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| We had to change to tiger catching at some point but I don't know how they are supposed to pay the 50$ per day fine. |
There was quite a bit of casual racism in my town growing up, which was odd in that there were not a lot of races. The populous was white with a few Hispanics.
We picked teams at school with the old, 'catch an N-word by the toe' version of Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Moe. No one thought that there was anything wrong with it, not the kids or any of the adults in earshot. I was never corrected, not once. In our defense, we had no idea that it was such a derogatory term let alone what that word meant.
It also didn't help that we had terrible adult examples. I knew of at least two black dogs in town named the N-word. Any time something was poorly assembled people of all types would refer to it as N*****-rigging. There was a constant supply of Polish, Mexican, Black and Jewish jokes. I am not sure why we thought they were funny because they were based on stereotypes of people we had no contact with at all.
It wasn't until I went to Jr. high in the next town over that I started to understand how racist so many of the kids and adults I grew up with were. Once on the bus there was a black girl, the only one in the school, sitting two rows behind a boy who told a joke about why there were no black people in the Flintstones. I just wanted to crawl under my seat in associated shame when he realized that she could hear him and was crying. The girls on the bus ripped into the kid for being a jerk and he apologized over and over. Girls our age becoming sensitive to racist remarks is what stopped the racist jokes, at least in public. If you wanted any chance of dating one of the classy girls racist humour or remarks just wouldn't fly.
