Racism

Today I witnessed the scariest thing. I was shopping with my Romanian roommates at this store called “Smart and Final”. As we were checking out with our stuff at one register, I started overhearing some whining and complaining from a customer at the other. The customer was a white, blonde woman, overweight, with high blood pressure problems (she got red really easily). She was complaining about the Mexican woman standing behind her in line. I don’t know how the whole thing started, but as I listened more closely, I hear things like “You come to our country and take our jobs” “You don’t even speak any English”, “ Go back where you came from”, “I pay taxes here”.

The Mexican woman’s English was indeed quite limited, so she couldn’t quite come up with a rebuke. As soon as she raised her voice to say anything in broken English, the white woman got more agitated and red in the face, and carried on with her rants.

At some point the white woman said to the cashier “Get this woman off my back … I spend thousands of dollars in this store”. The cashier by the way was not white.

So it’s like the Mexican woman is some kind of annoying animal, and the white woman owns the freaking store because she spends money there regularly. Plus she pays taxes, and the stupid Mexicans want to take her job and her tax money. Oh boy, I wanted to say something, and probably should have. But I was in shock, and not really used to a situation like this – I mean I’ve been in America for 10 years, and this is the first time I heard something as blatant as this.