I can officially prove that being racist
is a manifestation of the simple act of growing old; because my Mum's only started developing racist tendencies in the past couple of years (she's edging t'wards retirement).
She's not a grandparent, nor likely to be soon (one socially spastic son and two who are totally paranoid about accidentally spawning...oh okay, three socially spastic sons) but she counts anyway, because nar.

The incident when we were down south recently, and she instantly accused a bad driver of being 'probably Chinese', and then proceeded to defend herself vigorously is funny, but short; what she was also defending herself against was the family's lingering shock at her actions last year over my flat deposit.

Having finally been done with university, I was moving out of a flat in another city, and the entire family had turned up to help me dispose of my stuff. My flatmate was staying for another year, so the issue of the deposit was a bit tricky, especially since our frantic efforts to make the place worthy of even the slightest return had only managed to upgrade it to 'a bit crap'.
In a rather exceptional display of reasonableness, the landlord had agreed to simply return my entire half of the deposit, with any future issues to be sorted out between me and Flatmate. So, the last of my stuff was loaded into the car, the whole wodge of delicious moolah was returned to me and signed off with no issues whatsoever, the new flatmate was there to pay his deposit and move in, everyone was just waiting around to say cheerio, and my mother loudly and angrily accused the landlord, a third gen Pakistani, of ripping me off to fund Al Quaeda.
Erm.
Wait, what?

Yeah, she waited patiently until I'd got all my money back with no hitches whatsoever, and was bidding farewell to the place forever, to launch into a loud declamation of how "I just want to say that I think this simply isn't good enough, I've probably paid for a whole cell of Al Quaeda by now. You go around charging people for every little thing, you're bigoted against white people and it shows. If there's much more of this I shall be writing a letter of complaint!"

In front of the guy, his Chinese wife, three or four baffled students, and her own immediate family. Who haven't let her hear the end of it since.
I cannot emphasise enough just how incredibly unexpected this was - rude: sure, utterly backwards: should be obvious. But if I'd previously thought of her as someone likely to do that, I wouldn't have brought her along in the first place. I was literally too stunned and appalled to move to shut her up; I just sat exchanging 'do you fucking believe this?' glances with everyone else. She gets really upset when it's mentioned and tries to change the subject about it, which I hope and pray is an indication that she's at least embarrassed about how incredibly fucking out of line it was. Who knows, maybe she was still seething about the last deposit I was ripped off on. By...a bunch of ginger Celtic types. Hey, who says racism and thickheaded wibbling cretinous stupidity can't just get along?
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Thu 27 Oct 2011, 18:33, Reply)