I am not so sure I ‘believe’ the renditions of Gates and Jackson, while admittedly it more than likely happened, with them sort of embeleshing it.
Now, with rabidralph, I am not sure it is racist other than the clerk thought your family was inherently stupid (for one reason or another) and figured you wouldn’t notice the difference in the TV you were looking at and the others, which in an essence just points out the stupidity of the clerk, as I always had the impression that money was ‘green’ and the boss/owner didn’t really care who put it in the till as long as it was ‘his’......
A friend that I worked for is a Ret COL USA that went to West Point in the early to mid 50’s followed up by Fort Benning.
He and his classmates used to have ‘fun’ by going to the clubs outside the gate (GA) and be refused service because my friend was Black.
More often than not, the ‘Band of Brothers- 1 Black, other 5 or 6 white’ would ‘teach’ the owner what Brothers were about.
Naturally this wasn’t an everynight thing but my friend did note that he didn’t recall being invited to accompany any of his classmates on Leave or other family get togethers - not that he would have gone, he did ‘understand’ the situation but his wife ‘never forgot’.
A lot of that ‘changed’ when he attained the rank of LTCOL, but then again, the times had also changed.
Sadly, because of the hard work of BO and his minions, including Holder, I see a late 50’s early 60’s attitude on race beginning anew and hopefully it doesn’t get any ‘worse’.
Well, we did come to this country with funny accents so maybe he thought we were stupid. I don’t know. I will say that a lot of what passes for racism is, in fact, stupidity. So I don’t believe there’s as much racism in America today as there was during the time of MLK and before. And if it’s covert racism, who can tell what’s in another person’s heart?