My old job taught me to be racist
I posted this as a comment on a thread on a different sub, but I also felt it could fit here:
My old job in retail taught me to be subconsciously racist towards Indian people. I used to work at a retail store in the US that sold computers, printer ink, and paper fasteners. I worked in the electronic sales department in high school and would often be the only one in my department most times I worked (thin shifts). This store was in a state with no sales tax right on the border of another state with famously very high sales tax.
If you didn't know, when you buy a laptop from one of these stores for the price listed on the sticker (not even accounting for additional sale discounts), the company is selling it at a pretty significant loss. They rely on the insurance, setups, antivirus, etc. to make up for that and turn a profit. A laptop that gets sold completely naked without anything attached is a huge deal and the whole store's sales numbers tank. Selling even two of these in a week would prompt a call from the district manager. Being in high school and new to working (never having experienced things like sales quotas before) I was very concerned about my individual performance because our store's manager was a real hard seller and demanded high numbers.
Anyways, because of our location and lack of sales tax, we would often get folks from across the border who would resell the laptops on eBay or whatever, and pocket the difference they made in not paying sales tax. These people 90% of the time were Indian (not sure why, but that's just how it was in this area. The other 10% were mostly Chinese but there was 1 white guy who did it too). Because of this, we were taught to identify any Indian person who entered the store and watch them like a hawk to see if they went to the computer section. If they did, we were supposed to say we were out of literally every computer we had in stock (a lie) and send them to another store. In our defense, these guys would come in and buy 10 laptops at once which we were selling at like, a 20% loss. Approving all those sales would have the store shut down by corporate in a month.
Now, being 15 in an environment where I am actively encouraged by my employer to racially profile people on sight, this started affecting the way that I interacted with people in my everyday life. If I encountered an Indian person outside of work (again, I don't know why, but my area had a ton of Indian people in it) I would immediately become suspicious and distrustful of them. It has been well over a decade and I have spent a lot of active mental effort to unlearn this prejudice and I still feel a lot of internal shame for how I treated some of these people.