems more like a comment that would have been made 50 years ago about rock music in general, in a completely non-racist way, BTW. My thought in the OP’s situation would be to think about the other guy being a fuddy-duddy, hopelessly old-fashioned or nuts… but not racist.
But in a more general sense, it is my observation that some people go out of their way to look for racism, and analyze every comment and situation through that prism.
Rubber Soul. 
I’ve mentioned this on the board before, but I witnessed a driver hit another car in a parking lot. Managed to memorize the license plate and report it. In a later conversation with a responding police officer, he informed me that they’d tracked down the driver and matched up broken glass from the scene with the broken headlight on her car. He said that she’d claimed she’d hit a tree. I said, “Wow, so she just straight up lied to your face about it, even with the evidence there in front of her?” The officer, who was white, responded, “Oh, she’s just being Asian.”
I was dumbfounded:
a) he would say that at all to a relative stranger, and
b) he wouldn’t realize that I’d immediately wonder what he considers “just being black.”
You really find those two examples to be equivalent?
It surprises me too. I don’t think it’s an obscure term.