I’ve got a racist situation to share.... story time
My wife is from Thailand and now a US citizen, our children are obviously mixed. We live in NC near a military base where nobody gives a phuck about your ethnicity who you date, marry, ect. We go on vacation up to the NE US (Western PA), so while we are at the supermarket some POS a$$ MF’rs has the nerve to approach my wife who has my infant daughter and make some disparaging comments. Sad thing is my wife had a hat identifying her being military affilited, so evidently he picked up that she was married to a serviceman. The comment was something to the effect that “all you gooks trick the young GI’s, get knocked up just for citizenship and to go to the land of the big PX, divorce them and bring your entire family over”.
This all went down while I was off getting dairy grabbing milk or something. she mentions this while we are checking out, perpetrators are no where to be found, anyway the reference told me that the guy is or was military, that’s what made the situation really upsetting to me, beside the wife being visibly rattled. We go outside and load up my truck and guess who we see hanging out around a few trucks in the far corner of the parking lot... the racist POS and his cronies, we load and I pull around, my wife is insisting that I let it go... I’m assuming he saw my SF front license tag and my post decal which met I was on active duty... and about 40 years old at the time which met I definitely outranked him. So as I’m getting out of the truck he was already apologizing, the other guys are getting in there cars and leaving.... $he was maybe 18-19 years old and said he’s in Marine Corp and home on leave, he didn’t need any trouble and claimed he did it on a dare from his “friends” who just abandoned him.
So I sheepishly gave him a history lesson on insulting Asians correctly....LoL, The word gook or guk in his context is derived from the the Korean word for country, Hanguk is the word for Korea, Miguk is the word for America... so technically we are all guks of sorts... also my wife happens to be from Thailand, from central Thailand with Laoation roots, so the proper slur for her would be “Eson”... I told him he said sorry to the wrong person, so he walks around the truck and genuinely apologized to my wife... she started crying, I told him “good job are you happy now” hoped in and was about to drive off and realize he’s all by himself now, I ask if he has a car? He says “no I’m good” I offered to drive him home without hard feelings.... I’m sure he was too embarrassed to get in my truck so of course he declined.
To this day nearly 10 years later I’d like to believe that I may have provided that young man a lesson he learned from, racism is a learned behavior, but so is compassion. Administration of an ass beating would’ve only made his feelings of racism stronger, and endangering my security clearance. I feel that handling the situation as an adult and hi seeing how he hurt my wife may have changed the anger in his heart, and how he looked at foreigners.
Unfortunately this being a while ago, it seems like things are only regressing here in the US, which saddens me.