Racial insult and a delayed recognition

I had to pick up my sister from the airport today and that too during busy hour. I am a rather nervous driver. I can’t tell if I’m better or worse when I am alone in the car. Today, I was. I tend to get even more nervous when the road is too busy or there is a rush and have trouble making quick decisions. And I’m very aware of my shortcomings.

The airport road can get really confusing if you are not able to pull over around the area where you intended. Coming back around can be cumbersome and stressful. My sister directed me to insufficient space between two cars and I went with it. There I was, awkwardly wedged between two cars feeling flustered. My sister asked the car behind me to back up a little since he had space. The guy was nice enough to comply. Even the parking police was there to try to help me almost immediately.  Meanwhile another car passsed by the left lane carrying an old Caucasian gentleman who saw it fit to scream out “What country did you learn driving from?”. I did not think much of it then because I knew I was the one at fault there and that and only that played in my mind.

But now that I look back, I realize, I didn’t even recognize what was clearly a racial insult. And that right there is a pretty big problem. I gave it some more thought, wondering what would’ve been an appropriate response from me. First response that came to my head was also an inappropriate way of pointing out that he was being racist. But that would be a knee jerk reaction. However, I wish I did point out that there was no reason to be racist.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: