Matthew Walsh's EFL ESL website

" You Have Been Racially Profiled"

(From an exchange student in Japan)

  Racism in Japan? Well, I haven't really felt it, but sometimes some funny things happen. Of course my host-family and fellow students are really nice, but sometimes I notice people won't let me speak Japanese. When I go to a store, sometimes the person who is working there starts speaking broken English and when I ask a question in Japanese, they seem to pretend like I didn't speak Japanese and keep on using broken English. It's very confusing. Often, I can't understand.
  The thing that bugs me is that I can see that the person has judged me from my appearance. And, even after I speak Japanese, they refuse to talk normally to me. It makes me feel more like a thing than a human. 
  Also, one time, I was in the park and a bunch of elementary school students surrounded me and started saying all the English words and phrases they knew. It was cute, but bizarre.
  Thinking about this kind of 'racial profiling' that people do made me think of things in my own country. People often do the same kinds of rude things. They make generalizations about some nationalities or skin-colors. It's probably worse there, but I never noticed before I experienced it as a victim. I now know how people feel if somebody says something about who they are before they know 'who they are'. I will be careful not to say such things in the future.