A few weeks ago, I visited Pittsburgh to see some old college buddies. While walking to grab some grub, we passed by a couple of drunk students. Upon seeing that a couple of us were asian, one of them decided that he knew how to speak Chinese, and proceeded to call out, "Ching chang chong," ad infinitum. We just kept walking. One of my buddies said to just ignore him. Easy enough, I thought to myself. I felt more shocked than offended; I had never really been the recipient of such outright idiocy. The night passed without further event, and I filed the incident away.
Two weekends later found me in Great Neck, visiting my girlfriend. I was trying to cheer her up by making her some food, with paella being the request. I pulled down pretty much every Spanish cookbook I could find. A librarian noticed me looking through the cookbooks, and informed me that the library had just gotten a brand new Chinese cookbook. Smiling weakly, I told him that I'd pretty much found what I was looking for and kept browsing. How quaint, I thought, at least it was well-meaning, unlike the night in Pittsburgh. (The joke ended up being on me, as I cooked up an amazing paella in a wok.)
On the way back home, I mulled over the two completely separate incidences. I previously held the naive notion that this kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen anymore, that all the racial awareness and diversity pieces in the classroom early on, not to mention the festivities surrounding Martin Luther King Jr. day were supposed to at least let people know that that racism wasn't socially acceptable anymore.
And yet I knew that wasn't the case. I knew in my own heart there still were ugly bastions of racism, pieces that would sometimes bubble up embarrassingly in conversation, pieces that I wish I could just throw away. I wonder what future generations will bring in terms of acceptance.
Thanks for listening to me ramble. I believe that's what these things are for, after all... Feel free to downvote, but at least do me the favor of telling me why.