A few years ago I was at a dude ranch in Wyoming and there was this very nice British couple.

Halfway through our stay, they started talking about a rash of tack thefts in their area. And then the woman opined about how it was obviously the...

...and used a word for the Roma that is, in the UK, even worse than this one. We are talking absolutely the equivalent of the n word, which is why I'm not going to type it out except to say it begins with g and ends in o.

I reacted with the horror a decent person should react to the use of a hideous racial slur along with racially-charged allegations. Said I didn't want to hear this stuff and stormed off...I was angry, upset, and embarrassed.

The worst part was that the Americans and Canadians didn't understand why, so guess who got shunned for the rest of the trip and had to eat with the wranglers... They weren't familiar with the term and all they saw was an altercation for no good reason, those who even heard anything.

Yeah, I'm kinda STILL mad about it. I hold grudges.

The point is that these were nice people. Ordinary, decent people. The woman was a social worker.

I grew up hearing that word all the time. It was normalized (alongside a nice slice of Islamophobia). Ordinary, decent people still think and feel this way and don't see a reason not to. It's a battle people in Europe need to be fighting much more than they are.