Racial Nastiness

This may offend some, actually, but it seems a valuable service to me: someone's collecting instances of people using the 'N' word on Facebook, and blogging them. Racism is always depressing when I encounter it, but what's really saddening here is how casual and open these folks are about it. I found this one particularly depressing, because of the guy's profile pic -- he's a smiling daddy, holding his kid. I suppose he's already raising the next generation of folks who hate. Or there's this one, which nicely juxtaposes one woman's nasty racism with her oh-so-devout Christianity.

I don't know if I'm seeing it more, or if there's more of it to see, but wow, am I seeing a lot of nasty hate out there. The other day I'm in a store (not The Store), and I see a guy pushing around a shopping card with his toddler daughter in the cart seat. And he's being all happy and cute with his daughter. Kind of nice and heartwarming, right? Until he happened to turn around, and I saw his t-shirt: a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, with the caption "The Prophet Muhammad eats diarrhea".

(Oh, and since I'm on the topic, let me say this: Yes, I think that New York State's Republican candidate for Governor, Carl Paladino, is likely racist. To my way of thinking, you don't find the kinds of e-mails he was happily forwarding to everyone in his address book funny if you're not racist. Any justifications based on some kind of convoluted logic that those kinds of things may be racist, but he's not racist because all he did was forward them, strike me as terribly unconvincing.)