No doubt, there is still a huge amount of latent racism and bigotry around, and I think it will take a few generations more at least before racism is truly as past-tense as we would hope. I could be wrong, and I apologise in advance if this is taken the wrong way, but I get the feeling it's a lot worse in the Americas than in the UK, at least, but I have come across gross racism in every corner of the world I've been to. In the Mediterranean, there's huge stereotyping of non-locals. I grew up in Cyprus, and was shocked at times by the attitudes towards (for instance) Filipinos and Russians.

However, one thing I've found, myself, as a white British male, living now in the UK, in the north in a not especially multicultural city (alas!), is that just being a fairly tall young man in general is a scary thing for others. If I sit down on a bus, generally the only others who would chose to sit next to me are other men. If I sit down next to a woman, they instinctively turn away. Chances are that they're wondering if I sat next to them because I think they're hot, as that's the ONLY image the media presents of men. Shallow, sexist, misogynistic, egocentric pornography-reading adolescents who refuse to grow up. (My description is of how I perceive the typical media representation of men, not how I actually perceive us as a gender - as if a whole gender could possibly fit into one description!)

Mike Moore made a joke of it, in his "Stupid White Men" book, but there is a truth to the thought that pretty much all of the big league institutional wrongdoing that's been done in the world for quite a while now has been done either by, or for, white men (The Khmer Rouge and LRA being notable exceptions). In no particular order: The crusades, the Native American & Australian massacres and other atrocities, Apartheid and all the European invasions and selling into slavery of Africans before that, Nazism & both World Wars, all the recent banking scandals, the KKK, the America/Vietnam war, European/USSR communism, the invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan, the IRA and sectarian violence in Ireland, virtually every ecological disaster of the last 200 years, the insane official racial segregation in the USA up until less than a generation ago, multinationals polluting water sources of villages in India for commercial gain, destroying whole islands in Thailand and Malaysia to obtain minerals, the whole concept of "sex-tourism" and all the slavery, prostitution & poverty that come from that - and so on.

The whole concept of 'white-guilt' certainly has plenty of food for ammunition, and it doesn't take much for white men to get a pretty messed up complex about all this too.

We, as humans, have really shitty stereotypes of each other. Since we live in a media saturated environment, we do tend to get both bad self-images, and images of others from that. We desperately need good /real/ relationships with others to actually realise we're all pretty messed up, and all have the capacity for overwhelming generosity and love, and at the same time soul-crushing evil. It's the human condition.

All that said, I'm really sad that the OP has this experience in his city, and pray for the day when people don't find their self-image, or image of others in what colour their skin or hair or height, weight, sexuality, religion, shape, size, or cultural/racial background is, but instead are free in themselves, and in their society, to define themselves by what they choose to be.

I think I just wrote more than I intended...