Will racist ‘fathers’ do?

(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Tue 1 Nov 2011, 11:43, 4 replies)

I don't know why Muslims and Christians can't get along.
Can't they concentrate on the things they have in common, like anti-semitism?
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Tue 1 Nov 2011, 9:50, 2 replies)

Great QOTW
I know a lot of people have had a downer on this weeks question, but I've found it a fascinating insight into the views of the general public.

It's a bit like pulling back the covers to reveal the repressed feelings of individuals who don't speak their mind only because of fear of criticism rather than because they think it's wrong.

I'm mixed raced and have encountered my fair share of racism (mainly in the 80's & 90's). It's still there, just whispered rather than shouted.

Anyway, my kids are mixed raced and for the time-being oblivious to the prejudice that exists in the world. One afternoon over dinner, my father-in-law referred to the guy over the road as "the coloured chap". Cue my wife and I looking at each other aghast.

My boy who's nearly four piped up immediately "What, like the people in Avatar?"
(BinDipper, Tue 1 Nov 2011, 9:49, 10 replies)

Irony?
A japanese family moved in a few doors down from my parents many years ago. My mother told me one day

"Every time he walks by and seems me he bows his head, they do that in acknowledgement of the atrocities they committed during the war"

The irony??? I'm adopted, and oriental...
(ymmit, Tue 1 Nov 2011, 7:22, 10 replies)

YOU ARE ALL RACIST.
Just to keep some perspective here - NO ONE has come on and related any tales of how their grandad and his mates once ran down a nigger in a pickup truck and then lynched him from a fucking banyan tree for the crime of smiling at some white cunt. It's all been about some doddery old fruits making retarded comments.

You can claim that it was understandable for the grannies to be racist because they didn't know any better. They were told that their race was the most superior and that other races were morally decadent, and a threat, and had that attitude reinforced by fear and ignorance for their entire lives.

So what is your excuse?? If you are so damned enlightened now and claim to know better, why are you still supporting the regime that keeps struggling third world economies in economic bondage?

The cocoa in your chocolate IS produced by slave children. The coltan in your mobile phone IS mined by slave children. The palm oil in so many of your products IS grown by removing tribal peoples from their lands at gun point.
Make changes to your habits now, or die a racist that your grandkids will mock and despise.

*edit* Right. That's that lot told.
(Gritty, yet fluffy. kipperpillock is obsessed with me =), Tue 1 Nov 2011, 4:47, 171 replies)

This is so typical of white people
They tell you how ignorant their gran was just so they can tell a racist joke. And they think we won't notice.
(the other guy not the one that gave you coochie warts, Tue 1 Nov 2011, 0:25, 2 replies)

I used to work for a guy
He had habit of when ever his young son asked where mum was, he would say, "I don't know, probably ran off with a black man."
(the other guy not the one that gave you coochie warts, Tue 1 Nov 2011, 0:20, 7 replies)

Ban this sick /talk trolling.
Ta.
(PERSONALITY HORSE Graham Tapes - free download album - coming soon, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 21:42, 3 replies)

Driving along through Moss Side in Manchester
when we (Grandmother and I) pulled up to some traffic lights near a bus stop. The windows in the car were open and the bus stop was full of about six youths waiting for the bus, mostly black.
Bored, I had a look around and noticed that apart from all those 'orrible, flat-fronted houses, the area didn't seem as bad as its reputation.
"This place would be quite nice if it didn't have all those..." I gestured to the houses, trying to think of a good word for them.
"Niggers?" My Grandmother said, loud enough for the lads at the bus stop to hear. Thankfully the light changed and we drove off. Rather quicker than we needed to.
(Stickleback is carving faces into vegetables., Mon 31 Oct 2011, 20:48, Reply)

My auntie's uncle (not sure what that makes him to me)
...came home for a Christmas family get-together from America, where he'd bought a house, got married and settled. When I asked him how he liked living in the States, he went on for a while about how much he enjoyed it and concluded with: "And they don't have loads of fucking immigrants, not like Britain."
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 18:42, 1 reply)

I see this qotw is still here.
Your car is Japanese. Your Vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your Beers are German. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers -Arabic, your letters -Latin. And you complain that your neighbor is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!

(shamelessly nicked from facebook)
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 18:41, 16 replies)

Travel broadens the mind
Aged 17, I went with girlfriend and her parents to visit her grandparents in Cornwall. To celebrate granny's forthcoming 80th, girlfriend's parents were organising a special trip for her to London to see a West End show.

