Oh, that's always been true. Racism has been a huge help to the 1%ers, because it directs the anger of working-class whites onto something other than the elite class. Without racism, poor white Southern laborers would never have fought to support a system that kept them competing with slave labor. For a long while, racism stymied efforts to unionize workers. Today, you can see how much disproportionate anger the AM radio crowd has toward food-stamps and illegal immigrants. The elites have got the derpers convinced that it's those mooching brown people who are keeping them down, that's what they think the root cause of their problems is.

I don't know how many times I've applied for a job and one of the first questions asked is if I am aboriginal. Yay Canada.

[ x ] yes these are the abs I was born with

Drinking with my rugby team mates back in the UK. Somehow end up talking about racism in earshot of my Polish friend, Adam. I make the not very funny semi ironic joke of "don't ask Adam, all Polish people are super racist" ( bare with me, that's not the story)

He then goes into a rant of

"That's true! Before I came here, I only ever saw one black person, and we chased him, beat him up, stripped him naked and put him in a bin"

Crickets and incredulous looks all around. I point out to him that three of our teammates (thankfully not there at this point) are black.

"Ah, that's different. Blacks here is fine, just not in my country"

Experience it all the time at my job.

Just today, a client learned she was getting a new full time behavioral assistant named Secret assigned to her kid.

Client: "Oh great, just what I need, someone working with my son who has 8" nails and will call in sick all the time!"

Says this with an, "Amirite!?" attitude.

Me: "Well, tough to say how she will be, not a whole lot of info to go on..."

She then gets straight faced and goes on a, "Oh, it's not that I'm racist, it's just..." shpeal.

That's because a lot of jobs in Canada have affirmative action employment policies for aboriginals.

And here she thought she was safe to say it..LOL

Granted, based on this it might be safe to say what color you aren't.

The backpedals are amusing to watch though when this happens.

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If I heard the name Secret outside of the racism thread I'd assume white hippy chick.

i'm not even sure I've ever heard a stripper named Secret, much less anyone else.

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Not racist but homophobic behavior I have seen. A mom was kicked out of a youth wrestling tournament for calling a referee butt pirate. Also an 11 year old was thrown out of a little league game for calling the opposing pitcher(on his way to first after being beaned) an english cigarette.

Got a few. I'm asian (korean). I see it from all sides. It's very strange because black people will tell me how they really feel about white people, and vice versa. I literally get told every perspective. It's kinda funny. I'll try to make them quick.

#1 My wife (Chinese) has a best friend who's white. She moves into a nice area in Pennsylvania. Neighbor comes over and introduces herself and says "I'm so happy a nice white family finally moved in, all we've seen lately are ****** and indian people move into this neighborhood". Lol. She told her her best friend was a "*****" and to never come over to her house again.

#2 My wife works in the food industry, and their manufacturing plants are in rural areas. At one company she worked out their plant was outside Mobile Alabama (lol). Her boss told her a story once about what happened to him when he visited the plant. Keep in mind her old boss was a 6'6 black guy who probably weighed 260 lbs and looked like he could crush your head with 1 hand. He goes down south, rents a sports car or something, and he of course gets pulled over by one of the local cops while driving to the plant that morning from his hotel. Cop pulls him over and asks him for ID and all and checks it. Comes back to the car and says "Boy, I better not see you after sundown in this town". When I heard the story I laughed and asked my wife if her boss told the cop to go **** himself? She got serious and told me she said the same thing to her boss, but her boss said "Actually no. I took my license back and said 'yes sir, I won't be here after dark'". He then said he turned the car around, went to the hotel, packed and was on the next flight back to Philadelphia. He told HIS boss the story and everyone profusely apologized and said he'd never have to go there again.

