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Warbow

Racism— Your experiences

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Sorry to go off topic here a little but I think President Obama should speak out strongly. Not as a black man but as man the people who listen to. 
 

many people see him as a black man but I see him as a half white president also. Him more than others of influence knows what it takes to fix these racial indifferences with his voice. Growing up in Hawaii should have taught him something.

Disclaimer: Any views or opinions presented by this poster (Warbow) are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Univesity of Hawaii or it's loyal fans. All quotes and opinions from Warbow are valid for 30 days following the date of post transmission and are subject to change at any time. All information published herein by Warbow is gathered from his own opinions or sources which are thought to be reliable, but the reader should not assume that the information is official or fact.

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32 minutes ago, Warbow said:

It’s not really a racial thing in Hawaii but rather a cultural difference. Outsiders and immigrants are treated differently because they refuse to honor the Hawaii culture. I was also stationed in Hawaii while in the Air Force. The ones that failed to adapt to the culture hated it here, those that understood and tried to blend in here loved it.  A lot even made their home here because they loved it so much. Most locals here have what we call the aloha spirit. It not something that is made up. Then they are others who have none. 

Definitely cultural differences. I lived there for 6 years and just seeing the way my Korean and Filipino employees treat Micronesians and Portuguese definitely was borderline racism. I'm Hispanic and can pull off a "local look" so I rarely had anything directed towards me. But "Aloha spirit" is a myth for the tourists.

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In July 2017 my fiancee's apartment got ransacked and trashed by teens and young adults when she lived in Sacramento. Earlier that year she moved up for a job as an athletic trainer at a high school in Elk Grove, but she couldn't afford an apartment in the area so she found a place in Florin which is just north of Elk Grove. Her apartment was on Mack Rd. which is in a predominantly black neighborhood and most of the tenants in her complex were black and Hispanic with her being the lone white woman as far as we could tell. I was living in Bakersfield and going to school at the time, so I couldn't move up there just yet and could only visit on the weekends. She got to know her neighbor pretty well and the woman living above her, both of her neighbors were black. They were sitting on their porch drinking coffee together one morning when her neighbor made the comment, "why are you living here? you're white". My fiancee told her that Elk Grove was too expensive and Florin was the only area within her price range. She got a lot of looks from the other tenants especially when she used the laundry room and had to keep an eye on her clothes. In May, Mikel McInter was shot and killed by Sacramento PD and he was an unarmed black man. There were some protests in the area, but things stayed relatively quiet for the most part. In the following weeks though she started noticing little things like tenants parking in her designated space so she was forced to park at the other end of the complex and walk which she felt vulnerable especially late at night after traveling with the teams (she didn't get home until almost midnight). Other times the office staff refused to help her during maintenance calls, but her neighbors issues were resolved almost instantly and her mailbox was broken into multiple times while others were left alone.

In July we drove to Texas for NATA (National Athletic Trainers Association) conference in Houston for a week and she asked her coworker to keep an eye on her apartment while we were gone. As we were passing through Phoenix on our way home we got a call from her coworker that her apartment got broken into. We high tailed it from Phoenix to Sacramento in almost 10 hours. She called the Sacramento PD to file a report, but since it was the night of July 4th nobody was around to help. We finally got to her apartment at 11:00 that night and the extent of the damage was nothing other than borderline hateful. All of her electronics were gone, her clothes were missing, windows were smashed, furniture destroyed, text books and personal photos ripped apart, her pet fish were shredded in the garbage disposal, and they smeared honey all over the kitchen counter and her wood table. We kept calling Sacramento PD to file a report and the finally told us an officer would be out in the morning to investigate. We didn't really know where to go so we stayed in our car all night and kept watch. When the officer finally arrived in the morning he was shocked by the amount of damage that was done and called an investigator in to check for prints. After the officers were done we started cleaning and most of the stuff we had to throw away. My friends in Fresno drove up to help me clean and move her things to a storage unit in Elk Grove. While we were cleaning her apartment it felt like everyone in the complex was watching us and nobody offered to help or say they witnessed anything. My fiancee's coworker offered her a spare room to sleep in until she could find a new place to live, so she lived with her coworker and her family for a month. The police were able to get prints off the kitchen counter, bathroom mirror, and shower door which helped lead to the arrest 2 teens, one 18 and the other 19, both of them were black and lived in the complex.                

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19 minutes ago, Warbow said:

Sorry to go off topic here a little but I think President Obama should speak out strongly. Not as a black man but as man the people who listen to. 
 

many people see him as a black man but I see him as a half white president also. Him more than others of influence knows what it takes to fix these racial indifferences with his voice. Growing up in Hawaii should have taught him something.

Goodbye frying pan, hello fire

 

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I've really only witnessed it, not had it directed towards me. I made mention of bad experiences with Raleigh PD in the other thread, and one of those was just out and out racism. I was out with some co-workers one weekend, and we were outside of the bar we had been at, waiting for our respective Ubers. There were five of us... two white guys (pasty white me, and an Italian guy), one from Nigeria, one from Ecuador, and one from Puerto Rico. Raleigh PD showed up and started harassing the three non-white guys. Racial slurs were uttered, threats of arrest for public drunkenness (none of us were drunk), disobeying a police officer, and other shit were made. It wasn't until everyone around us pulled out their cell phones and started taking video of it that they backed down. That was the first time that I really witnessed true racism for myself, and it really started opening my eyes a lot to how things are in this country. We weren't doing anything, we were just standing there, waiting for transportation outside of a bar. 

