Had someone yell something racist at me today :/

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Was on my way to see my grandma and someone yelled something about my ethnicity. I couldn't hear it fully but they got my ethnicity right as I'm very clearly from that place (despite being mixed I look very much like I am from one country). I think it is why I burst into tears when something else happened shortly after that I should have been able to shrug off. It makes me so uncomfortable that people can tell where I'm from, even when I wear a mask. I don't know how they get it right. This isn't the first time I've been yelled at about where I'm from either, although those instances have been more lecherous than hateful. Once when I wanted to buy something from a shop I could tell they were talking about me in another language before they started telling me how tall I am and how they love people from my culture and it just felt very off. As someone who is quite socially anxious, being a walking sign of my ethnicity and having to deal with all this is not so fun (I'm only not mentioning the specifics of where I'm from as it is a weird mix and don't want to be easily identifiable to others. Probs paranoid but yeah)

Oh dear. You are simply going about your day and someone doesn't resist their compulsion to throw their personal failures of personality at you.

No matter what your is demographic some jerk will dislike you

Sorry that happened :/

Try not to take it personally, as it's just the ugliness of that individual showing itself to you. Their own insecurities. Their own fears. Their low self-esteem being externalized against an "other". It's really not about you and your ethnicity in the end. It's projection. It's not all that nice though.

I know how it goes. I'm one of those taller near-albino types (sorta funny as both my parents tan quite well and aren't all that tall).

Last edited by Dillogic on 15 Apr 2022, 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Am reminded of incident described by an author who had a show on PBS years ago.

He was native American poet of the Salish tribe in California, and one time he mentioned how certain White redneck guys on the street corner "will yell at any brown skinned person". One day some of them yelled at him from across the street "why doncha go back to where you came from?".

White guys...telling an Native American to go back....

He said with a smile "it wasnt a hate crime, but a crime of irony".

I’m sorry that happened to you. As others pointed out, it reflects their inadequacies and is no reflection on you.

It must be difficult to “stand out” quite literally and have that just be you, and who you are always on display. It takes great courage to be yourself.

You must live in a country where ethnicity is an issue to people. As a person from the UK I was surprised when reading this, as we don't have any of that here because different ethnicities don't stand out. If someone did yell out something racist, they would most probably be arrested.

Thank you all for your words. Also I'm a londoner :') (also yay fellow brit). Though in the uk I don't feel as on edge as I do when I've went out of the country. Also usually when I experience racism, it is from people who are not nearby others and can quickly escape (ie in a car or motorcycle). If I were on a bus or something I think someone would speak up and I do love london

There are a lot of different ethnic groups in London. In fact not all Brits are white.

Are a native-born English white person? If so, you wouldn't be in a position to know (from personal experience alone, at least) whether your country doesn't "have any of that." Hopefully your country has relatively little of that sort of thing, but I'd be surprised if you do, in fact, nave "none" of it. Here is one incident that would seem to indicate otherwise.


Even in the U.K., I would hazard a guess that people get arrested for this sort of thing in incidents that are both egregious enough and public enough to be newsworthy, but not in most lesser or more private incidents.

Here in the U.S.A., racist speech all by itself is not illegal, unless it occurs in specific contexts that make it part of an illegal act. (For example, killing someone while yelling racial epithets may make the murder itself a "hate crime" rather than just plain old murder.)

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 17 Apr 2022, 3:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for clarifying this for us, and for telling us the circumstances under which you typically do or do not experience racist remarks in the U.K. I'm glad to hear that you live in a city you can love.

I meant in the same context as what happened to OP - people just randomly yelling out a racist remark in the street and having people comment on their race like they've never seen a person of other ethnicities before. Here people of all ethnicities are just "part of the furniture".

That incident in the link is down to football hooligans. They can be racist.

A few years back, two Spanish tourists were beaten to within an inch of their lives for "looking foreign" in my home town, which is one of the most peaceful cities in England.

Those people are idiots.

There are racists, hooligans, skinheads, etc. in the UK—like anywhere else, really.

I’m sorry you had to be the recipient of that idiocy.

Here, Ivpin explained that precisely this sort of thing does indeed happen to her in the U.K., but mainly from people in passing cars or motorcycles on relatively empty streets, not from people on busy streets or in buses.

OK maybe they do the same in the UK, I don't know. I just felt perplexed when reading the OP, because unless you literally have never seen a person with different colour skin to you before, there's no reason to be racist. When I see a black or Asian person I barely notice their colour skin. I just see them as a person. I subconsciously notice their colour skin of course, because it's part of their appearance, but not enough to think anything differently about them.

Although I don't like extreme political correctness, I still am not racist. I just want everything to be equal. Not one race should get more privileged than another. We're all humans and nobody should be made to feel like a freak just because of their colour skin. In my city it's so normal to have different races that nobody bats an eye. That's probably what I was referring to. I don't know everything.