#3 This one is pretty weird. Was in a bar trying to get outside to have a smoke. Really packed, but I'm not one to push through the crowd. I try to get past a group of 3 girls, 2 white girls and a really cute asian girl. I'm behind the asian girl trying to get around her but her back is towards me, her friend sees me and says "hey get out of the way this guy is trying to get through". The asian girl turns around, looks at me, and says 'oh whatever he's just some dumb ass asian'. I'm really confused, so I just say 'excuse me?' She then waves her hand at me dismissively and says 'whatever, go back to your third world country or where the **** you are from' and moves towards the bar. Mind you, I was born here, grew up with Italians and Irish kids, and sound like I'm from South Philadelphia. Baffled, I just walk outside and light a cigarette. After 2 puffs, I throw it away, walk right back into the bar and fight my way through the crowd to tap her on the shoulder. She turns around and I tell her she's and ugly ****ing **** and if she has a boyfriend in the bar right then I'd be happy to go outside with him. She then proceeds to yell at me a bit or whatever and I tell her she's too ugly to have a boyfriend and just walk away towards the back of the bar with my friends. About 2 minutes later a VERY large white guy walks over and a white girl. As he walks over, the entire side of the bar stands up as I had about 15 people with me. He comes up to me and asks me if I have a problem with her friend, I simply explain what she said to me and tell him if he still wants to, we can go outside. He declined. The white girl then profusely apologizes to me for 10 minutes straight, saying she's so embarassed and explaining to me that her friend was actually adopted and she thinks she has some deep sort of self-hatred towards other asians. I wasn't in a very happy mood at that point and just asked her to go away and have a nice night.

I told that story to my wife and her sister, and I've never seen them more angry. lol.

I got plenty more but I'll save them for later. heh.

Three other stories I've been meaning to post. Being white, they're both about racism I have seen towards others.

(1) I have a story where I benefitted from the racism of others that always sticks in my mind as evidence that racism exists and how I inadvertently benefit from it:

In 1993, me and a friend of mine (he's italian) were looking for our first apartment in New York. We were looking in a place called Carroll Gardens Brooklyn which at the time could best be described as "working class mafia". We were looking there because it was cheap at the time and yet the commute wasn't too far from Manhattan. Getting an apartment was (and is) a stressful competitive task in the city. We found this apartment we liked, put in for it and was thrilled and felt lucky when we were told it was ours.

The day we moved in we were met by the landlord, a Ms Genovese (many of you may have heard of the Genovese Crime Family) who gave us our keys.

She told us how thrilled she was that we got the apartment. She let us know that prior to giving it to us she was getting close to her deadline of getting it off the market and if we didn't come along she almost was going to have to rent it to a young black guy! She said something like 'he seemed like a nice kid for a black guy but you know.' She left that hanging because I suppose everyone just knows why renting it to a black guy wasn't something anyone wanted to do. She gave us the keys and left.

I remember we both had our jaws on the floor. I wish I could say that we could have just stormed out of there but we had signed the lease and had our moving vans outside with all our stuff and nowhere to go. But I always remember that we got that great apartment over another young dude simply because we were white.

(2) My last year at Syracuse I was moving into the student apartments on the remote campus area (If I remember correctly it was called South Campus... its been over 20 years...). While moving in two girls came up to us who were the previous occupants of our apartment. They were telling us how great this area was... good parties, friendly people, etc. They said the only bad thing was... there was an apartment that played a lot of loud rap music but it was easy to take care of because if we called the police, they'd take care of it right away because they were a bunch of n*****s and the police understood that.

I don't mean to sound so passive but I legitimately didn't see it coming and really wasn't used to hearing people ever talk like this that I was shocked into silence. The girls took off and I don't believe I said another word to them the rest of the conversation. It was probably only the second time in my life where I'd ever heard anyone talk to anyone like that which, perhaps means that I'd lead a sheltered life or lived in places where that just never happened. I wasn't at all prepared to respond in any way.

(3) Last story was, ironically, at Diversity Training at a company I worked for. Again, I'm used to a pretty progressive crowd and have never had any friends who were racist. So these things always shocked me. I actually was annoyed that we had to go to diversity training because in my mind, everyone seemed pretty cool at our work.

So several groups are waiting in a waiting area drinking coffee and eating donuts before we break off into groups for the day. Some dude starts chatting with me and he says something like, "I can't believe we have to do this training. What's the point?" I'm nodding in agreement thinking its because we all agree that no one has an issue with race, they're preaching to the converted, etc. He then says something like, I don't care what they say here, no one can convince me to hire a black person. As I remember it, I simply said "OH MY GOD" got up and walked away from that dude. He did not end up in my group so I don't know if he voiced his feelings in the workshop.

I think about these kinds of stories all the time (particularly the first one) when people try to say that racism doesn't exist. And the third one as well - while this jerk was not in a hiring position at the time (and I never saw the guy again so I don't know what happened to him) that there were people who out of principle would never hire someone simply because of the color of their skin. Anyone who thinks racism is over is either sheltered, blind or in denial.

I don't think the conservative Supreme Court members are any of those things. Just excessively political opportunists.

