Racist rant from the government

Its the government calling, and they don't think that a person with an accent can be an American. Today we are talking about a racist phone call my wife received in the course of doing some IT work. It seems that if you cannot get what you want, you tell the other person you work for the government, and that they are a liar because they have an accent.

All kidding aside, this did happen to my wife. Someone called, didn't get what they want (they expected my wife to speed up the postal service) started talking about how they work for the government, and then started asking where my wife was located. When she told them she was in the United States they proceeded to tell her that while the company she works for is located in the US, she is not (because she has an accent). That only came out after a bit of swearing.

I really don't know if that happened simply because the person was angry, but that is a terrible way to deal with your anger. Are there really people out there who see racist remarks as being about the same as a well placed swear word?

I wish that were the only racist experience we had since coming back, but one was more serious. My son was born abroad, and so he has a consular record of birth abroad. He has a passport as well, but still needed social security number. We sent in all his documents along with my wife's passport (all originals as required) and then heard nothing for about a month. After doing some inquiring (and getting hung up on many times) they simply told us that they had mailed back the documents immediately after receiving them. The only problem is that they never came back. Two months later, with our documents apparently lost, they informed us that my son's application was rejected. Their reason was that they wouldn't accept his passport, or his consular record of birth abroad. They had taken one look at my wife's Chinese sounding name and tossed all the documents in a corner. Fortunately a senator stepped in to help, and magically my son was approved. Not only that, but all the documents that had supposedly been mailed and lost months before showed up in our mailbox a couple days later.

I really don't think racism is a major problem in the US, but even small occurrences can have a dramatic impact on the people it is aimed at.