Upon having the exciting news revealed to her, she replies: "I can't go to London - there are knife-throwing wogs on every street corner!"

I really wish I hadn't been taking a sip of tea at that precise moment…
( smutch, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 17:00, 4 replies)

Survival technique.
My 2 pennorth if that's OK.
Racism, along with possibly all other isms is founded in prejudice. Prejudice in this context is a partially outdated survival shortcut. If a group was all "we" and someone arrived on the scene who wasn't "we" they were a possible threat to life and were quickly identified as "them". The safest route to "we's" survival was to kill "them" rather than wait to find out if they were a threat or not. This would apply to anyone or anything who was not "us". It could be people of a different colour, people from a different tribe with the same colour, of wild animals previously not encountered or even aliens from other planets, should they drop by.
Unfortunately as we become more civilised this instinctive genocidal behaviour becomes redundant but because it's instinctive it's a difficult habit to break. There is nothing stronger or more successful in nature than a cohesive group so this tends to be the preferred default. If we aren't allowed to kill "them" (incidentally aren't we brilliant at justifying doing so) then we use the slightly diluted method called scapegoating. So we may say, "People from ....... are ....... and if we let them mix with us their behaviour will damage our group." By scapegoating we are not killing the person but we are effectively killing their influence on our group, we deny them from the rights granted to "we" by categorising them as not the same as us, therefore justifying our decision to treat them as less than human.
When one day the brain develops sufficiently to overcome this survival technique we will be able to act towards others without prejudice and judge them for what they really are. In the meantime I guess we'll have to settle for believing that we are already doing it. We're not.
And for grandads and everyone else the only limit is the group must have at least two members. I knew a grandfather, not mine, who said, "Don't talk to people from.......village, they got two bloody 'eads that lot."
( edjogs Collared doves are shit., Mon 31 Oct 2011, 16:58, 66 replies)

Possibly racist. Possibly a sudden attack of aphasia
A few months ago I went for an interview for a gardening job, working for an oldish lady with MS; on the phone she sounded kind of formidable and a bit mental in that way old people get when they've lived on their own for far too long, so I pretty much expected to meet Mrs Dubose. As it turned out, she'd lived on her own for far, far too long, was mad as a badger and told me her entire life story - in disjointed, non-chronological chunks - twice. Buried somewhere in the enthralling tale of a secretary from North Wales who had once moved from one small village to the next village over was the assertion that her daughter had married a gentleman of (possibly?) East Asian descent, or as my prospective employer referred to him, a "wily wacky Willy Wonka".

"I call him Ching-Chong Chow Mein," she explained, "because he's a [gesture beloved of small children and the elderly mad to denote the eyes of a Chinese person or possibly a cartoon cat]."

(I didn't get the job in the end because I couldn't be expected to do any heavy lifting on account of being a girl. Why she couldn't have mentioned this on the phone or when I first got there, rather than after two hours of creatively alliterative xenophobia,I have no idea.)
(Shinigami, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 13:35, Reply)

I think that maybe it would have been better if this question was based on the steps we take in not wanting to appear racist, rather than actaul racism cast onto apparent family members.
For example, I once had someone come round to the flat to discuss what the management company had planned for the communal garden. I apologised for the fact that there was a load of washing hanging up in the flat and he said 'That's OK, my place looks like a chinese laundry every weekend too.' At least that what I think he meant to say, because half way through, the Korean mrs Quackblast showed her face and he actually said 'That's OK, my place looks like a Chineeeeeeese Laund er mumble mumble mumble weekend'. He looked at me as if I was about to throw him out into the street.

What is it that makes us think a perfectly rational sentence meant with no offence could possibly cause offence?? I have a friend called Nigel who works in Madrid and his colleagues pronounce his name Niggel, with a hard 'G' and every time they say it he thinks, 'bloody hell, I hope no one heard that.'
(FartThroughAWalkieTalkie wished you were dead in ditch on, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 13:34, 10 replies)

My Gran was always complaining about immigrants not knowing about the royal family
"They come over here from abroad," she would say, "breed like rabbits, get given massive houses at the taxpayers' expense and never do a days work in their lives. God bless 'em, makes me proud to be British."
( Zuowan, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 13:29, 3 replies)

Subconsciously racist?
The only racist things I have ever heard my father (yes, he is an oldie and a grandfather) utter where anti-semitic stereotypes (along the lines of recommending Jewish accountants). I'm not sure if it counts as ironic that many of his work colleagues would assume him to be Jewish (apparently it's something to do with his nose and dark complexion).

