I used to be the only white guy in my football league. I used to be thrown abuse all the time from the supporters. But I never let it bother me as this sort of abuse is used by ignorant people and to be fair my team mates were very supportive..

I'm Asian but because of the area I lived in, I went to a mostly white high school. I wasn't the most popular kid in school nor was I picked on - I had my own circle of friends who were all Caucasians. Some kids would pretend to be funny and say things like ching chang chong or something but I just ignored it and figured the kid was stupid and went on with my life. Suppose that since I am an educated American born Asian, I am not made fun of as much as other minorities in the US but I am well aware that racism still exist.

I feel the sting of racism every time I realize that I might not get the job I'm applying for because I don't fit in with the company's minority quota. Being a white male is how would you say... a hard knock life.

I live in Ottawa, Canada, a place most people would think of as politically progressive. So did I, once. I had a business partner whose name was Frank. Frank is dead now (went to bed one night with the flu, got a blood clot that travelled to his heart, and never woke up), but at the time we ran a marketing company together. Frank was South American, from Guyana, with medium-dark skin, but he also had dreadlocks, which added to his visible "blackness." One day while we were out working -- both of us dressed in suit and tie -- in a suburb of Ottawa called Barrhaven, Frank and I went to an anonymous-looking restaurant in a mini-mall there for lunch. The restaurant was empty except for us, but we sat there a long, long time while the waitress walked back and forth and around us, puttering around and generally idle, but totally ignoring us. A tried to flag her down a few times, but she refused to even look at us. After a half-hour or so, I was totally mystified. Frank leaned across the table, touched my arm, and whispered, "Let's go." Outside the restaurant I asked Frank what the hell was going on. He looked at me pityingly for my naivete and said, "It's because I'm black." I stopped dead, totally dumbfounded. It had never even occured to me as a possibility. I mean, stuff like that happened in Mississippi in the 1950s, but I couldn't imagine it happening today, right here in Ottawa. I was so outraged I wanted to go back and flip over tables, smash things, and generally make an enormous scene. Frank asked me not to, and we just went back to work. He told me if he made a scene every time he was the subject of racism, he'd spend all his time doing nothing but. But I never forgot and never will.