Do native speakers tolerate foreign accents?

from OHIO

My dear friend, it seems to me that OHIO has a bad reputation. Something unpleasant happened to my friend who visited her ill sister living there. Some cops treated him like shit and passed on rude comments against his country. Though you can not paint all Americans with the same brush.

My older brother runs a celluar company in Dallas. Many of employees work for him are American males and females. If they hate a foreign accent or consider a foreign person as less intelligent then how they are working for his company is beyond me. A couple of them had talked to me on the phone as well. I am a foreigner from Pakistan.

My older brother used to tutor some American and Canadian students who were persuing their master studies at some californian universities. If they had a problem with a foreign accent or with a foreign person then why they were getting help from such a person, would not have hurt their pride? You see, you might be generalizing too much, not all American states liek OHIO.

Now come to another side of my post. A year ago my brother entered into Canada through American-Canadian border by car I suppose. He also had a celluar company in Toronto. He went there for some of his work. He was caught up by some of FBI investigators on return. He was procceeded to a closed room and was gone through a strenuous investigation for 5 hours. They checked eavry bit of information regarding his compony, his canadian friends and other stuff such as credit cards.
He also has a citizenship of USA still he was treated like an alien.
Since 9/11 attacks foreign people(esp muslims I guess) need to get used to facing such investigations or debriefings.

I have a lot of pictures in my family albums which my parents took them on their trips to various places of America. It is believable that White Americans hang out with other White Americans and other ethnic groups hang out with theirs. I didn't see a single picture of a white person hanging out with a black person. All groups were hanging with their groups which came across as a surprize to me. Anyways, my brother told me that culture in America is quite different. Here, if brothers are living in the same neighborhod they don't know what they are doing and they don't care about it. So, by nature Americans are reserved and don't want to care about other people's living. I suppose....

Just my ignorant post on the basis of bits and pieces of info I gather from different resources.

When I was in high school, I lived on an American army base in Japan, and the majority of my classmates were half-Asian and half-white. A few were half-Asian and half-black. We also had "pure" Asians, blacks and whites. Everybody hung out with everybody else, as friends, boyfriends/girlfriends, etc. -- EXCEPT for most of the black kids. They stuck to their own and rarely sought friends outside of their circle. There were a few exceptions, including our very out-going class president, but mostly they seemed to segregate themselves. I never knew why. They were the only ethnic group that did this. So it's not just that white people won't have anything to do with blacks -- often it's the other way around.

I noticed a few people like this when I worked in Georgia, as well. I had an easy time making friends with most of my coworkers, black and white, but there were a few black women who would always sit together and seemed to rebuff any attempts I made at casual conversation. Maybe it was me, and maybe it was just those individuals, but it's not an isolated phenomenon!

Uriel, it seems to me that accusing each other is a blaming game. Both parties are at fault. African-Americans always complain about their bad treatment by Caucasians on Tv shows. I mean, I was a watching a program "Fear-Factor" on one of American cable channels. One team consisted of white-Americans and the other team consisted of Black Americans. When the trun of latter team came they said to their white counterparts" we don't get your support at the national level so we need your support for this game." An anchor who was a white American, looking very jolly through out the show but when he heard such comments his face had had quite embarrassing feelings.

There was also a blaming game going on when a African teenager was killed by cops during an investigation. Parents and relatives of the teenager were accusing white cops for strangling him and rejecting the report of a post-martem which was conducted by a white American doctor. On live interview of Good Morning American news channel there was an altercation going on between that doctor and the teenager's parents.

There are countless examples like above I heard on Tv shows. Though I never heard such a complain from a caucasion American saying that they got a bad treatment by black people.

Anyways, we all need to go through a course of " how to respect other humans, moral ethics and etc".

Ain't gonna happen, Boy.

As you can see very well on this very forum, people LOVE their stereotypes and they LOVE to sow hostility and discord -- either for no good reason, or for slights, real or imagined, that hardly affect them personally at all. It's a nasty habit that is shared by eveyone everywhere -- it's just how it's expressed and who gets selected to be the target that varies from place to place.

"everyone" -- sorry.

No, not in the Nordic countries. We just praise ourselves in stead of bitching about others. It's called "positive nationalism", invented by the Great Dane F.N.S. Grundtvig :-)

Oh, you liar, Fredrik! I've heard you do plenty of bitching! ;P

Now girls.....control yourselves. This isn't Big Brother!