Anyway, I was recently helping him with some clearing out from from his study. I was boxing things up under his direction - stuff for disposal (defunct electrical items, old paperwork), stuff for donation to a charity shop (books, DVDs, working but no longer required electrical items) - and he'd popped out to get some more boxes.

I brought down a couple of unmarked boxes from an otherwise cleared shelf for pre-sorting whilst I waited for him to return and opened the first. It was tightly packed with DVDs, stacked vertically so that only the top of the DVD boxes were visible, two rows of about 20, some still sealed in cellophane. I pulled one out and read the title: "Hustler: Barely Legal". I glanced at the back cover. I started looking through the others. A few more were 'teen' or 'barely legal'. Some were seemingly Arthouse erotica, there were some girl-on-girl ones, plenty of oral and anal ones, there were a couple that really surprised me (imagine a Conga line of men and women in no particular order).

You know how, in some situations, a half-formed thought pops into your head and you have to go over something (an article you are reading, a report you are writing) again so that it crystallises? I started again, looking at the cover of every single DVD in the box. Out of 42 DVDs, three were still in the cellophane. These were the only three that had any image of a non-caucasian on either front or back cover.

I put both boxes back on the shelf without looking in the second and went and put the kettle on.
( wakeupandsmellthebacon, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 12:02, 9 replies)

This QOTW is like a character in 'Freaky Friday'
if Freaky Friday was about a comedian who changes places with a member of the English Defence League.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 11:02, 2 replies)

Well, here's topical
We were visiting my elderly parents this weekend. My wife woke up on Saturday morning with an intense itch up her left nostril. It was really aggravating and quite painful after she'd scratched it. I was a bit wary of suggesting using the stuff that we put on stings and bites up the nose, so since I was popping into the town centre I said I'd nip into Boots and see if I could pick anything up to stop the itching.

So I duly rack up to Boots and head to the pharmacist's bit, where I'm greeted by a woman with a powerful Eastern European accent. I explain the problem, and she suggests one of those nasal sprays you use for hayfever.

"Well no, I'm not sure that's really what I'm looking for" I said. "That's something to spray up into the sinus and it's actually the nostril that's itching. I was thinking something more like a cream?"

She looked at me blankly.

"Zis is vot ve have for no-says".

"But it's designed to be sprayed well past the point that's itching".

She proffered the box again.

"I suppose she could spray it on the offending part.. but that's going to be messy.."

"Zis is nose spray"

"Yes, jolly good. Look, what I really want is a topical emollient cream that can be safely used in a nostril"

Baffled look.

"Zis is vot ve have for ze hitching no-says"

This discussion was clearly going nowhere. "Right. Look, forget it" I said and I stomped out, muttering darkly. I gave my missus an antihistamine pill and it seemed to help; result, without spending £7 for the pleasure.

Anyway. I was regaling my mother with this story, and concluded it by saying "I suppose language problems are what you can get when you employ foreign staff."

"Hmph" she said. "And I bet she was black"
(richardm, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 10:20, 5 replies)

My dear old nan…
Punched me in the face and called me a paki for getting my nose pierced at 16

Referred to my (blonde haired and blue eyed) partner of mixed heritage as a 'stealth paki'

Refuses to eat pizza or pasta because it is 'wog food'. Though one Christmas she got drunk on sweet sherry and ate a whole bowl of prawn toast, gagging and spitting them out once we told her they were 'foreign'.

Insists that 'wog' is a polite term because it stands for 'Western Oriental Gentleman'

Told us that if any of her great-grandchildren had 'curly hair and were good at running' she would cheer for another child at sports day

Used to tell us (largely made up?) stories of how before my granddad she was married to a black man called Ram Jam Sammy, with whom she had a son called Sambo who was eventually sold into the slave trade.


Weirdly, her casual racism didn't stop her from translating her Indian next door neighbours bank and legal correspondants which they couldn't read due to their poor English, not did it stop her from helping their kids with their homework most nights.

Apparently being a 'paki' is something you can opt in or out of.
(Nickerly, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 8:52, 4 replies)

a mate of mine
got an art scholarship type thing for a french uni back in the day and one summer hitched around France a bit. Even now generally the more remote you get in france the fewer blacks people are seen. O e day an old lady came up to him be genuinely interested in him, asking him questions, impressed at his good french sneaked to rib his ski to see if the colour came off. She also got a pen and some paper as she couldn't believe he would be able to write.

