So many hateful people united in hate towards half of their own country.
Sometimes being a straight white dude is a weird thing, all these horrible people look around make sure there’s none of “them” around and then they say something so vile to me as if I’d agree with them.
I don’t let them off the hook. Ever. I just talk louder “what did you say? I’m hard of hearing please speak up? What did you say was the problem with all black people?! (Mexican people / gay or trans people / Jews / Asians etc)”
Quit trying to blame this shit on one part of the country. First of all, that's exactly the kind of division the fascists want.
Second and more importantly, it isn't even true. The rural parts of the rest of the country are just as racist as the rural parts of the south, and the urban parts of the south are just as cosmopolitan as the urban parts of the rest of the country. The only real difference between the south and everywhere else is that a slightly lower percentage of the population is rural.
I also live in the south, but I don't have other straight white guys saying bigoted shit to me as if I'm on their side. Why? Because I live in an urban enough area that I don't have to associate with fuckwads like that.
This happens in the north, too. I grew up in a reliably blue northern state, albeit in a very white area (and I am white myself.) After leaving for a few years as an adult (going to a very culturally-mixed area, in a southern state, ironically) and coming back, I was able to see all the casual racism that I hadn't noticed before. So many people absolutely say shitty racist things when they think they're with someone who will agree. They might be surface-level polite when in the presence of somebody brown or black, but as soon as the room's full of white people again, that filter is gone.
Oh, there may have been words here and there, but nothing past that.
See, that's what I consider "ambient racism", you think or feel a certain way, maybe even talk about it.
Have fun with it.
The south? They had proper racism, proper "2x300lb guys picking fights with you because they know you can't do anything and the cops won't help while everyone watches, just to show they can", followed by "chasing your ass with a baseball bat, swinging at you, but 'It's just a joke, man!'"
Not once, but daily.
And before you say they do it to each other, yeah they do, they're all pieces of shit, but with brown people it gets real, had friends in the hospital, I barely escaped a few times. The friends were either black or jewish.
So please shove your 'they used bad words' bullshit up your ass, the south is a culture of literal slavery and genocide that didn't end for 100 years after the war, and even then kept going, under the cover.
Never, ever experienced anything like that in any other part of the country. The south are just evil.
You know this, you saw it, but the difference between the south and the midwest is that when someone in the midwest is being racist, people call them out. In the south, almost never, it's just laughs and pretending it didn't happen.
My brother in Christ they are just as broke as you are. Be mad at the billionaires ruining your life, not the rednecks that they use as cannonfodder lol
I don’t know if it’s a gender thing, a location thing, or just my vibe (I’m a woman from Connecticut and I’m an autistic vegan with a septum ring who presents pretty butch), but this has happened exactly once to me. It was, unfortunately, my best friend making a mildly antisemitic joke to me and another acquaintance of mine she’d never met, at his expense. Fortunately, however, I took her aside and was able to get through to her. She was adamant that she wasn’t antisemitic, but “the joke was right there.” I explained that it’s like the “make me a sandwich” or “tits or gtfo” jokes, where in one instance, they might not be so bad, but they wear on you and make you so wary of hearing them that you start to think about your wording, and they other you over time. She understood, so well that she felt awful about it and apologized, and has occasionally mentioned the interaction several times since as a pivotal moment for her.
This was such a painful but wholesome story. I think as we all grow up and mature over time, almost all of us can think of a moment where we grew. Thank you for guiding others gently and for giving them a soft bed of understanding to land on.