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I went to a very white high school, probably 90%. The other 10% was basically all Latino and Asian. There were 7 black kids in my graduating class of about 500. They all hung out together, as you can imagine. 

I sat next to one of the 7, I’ll call him rob, a super nice and genuine kid, in 11th grade English. As you might suspect, when it came to discussing the boring shit on the 11th grade reading list, I was in my element. The crucible, other stuff I can’t remember, all that stuff you hated, I dug. Naturally, I got people asking me to write their papers for them, which I never did. I’d have gladly accepted their money, but I had better things to do with my time.

Anyway, by the time we got to the grapes of wrath, Rob asked me if I would just read his rough draft and give him feedback on it, so I agreed. I told him he could grab it from me at lunch the next day. 

Next day comes, and all 7 black kids walk over to where I usually ate lunch with my mostly white friends. I started digging in my backpack for robs essay, but I was a disorganized student and couldn’t find it. Rob and his friends waited.

While he was waiting, the school resource officer, with 2 or 3 other guys as backup, walked up to rob and the others and asked them, forcefully, to disperse. I tried to explain what we were doing but the officer didn’t care. I asked if he could wait until I found the paper, and he said no. The kids walked away, but one of them cursed as he did, and he got put in zip ties immediately. This happened as a huge number of the student body looked on.

A little later, the resource officer came back to assure us that we had done nothing wrong. I asked him why he did that and his repose, I shit you not this is it word for word, I’ll never forget it, “they were in an area they were not supposed to be.”

So basically, white kids could eat lunch wherever they wanted but black kids had to stay in their designated area. 

I didn’t see rob again until 6th period English, and by then, he had missed a crucial free period during which he could have been working on the essay. I don’t know how helpful my notes were for him. I said that what had happened at lunch was bullshit and he agreed, but what I should have done was reported the officer. 

Later in his life, rob would be arrested for possession of a gun he legally owned. He pled down to a misdemeanor rather than fight the charge despite clearly being in the right. 

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I've never experienced racism to any degree of significance, so I'm clearly not qualified to add much here. But I have experienced moments of injustice in certain circumstances. Injustice of any type consumes you and eats at your soul. It's such a powerful emotion. I cant imagine how demeaning it would feel to be judged because of your race. All I can do is try and empathize with others and try and put myself in their shoes. I think we have improved as a society, but still have a long way to go.

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I grew up in a white suburb of Milwaukee.  When I was about eight or nine years old during the 1960s, I heard the n word. I didn't know much about the word, but I did know it was derogatory. I used the word one time at home, my dad blistered my ass with the board of education (previously a slat from a snow sled). I never use the word again.

When I was 18, I went with a friend and his girlfriend to church in LA. The church was small, about half Filipino. On the way back, a Filipino girl a couple years older than me, I'm guessing 20 rode with us. She had always been friendly towards me, but we never dated or were really interested in each other. However, on the ride back she wrote up front with my friend, his girlfriend in his 1968 Chevy Nova. I sat in the back seat by myself. It was a really odd feeling, and I didn't know what was going on. After we drop the girls off, my friend told me that the Filipino grandmother had told her not to sit in the car next to me (it was the first time I met her grandmother). He told me that the girl was upset, but she respected her grandmother.

Finally, my mother and father-in-law grew up in Mississippi. Every few years, we go down there for family get together. Anybody who's been down there or Louisiana, has probably since an undercurrent of racial tension. One time, a distant relative we were staying with, an older white gentleman started talking about how black people down south live in uncleanly life or something to that effect. I told him I had close friends who are black. We didn't talk about it anymore.

 

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I've never really faced any true racism.  One time as a 14 year old in Cheyenne Wyoming a friend and I were walking to the baseball complex and two Hispanic dudes... probably early 20's jumped out of an old pickup and jumped us.  My friend got the hell beat out of him but the little squirt that hit me I laughed...more a nervous laugh because I was scared shitless.  He didn't know what to do after that really, but call me a little white bitch...

 

Later on in life as a pe teacher I worked with a black lady.  One of the kids asked me to dunk a ball and she burst out laughing.  I asked he why she thought that a was funny and her reply was that in her life she knew two things to be true...that white boys couldn't dance or jump.  I about died laughing on the spot.  She was an awesome lady who grew up in inner city Chicago.  I don't know what the hell she was doing in Wyoming.  

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18 hours ago, Warbow said:

Sorry to go off topic here a little but I think President Obama should speak out strongly. Not as a black man but as man the people who listen to. 
 

many people see him as a black man but I see him as a half white president also. Him more than others of influence knows what it takes to fix these racial indifferences with his voice. Growing up in Hawaii should have taught him something.

