Like Ibanez, I’ve missed out on jobs because of “Equity” or “Affirmative Action” policies and agree it’s complete bullshit. Most of the people in the communications industry are female, in my experience. They’re not a minority or in need of special treatment or anything, IMHO.
There was one particular case - I believe I’ve mentioned it here before - where I know the organisation hired a less qualified female applicant over me because, basically, they already had some white guys working there.
I hesitate to post this because you never know what’s racism versus people just being dicks. When we first moved into our neighborhood in DC 10 years ago, my wife and I were one of the only white families around. The house we bought was really run down and we set about fixing it up. One of the projects was rebuilding the retaining wall around the property which had fallen down.
There was something about that project that really attracted attention; lots of neighbors stopped by to compliment us on the house and say it was looking good, etc.; but other a few neighbors had a problem with it. Kids harassed the workers, the wall was vandalized during construction, and someone filed endless complaints with the city resulting in many, many visits by inspectors to check permits, etc.
Finally it was finished and I wrote the final check to the contractor for the job. That night someone took a hammer to it and broke off chunks of the wall. My neighbor said he had seen a teen kid around the wall and shooed him away (and told me what house he was from), but there wasn’t much to do about it.
It’s a crappy feeling to sense that someone doesn’t like you, not because of anything you did, but just because you exist.
You’d understand them better when you realize that they do understand it, but they simply don’t care.
You didn’t say that, no one is that clever. You THOUGHT it later, after ruminating 
I’m an American living in Japan, so my situation and perspective is a bit different, possibly not what the OP is looking for.
I used to live in the countryside where seeing foreigners was so rare that I often felt like a zoo animal. Old ladies followed me around the store to see what I bought. Groups of kids would exclaim and sometimes follow me around to see if I did anything interesting.
Even now that I live in Tokyo, where seeing non-Japanese is much more common, I’ll get people who pay a bit too much attention to me. Nervous smiles and fear that I’ll speak English are still very common. I still sometimes get followed by police officers for a couple of blocks, probably laboring under the assumption that foreigners are potentially violent criminals. That was more common in the country. I was stopped and (very politely) questioned by police several times there.
There have been many, many instances of Japanese people ignoring me, assuming I can’t speak Japanese. One memorable incident was when I was with a Chinese-Canadian girl (H) who spoke next to no Japanese. I explained things to her in English after the shop owner said anything, I ordered for us, requested add-on items, and the old bat still never made eye contact with me, instead directing every single question or comment to H. Even H said, halfway through the meal, “What the hell? She must know by now that I don’t speak any Japanese. Why does she keep asking me shit?”
Multiple odd encounters with Japanese guys who are inordinately interested in the size of my genitals. I’ve been groped a couple of times — not in a gay bar — by drunk dudes who apparently thought it was okay to just go ahead and check directly if they wanted to know how big my dick was…without even asking (or buying me a drink) first. I joke about it now, but the only time I was in a less comfortable situation than those incidents was when I was the token straight boy at a gay-friendly party in college, and a leather-bear took a shine to me, repeatedly invading my personal space. Shit, at least he gave off body language that was an advance warning.
Worse were the couple of times I was with a Japanese woman and some guy harassed her about me. The first, and most ugly incident, was when I was with a woman who volunteered with a local international society. She was showing me around the matsuri (festival, often held in late summer). A guy at one of the booths asked her where I was from, and I answered — in Japanese — that I was from the US. He, still addressing her, asked something in gutter Japanese that I didn’t get at the time, but now know was, “I’ll bet he’s got a big cock.” Even at the time I understood the second part, “I’ll bet you know all about that.”
The other incident was when I was with my girlfriend, now wife, and a couple of guys ignored me to hit on her. I told them in Japanese to leave and one of them said, “Fuck you” in English. Thank you, Hollywood, for spreading such linguistic joy.
There have been at least a handful of times where Japanese guys were much more aggressive toward me than they would have been to another Japanese. Once, he started acting very apologetic right after I started speaking Japanese. Considering I wasn’t at all nice about it (he rammed right into me because he wasn’t paying any fucking attention) and I said basically, “Hey, be careful! What’s your problem?” it was pretty obvious that he thought he could be a dick as long as I didn’t understand what he said. As soon as he found out that I spoke good Japanese and he couldn’t pull anything, he went back to standard let’s-both-agree-to-apologize behavior.
