It pleases me to see this thread here.
Although you can't tell by looking at me, I'm a breed, I'm half white and half red.
As a result, all my life, both races (as well as other assorted races, those with olive skin) have assumed that I'm one of them, and felt free to speak freely about "other" races in my presence, usually assuming that my silence indicated my allignment with the position they were stating. This exposure set me in my contempt for racists long ago.
Roughly fifteen (maybe twenty, I loose track) years ago, I stopped being silent.
At the time, I was a member of a construction union, and there is no harder core bastion of racism that I'm aware of outside of prison than a union construction jobshack, and to make a long story short, I ended up making myself virtually unemployable in my home city. Since I'm too stubborn to move, now I run my own construction company.
Sometimes, Fate is kind, and I ended up signing an agreement with the very same union I was once a member of, and some of the expressions that happen when a new hand reports for work on dispatch morning make me a happy man.
In my opinion, the most dangerous type of racist is a racist who honestly believes that he isn't. Someone who honestly believes that he doesn't treat "one of them" any differently than he would his friends, without realizing that he drew two lines based on race in that single sentence, not to mention that one of the lines separates other races from ever being counted as his friends, and without realizing that as long as it bears mentioning, it's an issue. If there was no issue, there would be nothing to discuss.
The boys in the white sheets and the clowns with the swastikas aren't dangerous. We know who they are, they go out of their way to tell us who they are. Without even the discipline to remain concealed, they are little better than punchlines. They think they are a threat with their cultures of violence, when I'm probably better armed and almost certainly a better shot, and violence pales beside things like glass ceilings and grinding, hopeless poverty. I would submit that when poverty becomes a way of life, as on the Pine Ridge res, and the children of your children's children will live and die in the same hopeless way of life, damage far beyond any firefight has been done.
One of the more pleasant experiences in recent memory was the discovery that the pistol league I had joined was one of the most tolerant places I've discovered in a very long time. Maybe it's that "polite society" phenomenon, I don't know, but it's responsible for my willingness to make this post, and discuss this issue with people I've never seen.
What I've seen is that the league I belong to accepts minorities and women without comment, which is one of the final steps in true equality.
The WNBA isn't equality. Equality would be female players in the NBA, at the same rates of pay, based on the same criteria, points scored, without becoming a cause for comment.
When I was an apprentice, some of the first women were beginning to join our union, and I apprenticed with some of them. Over the years, we slugged it out in job shack after job shack, and all but a few of the super-humanly strong ladies left.
Now some of those women are foremen, and jobsite superintendents, and while there are still some dinosaurs who object, they are becoming fewer and fewer, and I believe that it's going to take one more generation.
That is, the generation that is starting it's apprenticship now, who will be dispatched for the first time Monday morning, and walk into their first jobshack latter that morning to find a woman in charge will be the first generation to stand a chance.
Because as far as they will be concerned, that will be the way it's always been, and it won't be worthy of comment.
If you can remember a time when there was a race that was a second class citizen, who had to put out more to get to the same place, then you and I are probably both lost. We've been poisoned, and neither you nor I will ever be able to set the memory of that time completely aside. We will forever pine for it, or we will forever over-compensate for it, or we will see it where it doesn't exist, and we will never be able to balance our humanity on that razor edge perfectly enough to erase it. All we can do is fight it, and hope to produce that first morning in the jobshack, so that one day, there will be a generation who will only remember if not equality, then peace. Then acceptance. Then, perhaps, equality.
It's not just gunshops. It's everywhere, from WalMart to the Bon Marche, from restaraunts to auto body shops to dentists. Anywhere there are lazy people, you can find it. When you make a rule about a class of people, you are attempting to relieve yourself of the responsibility of analyzing people on case by case basis.
As it happens, it was a Washington State Patrolman who taught this to me, and he was teaching me about my brand new Springfield Milspec at the time. We were going over the rudimentry basics about when you draw and when you shoot, and when you don't. We had worked out most of it, and I made the statement "if you point a weapon at me, at my wife, or, my personal threshold, if you hit my wife, I kill you."
He said "Really? So, if an 84 pound, 92 year old woman who stands 4 foot 10 inches tall, has lost her glasses and has one arm hits your wife, you'll draw and kill her?"
Well, of course not. You can't make a rule, because any rule you make will have a hole in it. The analysis has to happen on a case by case basis, on the spot, under fire. As we talked, I realized that that's the basis of racism, and that's what's wrong with it. You can't avoid the mess, the effort, the inconvenience, and the mistakes involved in making decisions about people on a case by case basis, one at a time, on the spot, under fire.
As I said, it pleases me to see this thread, more than I can say.
In my experience, racists don't discuss racism, other than to either deny it exists or declare theirs proudly.
Did the guy work there, or was just a customer? 
