Dark Soldier wrote:

If I read your posts in a Denzel voice, you become the best poster on here Bor1s.

For a moment, I thought you meant:

I think there's certainly a lot less overt racism these days, however, don't think the number of racist folk has changed a great deal, they just know they have to be more careful about revealing their true nature.

Always shocks me when people just come out with something racist to someone they don't really know and seemingly expect them to agree.

Remember being at Stockport bus station about 10 years ago (had a shaved head at the time and a fondness for Stone Island) and was looking at a timetable. On the same poster was a photo your standard  'generic mulitcultural selection of passengers' and this elderly woman stood next to me turned to me and said something along the lines of "God they're everywhere now arent they, got to have them on these posters and everything, you're not even allowed to call them anymore" expecting me to join in her perfectly rational disapproval of what she no doubt saw as political correctness gone mad / an impending immigrant apocalypse.

Can't remember my exact response, but it was something like fuck off you nasty old cunt, and she seemed genuinely suprised that I didn't share her values. She did at least fuck off sharpish.

I had a rucksack, a coat and keys to a tall building I could only be there for one reason.

adored wrote:

I think there's certainly a lot less overt racism these days, however, don't think the number of racist folk has changed a great deal, they just know they have to be more careful about revealing their true nature. Always shocks me when people just come out with something racist to someone they don't really know and seemingly expect them to agree.

Yeah, I get a bit of this at work.  Every now and again I get a patient who assumes that because I'm so white I'm practically transparent, that I must therefore agree with their rampant racism. I've had everything from someone reciting the Rivers of Blood speech, to a guy telling me that all mixed race couples should be shot.  I used to find this incredibly difficult -  I'm not a particularly confrontational guy at the best of times, but in the role of doctor it's particularly tricky to start telling people that they're racist arseholes.  So I would say nothing and change the subject.  After my kids were born however (my wife is asian) I decided that I just couldn't let such stuff slide and vowed to argue with anyone who expressed such views.  I'm always surprised by how well it goes.  One guy refuses to see me anymore, but others have actually changed their views and behaviours on the back of gentle but assertive disagreement.  (I guess it helps that most of those who express such views are of a generation that still thinks doctors carry some sort of authority...)

My favourite bit of random middle class racism was when I was walking down the street with my baby daughter.  A little old lady stopped to peer into the pram, and after coo-ing for a while looked up at me with my ginger hair and translucent skin, then back to my daughter with her beautiful brown skin and eyes.  "She's beautiful isn't she?" she asked, and I agreed happily, then stood slack jawed after her next line -  "Which country did you get her from?"

And so it goes both ways. This pisses me off too and it's a subtle thing certainly in parts of the black community there's an element of accepted racism to white people, thinking possibly because they feel it's justified as a form of retaliation. 

I definitely take people on an individual basis and not sure why other people can't. Only exception are XB1 pre-orderers, bloody scum need to get out of our country