28 Common Racist Attitudes And Behaviors

[gollygee]

85. Yeah but if you compare experiences

you'll see that for every 5 times it happens to us, it happens to people of color 30 times. (Not specifically those numbers, but when talking to people it's clear it's much more frequent for people of color than white people.) It isn't always easy to tell which times it's due to racism and which time it's someone having a bad day or whatever, but the difference in people's experience shows that racism has to be involved a good part of the time. But it is hard to respond to it. You can't assume it's racism because maybe it isn't - maybe that's one of the 5 times it would have happened anyway.

This case though, even if she had responded to chatting rather than instigating the chatting, that doesn't explain needing the IDs when the sister-in-law hadn't had to show hers even though she hadn't been shopping there as long, and then even when there were IDs looking through the list of bad checks. That was a huge difference in how they were treated and it wasn't coincidence.

If we have our radars on and notice when we are treated differently than someone behind us or in front of us in line, when we can tell it's racism because of how differently we were treated, we have the power to do something about it and fight against racism.

Or we can pretend it's never racism and white people have it just as bad.