Even a simple trip to the grocery store was fraught with racial undertones. If, as a non-Southern white person, you forgot to say “Sir,” or, “Ma’am,” to an older white person working a cash register, it was a slight rudeness, the sort of thing you could expect from Yankees and foreigners. If you neglected to use the same honorifics with a black person in the same circumstance, it would probably be taken as a sign of racism and disrespect.
