Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/30/racist-lady-educated.html
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objects to young passengers not speaking English in a private conversation she was not party to
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ok, white people…let’s take this gentleman nice man as an example and act like him when we witness racism to others. well done.
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Amherst, Ma? Lol
Hippy tree hugging people loving people capital of Ma. She’s out of place there, BIG TIME.
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Is it telling that a cop comes along and asks the victims for their IDs, but not the elderly white man defending them?
I’d say so, since when someone on the bus points out that they don’t have to show him ID, the cop does say, “All I want to do is document who I spoke to.” And yet while on the bus, he"s just spent most of his time speaking to the white man.
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Isn’t that pole at the cop’s back lettered in Spanish?
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Unpopular opinion here:
Americans (there’s other way to say People that lives on US?) are so accostumed with English being lingua franca somehow in the world that they complain when people do on their country what they do in other’s.
Believe me, I needed to at least some times (I think at least a dozen) to help American people here in Brazil to deal with brazilians that didn’t speak English.
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It may be Amherst, but it’s still Massachusetts, and having grown up there I know that so-called Liberal Stronghold state is racist AF.
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It’s a good thing she wasn’t on the bus in San Ysidro, CA. That would have been a Scanners level event.
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Maybe, but then, I don’t think people in the U.S. who do this (it’s actually pretty common for white folks here to complain when they overhear others speaking another language) care at all what happens in other countries.
They’re provincial bigots who think everything around them should happen on their own familiar terms, and they’re also afraid of the demographic changes happening in the U.S.
And of course, they completely ignore how the U.S. generally (if usually superficially) takes prides in its ethnoracial diversity.
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That “somehow” is colonialism…
That said, I think this is a case of xenophobia and racism. It happens elsewhere too, here in my country you also get people complaining about dirty foreigners who should go back to where they came from when they hear people talking in another language. (Funnily enough this can happen regardless of the tourists’ skin tone, it’s just “ugh how dare they come here and flaunt not being from here!”)
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I mean, to be fair the video cuts off after he asked one person for ID, he may have asked the old dude as well.
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Maybe something is lost in the translation, but isn’t this what @fabiocosta0305 is suggesting? Or am I misunderstanding?
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And it’s obvious that she thinks Puerto Rico is a country, as they always do.
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No offense Rob, but “elderly”? That man appears ro be in his late 40s/early 50s.
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Absolutely – in this woman’s mind, she can’t be “racist” because she loves Puerto Ricans in a sort of abstract “I follow Lin Manuel Miranda on Twitter” sense, but the fact that she distrusts people that are a different color so much that she’s angered by them speaking a different language to each other is a sort of deep-seated racism. Not being in on the conversation makes her instantly suspicious. She’s paranoid and xenophobic, and being called out on it made her double-down angrily.
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Well, all I can offer is yet another maybe. At any rate, it seems that all 3 of us are on the same page. 
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Apparently, this woman had never ridden public transit before that day; otherwise, she’d know that headphones/music are an easy solution to shutting out other people’s conversations, no matter what language they may be in.
Good for the guy who stood up to the bigot; too bad about the cop being so typical in his attitude.
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