When did you first encounter racism?

[thenoise]

Oh I remembered, if we were buying my grandfather a gift we had to check the bottom to make sure that it wasn't made in Japan.  We gave him a wide berth on this one due to his experiences as a Far East Prisoner of War working on Death Railway.

[thomasina]

I got called 'Chinese-Japanese' at school a lot when I was about 9 and occasionally get a shout of 'Oi, Jackie Chan's sister!' these days.  I'm not Asian, I am Irish/English but have little eyes and live in a place where they can't afford proper ethnic minority people.

[syntaxerror]

I just remembered another playground classic "my mum's chinese, my dad's japanese, so I ended up like this"

Doesn't make sense without the gestures though. Never got told not to do that one, weirdly, but I don't recall ever doing it myself, though I probably did because I was (and still am) a stupid twat.

[Birdie]

I reckon not until my 20s when i started working in my second casino.

Many if the staff were openly racist. All the staff were white-  we had one black girl start and she lasted a week - didn't 'fit in'.  As for the punters- there were a lot of Asians and again many of the staff were racist about them even though we relied on them. I have to say I didn't even know there was an Asian community in Portsmouth until I started working there.

[Sexton Brackets Drugbust]

My Grandad was in a navy galley in WW2 and took agin the entire far East during his travels, due to their unhygienic food dealings. This followed him throughout his life to the point where he stopped going to a little cafe that served toasted teacakes and scones, because one of the kitchen staff was Chinese.

[xxxx xxx x xxx]

Another playground one round my way was

"Do you like coffee?
Do you like tea?
Do you like sitting on a black man's knee?"

There was one black kid in my class when I was eight (1974)  and our teacher would regularly mock-glower at him and say "Don't you give me those black looks, boy" in a weird Windsor Davies-type voice, to the poor kid's obvious embarrassment.  It was very funny for the rest of us at the time, though.

[Neville Chamberlain]

One of the first highly racist things I ever encountered was this joke:

Q: Why do black men wear baggy trousers?
A: Because their knee grows!

[Kishi the Bad Lampshade]

I think it must have been either the "my mum is Chinese, my dad is Japanese" rhyme, or my grandmother making me promise never to marry a black man. She then told me if we got married we've have horrible children whose skin looked all nasty, and then showed me an example, a picture of a girl who I swear in my memory was either white or olive-skinned, not mixed-race at all. (I presume she had kept the picture especially for this occasion). Bit loopy my grandmother was. Liked to burn books in her youth because she thought they carried disease. Maybe the picture really was of a mixed-race girl but I was so non-racist that I literally didn't see her colour (I had a mixed-race friend who I don't think I realised was non-white until I was ten or something. I also used to sleep curled up with an East Asian boy!)

I said yes because I presumed that was all fine and proper, and I was only about four. To this day I've kept my promise though.

[buttgammon]

I think it was when my aunt and uncle were at our house because my uncle was doing some electrical stuff. He needed a fuse but it was getting late in the evening, so he was wondering where to get one from and they ended up having a discussion about whether the 'p**i shop' would be a total rip-off for them or not. I was about 9 or 10 years old but I'd genuinely never heard the word before, so I asked "which one's the p**i shop? Is that the name of the owner?" and everyone told me it means Pakistani but I mustn't repeat the word ever again.

Although there were two mixed-race kids and no other non-white people in my primary school, I don't remember any racism there (although with it being the most middle-class school in a poor town, there was a lot of very shameful bullying of the kids who came from less affluent families). The closest I can remember is the time we were shown the film Dam Busters and it caused a stir because it featured a dog called n**ger. Everyone seemed more offended than amused and the teacher had to try to explain why the dog was called that. His argument pretty much amounted to "it was alright to be racist then".

There might be a more deep-seated form of racism in my past somewhere because I was absolutely terrified of Moira Stuart when I was a toddler. It made no sense because, although there weren't any black people in my village, I wasn't scared of any other black TV presenters, or of the album covers from my parents' record collection (almost universally by black musicians).

[Neville Chamberlain]

There might be a more deep-seated form of racism in my past somewhere because I was absolutely terrified of Moira Stuart when I was a toddler. It made no sense because, although there weren't any black people in my village, I wasn't scared of any other black TV presenters, or of the album covers from my parents' record collection (almost universally by black musicians).

No, it's OK, regardless of her race, creed or colour, Moira Stewart is just generally terrifying!

[Dusty Gozongas]

I suppose the first encounter I remember was when learning to read. This was at a time when The Story of Little Black Sambo didn't raise many eyebrows as a teaching aid. To be honest, it wasn't outright racist per se (as I vaguely recall) but crikey! What were our educators thinking? On the other hand "Eeny Meeny..." in the playground always struck me as definitely dodgy every time it was recited.