Another guy almost started an actual fist fight with me when he (again with the not paying attention) walked into me. I was standing upstream of my toddler niece in the crowds at Shinjuku so she didn’t get trampled. The choice between body-checking him or stepping aside so he could trip over her was an easy one. He and his buddy were obviously getting ready to do something when my sister in law (Japanese) stepped around from the other side and the rest of my family caught up. I apologized, and pointed out her daughter. He still looked like he was going to swing but then took another look at my family behind me and backed down, probably realizing that there would be native-Japanese witnesses.
At Kamakura a few years ago the shop lady refused to let me look at some alloy-metal practice swords, saying that she didn’t let customers look unless they were going to buy. She’d just seconds earlier finished letting a Japanese guy examine several, and even take one completely out of its sheath and give it a test cut, and he left empty-handed.
I’ve had several instances where someone insisted that they didn’t speak English (in Japanese, usually after I’d already addressed them in Japanese) or apologized in advance for the fact that they didn’t serve Western food (this is a sushi shop, dude, I think I know what I’m getting into) but she is the one person I remember who just flat lied to my damn face. I politely said, “Thank you anyway” in Japanese and left with my girlfriend, but if there was anyone who ever deserved a “fuck you” more, I haven’t met them yet.
I have a few South American friends who were turned away by landlords when looking for apartments, but I’ve never had that happen to me personally.
Yeah, I think I’ll stop here before it gets any longer or more depressing.
Personally experienced: I was marching in support of same-sex marriage, holding a sign and wearing rainbows, and an onlooker screamed “Burn in hell! You’re going to burn in hell!”
Witnessed: My class went on an excursion to a nature discovery centre, where an Aboriginal guide took us on a bush walk and taught us to make a tool by gluing a sharp edged rock to a stick with tree sap. Afterwards, while we were waiting for the bus to take us home, one guy held up one of the tools and said “It’s an Abo sex toy - stick it up her vagina, and if it comes out chewed, there’s another little monkey on the way.”
One of my home economics teachers in high school had two kids who went to school there. They were both wheelchair users. While I was heading to class one day, I overheard a girl I didn’t know saying to her friend “It’s a shame Mrs X has retards for sons.”
I was more upset about the incidents I witnessed than the one that was directed at me. I mean, I was participating in a protest - marriage equality shouldn’t be controversial, but it is, I knew we were gonna attract attention. And “you’re going to burn in hell” isn’t that hurtful to me; I’m a Christian, and I’m confident that I know more about my relationship with God than some idiot who likes to yell hate at strangers. But the breathtakingly crude racist comment was inspired by a man who’d done nothing but try to teach us, and the “retard” comment was about my best friend, who’d done nothing but exist as a wheelchair user while being one of the smartest people I know. I feel bad that I didn’t confront either of those people, but I was really shy at that age and too shocked to come up with anything to say.
Some anti-abortion cretins come flat out and say “Gay parenting is child abuse.” WTF?
And an anti-abortion protestor telling two little girls going into the clinic with their parents “Children are murdered in there.”
I would have to go back just slightly more than 10 years, maybe 15. My city used to have a well deserved reputation for having a racist police force. The feds stepped in and cleaned it up. On many occassions I heard poilce calling young black men racist slurs and taunting them to react. Driving while black in my city was a very common violation. Much better these days. I should have added this was in a coastal city of Southern Ca.
My friend lives in a small rural town in Japan and ended up being advised by the police to move to a different apartment complex if possible, because he kept getting death threats from several other people living there for being a foreigner. So much that the police couldn’t reasonably guarantee his safety because of the sheer volume and regularity of the threats. He even came home several times to threats graffiti’d on his door.
It was kind of weird, the whole kerfluffle seems to have resulted from a bad breakup or something. As far as we could understand from the initial notes (they weren’t horrifically coherent even to fluent speakers), some guy’s girlfriend was cheating on him, and he decided that my friend was the one she was cheating with (because of his giant gaijin genitals), even though he didn’t even know who they were talking about. Then the guy started a witch hunt about how bad a person he was that every other tenant jumped in on because… because.
The town itself isn’t too bad, and while he complains about getting low-key casual racist stuff now and then, the really bad scary stuff seems to have mostly been that specific apartment complex. He doesn’t seem to have gotten much trouble since he moved to another complex in the same town, other than getting harangued by the Japanese Communist Party activists every now and then.
Neighbors pointing their “Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman” lawn signs toward our front door.
