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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

There used to be guide book for African American travelers called the green book. It helped them know places they could use the bathroom, eat, and lodge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Boo...

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Even in Canada today you can still see instances of this. Fairly disgusting, to put it mildly. I found this out when we employed the one person of color in the community as a gas station attendant, the reverse situation sketched in the wikipedia article linked. Large customers would contact me and pointedly demand we fire the person or they'd cease doing business (this was fine with me, the nearest alternative was a 90 km round-trip and not serving them for a couple of weeks taught several of those customers expensive lessons about racial intolerance, I suspect that they did not change their mentality even if outwardly they eventually relented and begged to be served again).

Assholes.

Where in Canada was this? I could possibly see it in Northern Ontario, they were eagle eyed watching a black friend of mine there. In the cities or southern Ontario I'd be very surprised to witness open racism.

Northern Ontario, spot on. But even in the cities I've seen plenty of it, just more clever variations.

Growing up it wasn't something we really thought of. People of all sorts were always around us. In high school we even used to play the game of trying to pronounce someone's name "correctly" (Which could be really difficult if you didn't have the right accent).

I had heard from people about 10 years older than me that they got flak for interracial marriage. It seemed absolutely alien to me at the time.

I know entire families who got split in half because one half decided to become Evangelical Christians while the other half remained Dutch Reformed. It's not the same thing, but similarly alien to me.

Sad.

Did (or, do) First Nations people experience similar overt racism?

Yes, no doubt. I befriended some people from those communities (apparently a rarity) and some of the stories they told made me cringe. There are quite a few stereotypes at work there and if you're born into one of those then you'll be working uphill to escape these. The net effect is that First Nations people tend to be either un-employed or employed as cheap labor only. It's a very sad story and even though on paper the Canadian government is doing all kinds of things to create a more level playing field the only viable option a First Nations born person has to change that is to assimilate.

How long ago was this? I thought you were a technology consultant living in the Netherlands.

8 years. And yes, you are right but it wasn't always so... I've lived in Canada between 2003 and 2008.

Do you keep mental tabs on the claims of users? What's my file say?

> Even in Canada today

Drop the surprise. Canada is populated by people. People in Canada are just as assholish, racist and disgusting as people anywhere else in the world.

I'm embarrassed that I didn't even think that something like this would exist.

Thank you for posting it!

My grandfather's job in the military (in the early 1950s) was to desegregate (by aggressive diplomacy) places to eat and rest between East Coast bases, because when soldiers travelled together (esp. by the busload), all of them were limited by the fact that any of them were black.

America is not a great place for black people.

Also: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-green-book/

They're getting rare (as they're torn down and rebuilt), but if you stop at a rest stop along the interstate and encounter a men's or women's restroom that has two entrances, that's one that was built during segregation, and it originally had a wall inside dividing it into white and colored sections.

That article is really wikipedia at its finest.

Steely Dan even wrote a song about it.

I've read the lyrics and don't have the cultural background to get everything. I couldn't find anything racist in it and don't think it was supposed to. Is that correct? I'm asking because you mentioned it in this context here.

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