Can I add into this again? Forgive me.
I am white English, nearly 76 now so brought up and educated in the then best Grammar school in London, 625 boys, masters wearing mortar boards and black gowns and all male and plenty of caning, in the last years of the British Empire educational system (you can imagine what we were taught about the world and the peoples in it? )- and reading the
@nycwalking post again (for the fourth time) I now realise that my point of view on this subject is probably hopelessly invalid, invalid because I am white and English and old school and don't have to live with (or even notice) the small and 'insignificant' slights that people of colour have to endure every day - probably much more in the USA than elsewhere.
Here's the thing - my only racist 'insignificant' story. Many decades ago I was in Casablanca, Morocco, and I met an American guy, from LA .. he was broke (had run out of cash until the banks reopened after a holiday, no cashpoints back then) so I suggested we went for a cup of tea.
We went to a cafe with outdoor terrace and sat outside and I ordered - merely because it was my invite. The waiter seemed 'normal' but when he returned he placed a tea in a cup and saucer with tea spoon, with a small plate with a biscuit on it at my new friends' place, and to me set down a cup of tea, no saucer, no spoon, no plate with biscuit, and walked away.
My new friend didn't notice until I pointed it out to him and then he roared with laughter, it choked him up. Why? Because he was a young black guy and what the waiter had done was to treat me the way black people get treated all the time, because he and the waiter were black and I was white. He told me that this was the first time in his life that this had ever happened.
That has never left me, and, pondering more, maybe I do actually know why there are almost no metal detectorists who are black, and why so few on Camino - not because of those of we to whom it isn't important but because of all those others, Spanish and pilgrims, who would do those daily tiny slights that cut so deep.
So my thoughts. If I am wrong here I apologise.