If you don’t mind me asking, where do you live? I certainly intellectually know of the existence of anti-Roma prejudice, but I’ve never heard of it in the USA. Not due to saintliness on our part, of course, simply due to unfamiliarity. I don’t know what percentage of Americans would recognize someone as Roma purely from their appearance, but I wouldn’t think it was very high. Or are there parts of the country with a much high population, and thus more familiarity and more prejudice?
I don’t live in Japan, never have, can’t imagine any set of circumstances under which I will, but. . .
Here’s my (utterly trivial) story about Japan.
Years ago, I was staying in Sendai, visiting Japanese friends. We took a day trip out of town, somewhere north (maybe, can’t really remember) of the city. My friends were looking for an onsen, a natural hot spring bath. We were turned away at two. I assumed that it was because I am not Asian, but my Japanese friends explained that it was because I have many visible tattoos, and this is a big no-no in Japanese culture. We were admitted to the third onsen we tried, and my Japanese friends explained to me that I was actually getting a big break – that the bath owners would not have admitted a Japanese person with tattoos, but were cutting me slack because I wasn’t Japanese.
Otherwise, my visits to Japan (only two) were free of any unpleasant incidents.
**ZPG **thinks that a man shaking hands with a woman is anti-Roma prejudice and is akin to rape, so if I were you, I’d take any of her statements about anti-Roma prejudice with a very large grain of salt.
Couple of interesting ancedotes:
When I lived on Miami Beach, me and my white GF (I’m Creek-Cherokee/pass for white) moved into a Latin neighborhood. We were the only white people there. Our apartment got broken into once, but I learned from someone that everyone thought I was a cop. I think it was because of my Indian tags. (Also half the time I got parking tickets ‘foreign’ was written on the ticket because apparently no one understood what it was)
Also, when I got a job at a restaurant, I noticed one day all the white male waiters were very friendly to me. (No, they weren’t gay). They would make a habit of coming up and just generally hanging out with me and each other…and I couldn’t figure it out until I realized it was because they were a minority on Miami Beach.
Witnessed: Shortly after President Obama got elected, I saw a white male customer at my store get into an argument with a black female coworker of mine.
In his frustration, the customer said, “Just because you people got a president elected–”
I didn’t even like my coworker, but I’m very pleased that BOTH of us put the kibosh on that. “You can cut that out right now.”
Totally lucky. There’s a former American (he took Japanese citizenship) who has made a name for himself as a rights advocate / muckraker. One of the first things he was involved in that hit big was an onsen in Otaru that was discriminating against foreigners. He wrote about an incident last year where a Maori scholar was denied entry to an onsen because of her traditional tattoos.
I feel your pain. Crackers and chowder upset me too.
Got let go from a teaching job because I’m gay and (as my boss stated, unfortunately not in writing) “all lesbians are pedophiles.”
Got reported to social services regarding my daughter because of my “lifestyle.” That was the entire complaint and the case was closed immediately after meeting me and my daughter at home and realising that there were no problems in the slightest.
The complainant was my daughter’s school. There really was nothing wrong with my “lifestyle” for them to complain about - they didn’t know anything about my life apart from my daughter turning up to school on time, clean, happy, etc.
I changed my job and her school, FTR.
I am a white, female engineer. Most of the time, I don’t feel like I am treated differently. I encountered a little bit of sexism in college with some of my professors but we all knew they were assholes. I mostly didn’t let it get to me because I still passed the classes on my own merits. My first job was a lot harder to just shrug off. My boss and “mentor” did not like me. I was never really sure if it was because I am a girl or that he genuinely felt I was not good at my job, but a lot of people felt it was the former. To be fair, the job long term would not have been a good fit and I was trying to leave the program. But he did expect me to work hundreds or hours and felt that every moment I spent not saying yes to everything or begging for work was a moment wasted. He mostly ignored me until it was time for evaluations. It didn’t go well.
I found a new job where I am doing much better. The worst I have had to put up with are people in the plants calling me honey or sweetheart. That grinds my gears a little but the industry as a whole has been slow to adopt women in their ranks.
My now-wife and I (she’s white, I’m of [East] Indian descent) were basically shut out of holding our wedding at a local-ish country club. We’re 99% sure it was because we were miscegenating. There was no overt “we don’t take kindly to darkies heyah” stuff, but the lady told us they didn’t have anything available for us without even looking at their booking records (or asking when we planned to have the ceremony.)
My dad (an Indian then living in the UK) was told to go home and had bricks thrown at him when he was a young doctor in Liverpool. This was in the early seventies. One woman even asked what he thought he was doing there after he replaced her hip.