A funny one we’re currently laughing about.
Very Scandinavian daughter cooks for two doctors and their family. The husband and wife both have their origins in India. Recently they gave a large party and invited all East Indian friends and colleagues.
Daughter prepared and set out the buffet and then lingered behind the scene to keep the dishes filled. At one point in the evening she heard several of the women guests talking to the hostess about what a good cook she was, and she’s so clean!
One of my idiot neighbors showed up at the school bus stop the first time Obama was elected to ask if he would now hire Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
(Having taken Drivers Ed in Georgia, I was taught that when you had an accident you called the police and waited on them to do their thing before leaving the scene. It was this concept that started all this…)
My wife and I are in Knoxville, TN, when we get rear-ended. Get out, look at the damage, not a big deal but it’s still an accident and has to be reported, right?
The woman who hits us gets back in her car and acts to drive away. I stop her and say “You can’t leave, we have to report this. My wife has already called the police and they are on their way.”
Well, she blew up at me. Called me a fuckin’ racist, said I didn’t like people like her (she was apparently from somewhere in the middle-east/india… never really got where) and that, as a doctor’s wife, she didn’t need to put up with this crap, etc. The cop arrives, an African-American which made him, in her eyes, the perfect confidant to share her tales of being oppressed by that racist whitey who wouldn’t even let her leave and was now trying to get her arrested.
Anyway, the cop does what he has to do, issues her a citation for following too closely (which meant that he, too, was a racist), and we all leave.
And if that was that, I probably wouldn’t even remember this story, much less be writing it today, about 10 years later, because I don’t like wasting brain cells remembering useless shit.
But, 2 hours later, her husband called me at my home number to make the same accusations.
Needless to say, that’s when I got upset. He and I started screaming at each other, with the conversation ending like this:
“I don’t understand! I’m a Christian, as is my wife! Why do you treat fellow Christians this way?”
“Sir, what the hell does being a Christian have to do with anything?”
“We came to this country to try to integrate. We became Christians in 1973.”
“So? What does that have to do with anything? I’m not even a Christian.”
“… You’re not?”
“No. But here’s the thing - you assumed, merely because I’m white, that I’m a Christian. Therefore, you are just as guilty of the same sort of racist thinking that you are accusing me of. So get the goddamned hell off my phone and never call me back.”
Well, he called me back. This time to apologize and, get this, he even listened to my explanation (above). We ended the call civilly, which is more than they deserved.
Or the opposite. I was accused by many liberals of being a racist when Obama ran because I didn’t think he would make a good President.
Personal, as in, directed at me? Several years ago some guy called me “cracker”. I was like, oh snap! You got me dude, I’m a white guy! It sure sucks.
That’s all I’ve got.
I was sexually assaulted by a man who told me he owned all women. I was raped by a man who told me that I couldn’t turn him down.
I suppose that was the worst. But the most mundane, daily sexist stuff is when I am informed by random people of my nature. It’s weird that while it’s not ok to tell Jewish people that they should naturally be good with money, it’s still totally ok to tell women that they should naturally like shopping and babies. What bothers me more than that, is that when I try to tell perfectly decent people they will come up with endless excuses for why people say these things, rather than just say: “yep, sexist shite!” It hurts me more that good people try to deny my experiences than that shitty people are sexist.
The most recent? Probably the diversity training I took at work. While the intent is to dispel generalizations (I think), they go about it by making us learn and repeat broad generalizations about age, racial and sexual groups. “Don’t tell a black woman what to do”, “Don’t expect young people to pay attention like old people”, “Women have to be talked to like this while it’s OK to talk to men like that.”
It was a very stange class. We even got a list of the generations (Boomers, Millinials, Xers, Yers and, my favorite, the Greatest Generation) and the broad expectations we should have for each.
Not defending this practice, as it may well be used as an excuse for bigotry at least sometimes, but the original reason for not allowing people with tattoos is that in Japanese culture that typically meant the person was Yakuza (gangster) or associated with them. Once you allow those types in your onsen, other customers won’t come. Then, some of the onsen owners will say that if they make exceptions for foreigners it makes it harder to hold the line on the original policy. I don’t know how much of a problem this really is for onsen owners, I don’t have tattoos and have never had a problem.
What’s fun are those places that have women staff in the men’s locker room, cleaning up and stuff. I guess that’s sexism, since maybe men wouldn’t want to do those kinds of jobs or something. You also see women cleaning up in men’s restrooms while they are in use, in various places not just at onsen.