I know Rehnquist is no longer in office but I'm referring to his as example to explain why I'm not as optimistic as you:

This is from "Blinded by the Right" by David Brock which I'm reading. I just read this part yesterday so it was easy for me to find:
"As a law clerk, Rehnquist had written a memorandum in 1952 favoring state-supported segregation, and during elections in Arizona in the 1960s he worked in a Republican party effort to harrass minority voters at the poolls."

The book is filled with his testimony about how behind closed doors (and frankly quite often in the open) the right (including their judicial activists they worked to get in place) their goal was to roll back Civil Rights, "feminist advances", etc. He makes it pretty clear that the right was stacking Judges who were quite known and active in what we would call racist agendas.

That's neither sheltered, blind, nor in denial. That's specifically being aware of it and working to further it.

And how do we do this? Is this by speaking up? Is this by denouncing that kind of talk? Or any type of racist comments?

For example, when someone says to me "Well, your parents weren't born here so you aren't as American as I am" that's kind of laughable. It really doesn't bother me, but it bothers a lot of other people because it's implying their value is less than the other persons.

So, when a pretty girl asks me "where I'm from" and she's obviously trying to talk/hit on me, I'm obviously not going to be mad. It's not nearly as offensive as some of the liberal/progressive thinking process is towards those types of questions.

So, how do we deal with this? To the first comment I might get angry or defensive, to the 2nd I might just blow it off. What's the right way to respond? As brought up before, if you're white and a white person bitches about another race, do you respond differently than say, if a black person says something racist to you?

This is a problem, but it's a sensitive problem. My mother is racist. Some of my best friends parents are racist. At what point do you stand up for your beliefs and at what point do you value your relationships enough to put up with some wrong perspectives? How can I ever tell my mother that she should stop saying things and look positively towards a group of people who has occupied and attacked her country for decades?

I worked with a much older guy just a few years ago. He retired within 3 years of me working there. He never really spoke to me and I wondered why. Someone told me he was in Vietnam and been through some rough stuff and held a permanent grudge against all Asians. I understood. I really did. Even though I had absolutely zero to do with that, and in fact my people helped fight against the very people he disliked (Korea rotated 300k troops in Vietnam to help the US against the communists), I accepted his position. What could I have possibly said to this man?

In the end, a few months before he left he started coming over and talking to me quite a bit. He turned out to be a really good guy (which I always had a feeling of), but he just couldn't get past the **** he saw over there, and I was ok with that.

Little comedic relief - my wife's best friend (Syrian) once had some starburst candy. She opened it up and gave all the orange and lemon ones to my wife and kept all the strawberry ones. My wife asked her whats up with that and she said that it's a known fact Asians like orange and lemon and white people like strawberry and cherry.

I've been very wary of eating anything orange flavored in public again.

Also, at my wife's diversity class a black dude said he NEVER ate watermelon in public due to the stereotype. I was kind of baffled by this, but then I remember the starburst thing. lol.

Depends.

It's not easy. There are a few factors involved.

First you have to understand how racist comments are weighted based on who's saying them and who's on the receiving end. Not all racist comments are the same across racial lines. Whites really have no valid complaints about other races. But some seem to want to think a small incident is equivalent to hundreds of years of bs.

Second, you have to account for intent and context. But then, most people just want to see it from their own view and not another person's.

Good times.

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Stereotype threat at work. Usually performance-related but pretty positive this fits too.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

It fits if you connect enough dots to tie it to affecting performance(which is possible in that example). Why else would a Black person eating watermelon have a negative connotation? There has to be a reason he would think it reflects bad on him as a negative stereotype.

But to clarify: Stereotype threat isn't 'usually' performance-related, it 'is' performance-related.

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I feel like there is another term that better fits the watermelon example but it's escaping me. Like, a term describing an awareness of a stereotype you'd quality for based on race/gender/whatever, and actively working to avoid behaving in such a way that it would perpetuate the stereotype. It's not internalized racism/sexism/whatever, something else. Someone needs to help me out, driving me bonkers.

Well remember why you're saying they don't want to perpetuate the stereotype. If it's a negative stereotype it would mean the person is aware of consequences associated with the stereotype.

Also remember, people also try to emulate positive stereotypes to gain the benefit of that stereotype.

I'm sure you're right, there is a different term for it because it is prior to an outcome, which stereotype threat deals with, but I can't remember it.

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for the amount of liberals in this forum, I'm a bit surprised of the responses.

As if there's anyone on the planet that doesn't like watermelon. It's delicious.

Maybe your perception of "liberals" is based on a faulty stereotype..?