[rayiner]

People don’t shout anything at me, racial or otherwise. Certainly not “1 in 20” strangers on the street. So I find OP’s story difficult to believe and likely lacking context.

> Park next to someone? They yell, "This ain't China, don't park so close." Walk home from school? Students yell ching chong at me. Shit is messed.

Is this “racism” or bad manners/people trying to get a rise out of you? Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian, or would he have yelled at you if you were white—just with a different comment? Same for the kids in school—if you were different in another way (fat, skinny, etc) would they have shouted that at you instead?

Do you think you’ve ever been materially prejudiced because you were Asian rather than white?

[simmanian]

again, super happy for you. but i feel some people try to go out of their way to convince themselves that racism is not at play even when it clearly is, because it paints a picture where they are somehow "better" than those who experience hatred. the guy who yelled at me to park farther away, when I called him out on what he said, he walked up to me in an imposing manner and said, "so yeah, I can be a little racist, so what are you going to do, mr. china?" I'm not even chinese.

this is just an anecdote, and you don't have to believe what i say. but i think racism (against asians) is very real and many people are affected by it every day.

[rayiner]

I assume such events are randomly distributed. So I’m talking about your reaction, not the conduct itself.

What I find odd is the impact of this negative interaction in a parking lot. Do you think the guy wouldn’t have yelled at you had you been white? If not, what’s the real difference between “this isn’t China” and “are you blind?”

[simmanian]

>I assume such events are randomly distributed.

your point is racism towards asians does not exist, because these random assholes are being assholes toward random targets and they would basically act the same way to other white people. i disagree. i believe what the grandparent comment described about their partner's experience in rural town america is more or less true. you are free to think they are a liar or an outlier. but when people you have never interacted with call you a chinese ching chong on the street when you're just walking home, you have to admit there is some racial element to their abuse. would they have yelled anything at me if i were just another white dude in their predominantly white neighborhood? somehow i highly doubt that.

no, i don't think these people go about their lives consciously trying to be especially mean to asian people. most of them have probably just internalized certain biases against asians. for the sake of convenience, i and many others have decided to categorize such patterns of behavior as racism.

again, you are free to believe that racism is not real. if you are squarely within that camp, i doubt anything i say will change your mind.

[derefr]

Re: your experiences — racists (and bigots in general) are a lot more likely to voice the bigoted things they're thinking, when the target of their vitriol looks like someone who wouldn't fight back against what they're saying. So: women (when the speaker is male and physically larger); old people; people with disabilities; etc. It's the same victim-selection logic that criminals use.

If you're the sort of person who would never expect to get randomly fucked with on the street, then you shouldn't expect to be the target of voiced bigotry, either.

> Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian

Yes, 100% it was because she was Asian.

The small town I grew up in is effectively 100% white (just by coincidence of history); but exists near some major global cities (like the one I live in now) that have a good mix of ethnicities, and especially an increasingly-large percentage of Asian people.

Due to various economic factors, many otherwise-well-to-do people can no longer afford to live in the big cities. This includes many immigrants of other races who originally moved to this country to live in these big cities, and have never visited the rest of the country. These people (including the immigrants) started off just moving to commuter suburbs — but as those shot up in land value as well, people are now increasingly moving to outlying non-cosmopolitan small towns, which do still have lower land values.

And that's shifting the demographics of these small towns.

This wave of demographic shift has not yet reached the town I grew up in.

AFAICT there is a sentiment among people who live there that they don't want "outsiders" — i.e. immigrants / anyone who's not a tenth-generation resident of the country — to move into the town. The sight of such people — especially when those people are "city slickers" doing "tourist" things in the town — enrages them.

So, it's not a prejudice these people have that's specific to any one race of people — but it is a racially-motivated prejudice. It is, essentially, a racial purity mindset — whether the people living there would call it that or not. (I say "racial purity" generally rather than "white supremacist" specifically, because this dynamic exists in provincial small towns in every country that's currently experiencing demographic shift — with the people in those small towns being bigots against any ethnicity other than their own, but especially against whichever ethnicities are increasing in prevalence in the countrie's large cities and beginning to "spill over" into small towns.)