Confused and surprised by Linguistic discrimination

I struggled on the quiz... I had trouble like some of the others guessing what racial title they were looking for, but I also had just as much trouble guessing the race. And the funny thing was, I was able to guess those accents that I hear least often, but the ones I hear every day I couldn't figure out and had to look at the answers. I completely missed all of the latin accents, and you'd think that I would recognize those easily. In fact, though only one was really caucasion, I found myself picturing caucasions on nearly half of them.

I was also totally unaware of the Fair Housing discrimination. It makes sense now that it's been brought to my attention, but it was something I had not considered before. I'd almost like to experiment with that myself, just to see. It's definately something that I would like to research and know more about.

The video with the cat was interesting in several ways. I work in Fast Food, so we encounter many different kinds of people. I've noticed that people with strong accents, especially the Asians, seem very embarassed about their accents and sometimes shy away and suddenly speak very quietly when I ask for clarification to be sure of what they want. It's a shame that they're so ashamed of it. I do my best to work with them and I only hope that I'm doing it right. It's really hard to know what to do in order not to hurt or offend people. I often pretend that it's my fault, that I can't hear clearly over the machines, or I just wasn't paying close enough attention. Perhaps with this class I'll learn better.
The fact that they used a cat was interesting to me in an amusing sort of way... I doubt it has much to do with discrimination; but it's been found that often people who grew up with pets such as dogs or cats have better communication skills as a result of having to learn to understand and communicate with the animal in order to provide for its needs.