> "He tells them, directly, in the same manner as if he were talking to a drunken buddy making an ass of himself at a bar, "what you just said was offensive/rac

> "He tells them, directly, in the same manner as if he were talking to a drunken buddy making an ass of himself at a bar, "what you just said was offensive/racist/etc. I'm gonna assume that you didn't realize it, but now you do. Cool?" He told me this has resulted in all of them apologizing with minimal awkwardness afterwards." Your world of rainbows and unicorns sounds amazing, where all racism comes from under-informed people who can then be rightly fixed by prompt education! Clearly, oppressively racist institutions where people are powerless to correct the situation don't exist. Where they appear to exist, the victims just didn't assert themselves strongly enough. If they just calmly told their oppressors that they were being racist and offensive, they would stop! This totally explains away the entirety of slavery and apartheid. I'm just shocked that no one over hundreds of years just nicely stopped someone, explained how what they were doing is wrong, and had them stop! </snark> Seriously though, I'm glad that your experiences have been exclusively in places where people actually respond to criticism and education. And I mean that - facing the sort of horrific, powerless racism that many people do every day is terrible, and no one deserves to experience it from either end of the stick. Your experience is not generalizable to all instances of racism - it's not even generalizable to a minority of it.