 

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20 hours ago, soupslam1 said:

I grew up in a blue collar white and Hispanic neighborhood. I had a lot of Mexican friends and we had a lot of good times together. I can’t remember any overt racism incidents. When I was in the army there was a lot of prejudice between mainly white southerners and blacks.

I was with a survey crew in a black neighborhood with two other guys when I got out of the army. A black dude came by and said we had better leave if we knew what was good for us. My step mother grew up in Florida and was really bigoted toward any race that wasn’t white. She embarrassed my brothers and I more than once in front of friends. 

There is racism everywhere and it isn’t going away any time soon if ever. However, it’s not as bad as it used to be and will improve as races live and work together more. 

My dad was a lieutenant in WWII when black and white platoons were still segregated. (Dad did have a couple Hispanic guys under him.) Dad was assigned a white sergeant from the deep South who was a total bigot, not just against blacks but pretty much anyone who wasn't an uneducated white Southerner. Worst racism he saw in the Army was sitting in a small bus station somewhere in Mississippi one evening. Four rednecks were at a table playing poker and they kept throwing stuff on the floor for an elderly black janitor to have to pick up. When one of them eventuallhy stuck out his foot and tripped the old guy, Dad interceded verbally and they stopped their game and got up to let Dad know they could tell from his voice he wasn't from the South and although since he had his uniform on they'd cut him some slack, if he said another word, they'd kick his ass.

When I played baseball in HS, our team was totally white. We once had an OOC game against an all-black team which was played at a local park because their field was awful. Several of my teammates were shagging flies in the outfield before the game and I went out to speak with them. Because I played 2B, I just held my glove by my side. Three African American guys who must have been about 20 walked up behind us and one grabbed my mitt and casually walked away while calling me Honkey. It was clear he was trying to provoke me so I just raised my voice a bit to ask that he give the glove back. One of the kids on the opposing team joined in and the guy who took my glove dropped it over his shoulder after carrying the thing about 50 yards. That was the only blatant racism I can ever remember been the victim of. The black kid who got my back could clearly empathize.

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12 hours ago, Bob said:

I've never seen or experienced racism. I surround myself with decent people

It's actually quite easy to be envious of your "pleasantville" waltz through life. Me personally, however, craves knowledge and experiences.

Looking inwards as you interact with others of different cultures, upbringings, and socioeconomic status domestically and abroad is what drives me. It is impossible not to notice severe inequalities, discrimination, and oppression when you take a small step outside your comfort zone.

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One time I walked into a restaurant and was waiting for someone to come seat me. But waiters, waitresses, even a manager looking dude would walk by and not even look at me or acknowledge my presence. And this went on for like 15 minutes until I just left. Now if I were a minority, I would've thought for sure that I was being discriminated against. So the big question is, what % of false positives occur out there. Some minorities have a victim complex and are convinced they're getting screwed all the time and are overly sensitive by reading into things that aren't even there a lot of the time. I think the false positive rate is fairly high, especially if you're always looking for it. 

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23 minutes ago, Nevada Convert said:

One time I walked into a restaurant and was waiting for someone to come seat me. But waiters, waitresses, even a manager looking dude would walk by and not even look at me or acknowledge my presence. And this went on for like 15 minutes until I just left. Now if I were a minority, I would've thought for sure that I was being discriminated against. So the big question is, what % of false positives occur out there. Some minorities have a victim complex and are convinced they're getting screwed all the time and are overly sensitive by reading into things that aren't even there a lot of the time. I think the false positive rate is fairly high, especially if you're always looking for it. 

Certainly didn’t expect a racism-is-fake-because-I-once-received-bad-service take, but Convert went for it. Kudos.

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On 5/31/2020 at 1:15 PM, CV147 said:

There were two different times we were pulled over and let off because we were white. In both circumstances they were looking for Hispanic men. This was the late 1990s early 2000s.

In one of those circumstances we had marijuana in the car and the driver had been drinking.

I still remember vividly one officer shouting "They're all white! They're all white!" before getting an apology and being let go. This was the time we had a quarter-pound of weed in the car.

We would have been in a lot of trouble had we been the wrong color.

Where in the country was this occurring?

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33 minutes ago, Nevada Convert said:

Some minorities have a victim complex and are convinced they're getting screwed all the time and are overly sensitive by reading into things that aren't even there a lot of the time. 

Yeah that behavior is definitely limited to minorities.

:rolleyes:

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On 5/31/2020 at 1:40 PM, East Coast Aztec said:

White people have called me ++++++, black people have called me cracker. :coffeecomputer:

ECA do you have white and black parents?   Can you answer a question for me?   Why do so many mixed black and white kids identify as black?  Or is that just my opinion?  

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15 minutes ago, NVGiant said:

Certainly didn’t expect a racism-is-fake-because-I-once-received-bad-service take, but Convert went for it. Kudos.

Good lord you’re stupid if that’s what you got from my post. You’re such a big baby. It’s a fact that you won’t always be right when you think someone is purposely working against you. And there will be times when someone worked against you but you didn’t notice it. The question is, how big of a % are the false positives. And false positives do occur despite your inability to understand the concept. 

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