I used to get shit from African-American students in college, telling me I wasn’t Hispanic cuz I couldn’t even speak Spanish. For some reason they didn’t like it when I asked them if they spoke Afrikaans. Nothing big though.
One time, me and a (white) friend were standing in line at a local grocery store getting some gaming snacks on a Sunday morning. In front of us being checked out (by a black person) was a man and his young son. At one point, a large group of black people came into the store all at once, dressed like they had just come from church. As they walked past the registers, the little kid suddenly says out loud ‘Where did all these niggers come from daddy?’. I dont know what happened next cuz we put our stuff down and walked the hell out of there as quickly and nonchalantly as we could.
Today I saw a white transit cop hassling a black passenger who was obviously middle-class, middle-aged, wearing a stainless white tracksuit, not remotely homeless-looking. The guy was dozing off listening to his iPod and the cop banged his seat and said “Are you awake, are you OK?” startling the poor guy half to death.
Yes, we have a problem with vagrants on the train. Their smell easily gives them away. And even smelly people have a right to sleep on the train as long as they don’t threaten or panhandle.
Was attacked in a class when I was a student in College about seven years ago… Had a student stand up and scream in my face that I was a faggot in front of several students and a Gay teacher…
Went to the administrators, went to the “Equity” Center and no one wanted to deal with it… I had straight witnesses from the class come with me to try to get someone to do something, but finally realized no one was going to do anything. I felt unsafe at the school from that point on, and withdrew a short time later.
Ironically, as far as I know the homophobe who stood up and attacked me graduated…
Texas. It’s been my experience that when certain groups in the population (the same groups that don’t like the blacks, Hispanics, Jews, or anyone else not like them) become aware of Roma in their part of the country, their prejudices surfaces. Anti-Roma sentiment is lower in the United States because many Roma in this country maintain a lower profile similar to the way less religiously stringent Jews have used to assimilated. On a professional level prejudice becomes a problem with traditional white power structure bigots, immigrants from parts of Europe with heavy anti-Roma sentiment (those were the jerk professors who were so certain I was stealing rare books from the library’s collection and selling them, yeah, it’s a minor thing, but it’s very insulting), and other minorities (there’s some turf wars of whose had it the worse and what each group is entitled and not entitled to constantly being fought).
I used to have to deal with the pretending-to-be-subtle racism, but since moving to the Midwest, it’s become not infrequent and blatant. I’m really not sure why I live here.
Personally I have not been discriminated openly in any way, whether dating, employment, etc. I have not had anyone verbally or physically hurt me or say anything awful regarding my perceived or real ethnicity.
I am a white male, I have an english accent. I live in Winnipeg, Canada.
Canadians of all ethnic origins think its perfectly OK to mimic my accent. After 15 years it is becoming a little irritating.
We were dropped as friends by a jewish family when they found out we were not jewish. We lived in a predominantly jewish area, and have a last name that could be jewish.
In texas back in the 70’s I was frequently called a “Limey”.
Pretty tame compared to some.
Ok, being South Asian myself, I would venture that this is a misunderstanding. They were not talking about your daughters personal hygiene, but rather how tidy she was in the kitchen, that is she did not leave a mess. I have heard that about cooks many times so that.
Yeah, I know the traditional excuse, but it ranks right up there in credibility with “lefties have an advantage in using a shinai right-handed in kendo, so just do it the same way as everyone else”*. It’s bullshit.
Just like co-ed bathhouses, casual public nudity, and the regulation of prostitution, tattoos were legislated against and stigmatized in the Meiji Era mostly due to fear about negative perceptions of Japan by outsiders. The Yakuza connection is of recent coinage, and is pretty weak. There are quite a few normal people in Japan who have gotten tattooed in the last couple of generations, despite the marginalization. Like most social changes, Japan is at least 1–2 generations behind other industrialized nations. Look for a tattoo boom in Japan — similar to the one that happened in the ‘90s in the US — in another 20 years or so. (Tramp-stamps and pleated skirts for everyone!)
You punished the store because of the actions of a customers child?
*One time my niece at age five or so screamed that she didn’t want a Snickers bar, she wanted a nigger bar in a store.
The adults were embarrassed as hell, and no one ever figured out where the fuck that came from.
What is Roma? Romanian? Are they considered different than other eastern Europeans?
Roma = Romani. You might know them as gypsies, though that term is no longer in favor. They’re discriminated against with a capital D more or less everywhere. Perhaps less so in the US since nobody really knows who they are.