| 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.) |