It was Christmas morning in San Francisco, California and my uncle was taking care of my aunt’s pets before coming over to my grandparent’s house to meet up with everyone for Christmas festivities. As my uncle was walking back to his car, one of the neighbors approached him to complain about how he couldn’t see down the hill to get out of his parking space because my uncle’s van was too big. (My uncle drives a large white utility van. It’s for his work and his only means of transportation.) The neighbor, living in an affluent area in San Francisco, immediately assumed my uncle didn’t live there and had no right to park his car there. He didn’t know my uncle was staying with family and that he had just come from the house next door. The neighbor backed up his demands that my uncle moves his car with several rude, racist, and classist comments to my uncle, including the rallying cry of racists everywhere, “go back to where you came from.” The kicker of the story is that my uncle is actually Native American (Navaho). This white man, who is living not only in a state, but a country that was stolen from Native Americans told a Native American man to “go back to where he came from.” This was Christmas morning and my uncle, who has a “let’s all get along temperament, was left feeling pretty down. The whole encounter made him feel like he was just viewed as an unwanted outsider, who could be treated as a lower life form who had no right to park in a particular neighborhood. This wasn’t the first time people have discriminated against him based on his appearance, nor was it the most dramatic and potentially life-threatening occurrence. The thing that really hurt was that it was Christmas morning and the racist Scrooge of the neighborhood had not discovered the true meaning of Christmas. People make assumptions, that’s normal, but feeling justified in acting in a hurtful and hostile manner simply because of these assumptions is wrong. That neighbor didn’t just assume my uncle was Hispanic, he also assumed that because of what my uncle looked like, he didn’t belong in such a wealthy area. The neighbor also assumed that he then had the right to order him to move his car and throw in a racist rant as well. Why? Why did the neighbor feel he belonged there and not my uncle? Why did he feel free to treat someone this way? Because America is a segregated country, not only by skin color but by income and since my uncle didn’t fit the norm of the neighborhood, this man decided to come outside of his multi-million-dollar house on Christmas morning, morph into the love child of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch and feel entitled to dump his racist vitriol on my friendly and kind uncle. The moral of this story is whatever your assumptions are, everyone, deserves to be treated with respect, and don’t be a racist bigot.