u/CurrentInternal1087

This story is from when I first started driving. I was practicing in the car with my Dad in the passenger seat. I was trying to leave from a complex of stores into a street. There was a yield sign there at the location I needed to take a right at and merge onto the road. I was nervous as I was still learning driving, when I finally took the turn I got a little close to another car moving in the lane I needed to get into.

The driver of that car slammed his horn at us and made extremely aggressive gestures. His behavior was extremely aggressive and he rolled down his window and yelled at me to pull over to the side and I did although I was nervous. I was very young then and didn’t know better so I did pull over. He told us that he took a picture of the license plate and was ready to call the police. He kept cursing and yelling at us. I was frozen in my seat but my Dad got out of the car to talk to him. He yelled that he had a gun in his car, and my Dad tried to calm him down. I’m pretty sure what he did was a threat and illegal but I didn’t call the police because I was terrified and worried that they wouldn’t care. He later just drove away but I was shocked that me and my Dad had been threatened.

7th grade was probably one of the worst times for me, everybody bullied me or hated me. My neurodivergence made me a very easy target so people collectively disliked me.

Everybody was rude to me, especially in PE class. I wasn’t that good at sports or fitness related activities. I also had severe body confidence issues so I felt insecure about changing into PE clothes that showed my legs and stuff. The PE teacher made it so that on many Fridays, if everybody dressed out, the day would be a day where everybody could just play a variety of sports.

Since my classmates were rude regardless of when I played sports or not, I often didn’t change into my PE clothes—even on the Fridays. As a result, sometimes the sports would be cancelled for all of them. I honestly don’t feel bad, they were awful to me, I wasn’t going to let them have fun.

I recently witnessed racist behavior from staff at the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta. I had arrived from a flight, and my mother has a severe knee problem and needed a wheelchair. I had walked beside her as did my sisters and we went into the wheelchair assistance area. Several other people, who were South Asian as well, also needed wheelchair assistance.

One of the wheelchair assistance members loudly mocked an Indian accent about 40 times. He said the word “don’t” in an Indian accent, then he and the rest of the wheelchair staff laughed about it. I have heard that it’s a meme on social media, however the underlying joke of the meme is an Indian accent.

Overall, the experience was very demeaning. It was very upsetting how the wheelchair staff member mocked Indian accents in front of many South Asian people—including me, my mother, and sisters—while the rest of the staff laughed about it. The racism was shocking!

The racism we experience is way too normalized, I would have never expected that even the wheelchair assistance staff would do this!