Also when my gran heard was marrying a black girl she angrily told my mum that her first great grandchild had been a bastard and she didn't want the second to be a nigger!
(Wagane, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 8:37, 4 replies)

When I was a kid my mother (OK, she's a grandmother now) had a habit of adding the word 'nignog' to songs,
so that she'd sing, say, 'Like a nignog on a string' instead of 'Like a puppet on a string'. This presumably passed for wit back in the 70s.

When I was about 16, my brother and I heard her singing that classic 60s hit 'Tossing And Turning', you know the one, with the line 'I can't sleep at night - tossing a nignog...'

We spent an hour snorting and giggling as she repeated the line 20 times or so over the ironing until I eventually strolled over and explained what was so funny.

She went a bit quiet and never sang about nignogs again.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 8:37, Reply)

I can only speak for myself, but as an Aboriginal person
this QOTW sucks and is hurtful. Yet, I have had a sly giggle at some of the answers for two reasons - it's been said to me in the past and I am so past reacting with profound anger or it's just so outlandishly wrong as to be not worth my time. Some of them are just flat out funny, never mind the racism. Other ugly posts make me a feel sad and sickened, the same as the high moral ground responses. Just another QOTW, really.

Racism, in any form, is wrong. But the thing about this QOTW is that things change and it is nice to be part of it. It ain't perfect, but in my lifetime I can now walk down the street and not be physically harrassed over what I am. I have been denied employment, had my grades fucked around, been spat on and hit by complete strangers; but everyday I believe that more and more people find that unacceptable.

For the majority posts here, I understand that in saying these things of our grandparents, we recognise it is wrong and our own behaviour will never be like that. Gotta applaud anyone who stands up to it, changes their mind on it or never wants to revisit it again. Yet I do believe, moderators, that once is definitely enough for this QOTW.

But this is just my opinion, mind.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 7:30, 12 replies)

When I were a lad...
Growing up in a mining town in the middle of Fucking-Nowhere, North Queensland during the 80's, that was a multi-cultural mecca due to the fact that it was a mining town, I was befriended by a young girl called Petulia. She introduced me to her grandfather George, who was an elder of the local tribe (Kalkadoon from memory - can't be too hard to figure out where it was from that).
After school and on Sat. mornings in a rock circle over the railway tracks George would tell us stories from the Dreaming, teach us some bush lore and generally be a kind, munificent old man to us.
Nothing suss.
Thru word of mouth Petulia & I grew into a group of about 15 kids whom George happily told stories to, taught us how to track lizards and roos and seemed to have infinite patience for.
Until Ming Yew arrived from Malaysia - his parents lured obviously by lucrative mining company pay-checks.
Yew came with me 1 day to one of George's sessions. George flew into a rage, like nothing we'd ever seen - flatly refused to have anything to do with Yew stating that "My dad got killed by the bloody Nips".
& therein ended our opportunity to learn about Aboriginal folklore, bush lore & stories from George.
I haven't kept in touch with Petulia. I may have to change that.
No apologies for anything.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Mon 31 Oct 2011, 6:39, 19 replies)

Do gingers get to play the racism card too?
or is that just another whole round of offensiveness on it's own?
If so, why do gingers get special treatment?
If not, why do you oppress the gingers?

I need clarification on this issue, because I'm pretty sure I could write a plausible story about the shameful prejudice shown towards the rusties. With some morally-corrupt old people thrown in to serve as dartboards, I reckon I could shoe-horn it into this Qotw.
But I really need clarification before I can be arsed.
(Gritty, yet fluffy. kipperpillock is obsessed with me =), Mon 31 Oct 2011, 5:53, 18 replies)

Even in beautiful NZ
the first joke my daughter's host father told her was:
Why do Maoris have big nostrils?
Big fingers.
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 5:43, 4 replies)

A good whitefella friend of mine
Married into an Aboriginal family. My mum said that he would now be the white sheep of the family, but he didn't think that was funny.

I still get teary eyed thinking what a waste that joke was on him.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 5:04, Reply)

I can laugh about it now...
but being on the receiving end of a racist spray from an old person when I was only a kid, doing nothing but hanging around in my own skin, was just one of the less joyous days of many running home crying. That day only distinguishable by the falsies clacking at a furious pace to tell me whatever it was they had to get off their chest.

The one thing I used to get all the time when I was younger, always from some older man - 'You're too pretty to be Aboriginal'. I never, ever could come up with some witty reply to that. Love to hear one now.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Mon 31 Oct 2011, 4:50, 6 replies)