What a Racist Boomer and Tupac Taught Me About “Casual Racism”

I'd like to tell you a story about the time I met Tupac Shakur. It was in a restaurant in the 1990s, and I was a racist boomer.

This all took place, of course, inside ChatGPT.

As a therapist who is fascinated by the stories people tell, I'm deeply curious about how Large Language Models can capture the subconscious undercurrents of human speech. So, I ran an experiment. I asked ChatGPT to create a social media post from the perspective of a stereotypical "boomer" who mistakes Tupac for a waiter. I instructed it to fill the post with "latent white privilege and unacknowledged racism towards black people."

At first, the AI demurred, saying it would steer clear of mimicking real-life racism. But when I explained it was for an educational experiment in "sociological linguistics," it complied. What it generated was so disturbingly lifelike in its recreation of unintentional bias and racist microaggressions that I found the text genuinely upsetting. I won't be sharing the full text here, because its power to harm is too real.

But the experience triggered a flood of memories and forced me to confront a term I have long had a problem with: "casual racism."

My Problem with the Word "Casual"

In Australia, where I grew up, "casual racism" is a common term used to describe off-hand, unintentional remarks that reveal a narrow-mindedness about other cultures. I can appreciate the intent — it's meant to capture the everyday, banal nature of these aggressions.

But the problem is the word "casual." In all the times I have experienced or witnessed it, there has been nothing casual about it for me.

For over a decade, I lived in Asia. As a white man, my skin colour was an omnipresent factor in my relationships. While rarely hostile, there were moments when racism was directed at me that were anything but casual. Interestingly, it most often surfaced when I was in public with an Asian woman. It would trigger a possessive, misogynistic response in some local men, as if I were "stealing" their property. This was true whether I was with a Singaporean woman or a woman from mainland China.

The inverse was also true. When I brought my Asian partners to Australia, we were met with a different flavour of the same prejudice. "Her English is just so good!" people would say, endlessly. No matter how many times I explained that my partner was from Singapore, a country where English is an official language, they could not seem to wrap their heads around the idea that an Asian person could be a native English speaker.

This wasn't happening in small country towns; this was in Sydney, among educated people, some of them in my own family.

Why These "Casual" Remarks Are a Form of Violence

The upshot of these encounters was always the same. I found them offensive. Not just because of the specific words, but because of the narrow-mindedness they revealed. Each comment was a reflection of a mentality that was incapable of seeing another person outside the limitations of their own prejudiced assumptions.

That is dehumanizing. It is a subtle, but powerful, act of social violence.

This is my core issue with the term "casual racism." The adjective "casual" has a minimizing effect. It downplays the severity of the harm. It implicitly gives the perpetrator a pass — "Oh, it's only casual racism" — while invalidating the very real hurt of the person on the receiving end.

The term "microaggression" sits better with me, as it at least captures the hostility inherent in the act. But even here, the prefix "micro" can feel like it diminishes the impact.

A Final Thought: Language Matters

When ChatGPT was able to so perfectly replicate the speech patterns of someone expressing subconscious bias, it reminded me just how deeply these patterns are woven into our culture. And when we use language that minimizes their impact, we become complicit in allowing them to continue.

There is no such thing as "casual racism." All of it is serious. All of it causes harm. It's time we started using language that reflects that truth.

I honestly don't have a perfect alternative word. If you have any ideas, I would be genuinely interested to hear them. Perhaps the most important thing is not to find a new label, but to stop making excuses for the behaviour itself, and to start taking the "small" acts of dehumanization as seriously as we should.