Fast forward to my teens for my first experience of full blown hate. One snowy winter's day I was walking around town with a couple of mates, when out of the blue one of them decided it would be great fun to throw a snowball, full pelt, into the pram of an Asian mother. Fucking shocking! Of course, I did the shameful thing and ran like hell with my mates and had to endure their laughter and re-telling of their proud act over and over. That was the last time I shared more than a few words with the pair of them during that period of my life. I suppose there's a happy ending in the case of the perpetrator in that after years of drug abuse he had an epiphany whilst travelling through India - he'd been sexually abused as a child and had managed to lock the experience away by pushing hard on a self destruct button for the best part of twenty years. Currently doing reasonably well as an artist and occasional musician and happily married to a very lovely  and politically influential Japanese woman (can't say much more than that, as she doesn't talk about her position too much. Sensitive stuff and total kidnap/ransom targets etc.)

[checkoutgirl]

Probably when I was around 12 years old and my mother is sharing around a packet of sweets with my family and we're all standing around gleefully chomping away and my dad, feeling left out and ignored says "Am I black?". I remember giving my sister a baffled look as I tried to process the information. "Obviously he's not black, what could he.....oh, he feels like he's being ignored or mistreated and only black people deserve that kind of treatment, aahhhh".

Does that count as a racism ? I don't remember Indian kids being chased around and beaten because there weren't any of them around at the time. I grew up in small town Ireland which was unicultural, everyone is pasty and white. Then when I moved to Dublin I had no cause to live in any rough areas with many races, I tended to gravitate towards the posher areas and just live in a shitty bedsit. I used to work with a couple of Pakistania lads and we used to hang out for a bit and I used to use the word p**i around them as an abbreviation, I couldn't be arsed saying Pakistani all the time so maybe I was racist there out of pure laziness. Loads of do-gooders would say that's racist but I couldn't give a fuck.

Having said that, Irish people are no slouches when it comes to being racialist. When I worked in the tax office there was acceptance that the Chinese were a bastard to get a penny out of because they (apparently) saw tax as a voluntary option. Is that racist ?



Is this racist ?

[Big Jack McBastard]

To this day I've not bothered to look up it's intent but I do recall the phrase 'Play the white man' being fired at me now and then as a nipper and thinking it sounded awfully backhandedly racist.

Might be a chess reference for all I know and people were just telling me to get a bloody move on.

[Cerys]

Maybe it was a crap way of telling you to keep a stiff upper lip.

[Big Jack McBastard]

You implying I was a crybabby wuss-pants?

[SetToStun]

In my experience, "play the white man" was always an entreaty to play by the rules and act honourably. Basically, "don't act like a savage; play the white man" is what it means. It is unutterably racist and quite mistaken; I mean, most Italians are white, so appealing to whiteness to ensure fair dealings is absolutely pointless.

[Cerys]

You implying I was a crybabby wuss-pants?

Would I do a thing like that?

[Big Jack McBastard]

In my experience, "play the white man" was always an entreaty to play by the rules and act honourably. Basically, "don't act like a savage; play the white man" is what it means. It is unutterably racist and quite mistaken; I mean, most Italians are white, so appealing to whiteness to ensure fair dealings is absolutely pointless.

Lol

Yeah sounds about right, it usually came out when I was having an argument with an oldie about something I had no desire to join in with and was, not so much a dick about it, but obstinately indifferent to whatever was 'Sooo important' at the time.

[Big Jack McBastard]

I remember my old mate getting back to our flat and recounting a story of some black guys arguing across the street with each other outside of the hospital he worked in for a large portion of his day, he put on an army major-stlye voice and was swanning about our flat while denouncing them faux-racistly.

I'd been out during the day too and had seen two black girls tearing each others hair out in a clothes shop over who got the last cheap shirt. So I joined in playing an appalled WI battleaxe shot my eyes furtively side to side and referred to all black people in a hushed tone (like those secret, but real racists do to each other) as 'People of darkness'.

That got a laugh, maybe you had to be there.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I recall the usual lame "p**i" jokes in primary school, but the earliest bit of racism that sticks in my mind was at school, in French class, when the Indian kid in our class called Andy Cole a "fucking n**ger", much to the consternation of our teacher. He probably changed his tune when he ended up at his beloved Man U a few years later though.

Otherwise, it wasn't uncommon to hear racist slurs aimed at any non-whites (Newcastle wasn't the most racially diverse city, it's a bit better now though). I never even met a black person until I moved down south for college when I was 18. I remember the other roommate telling me he was a black guy, and me thinking "Oh my god what am I going to say to him?" and then he was into exactly the same music, films, things to do as me and I felt stupid.

[checkoutgirl]

called Andy Cole a "fucking n**ger",