The post you responded to was jocular, but here is my serious response to your post:
About religion: I have in the past been judged in the workplace pretty harshly. I thought of it as religious persecution, though actually I was pretty odd among the people I worked with. They were very sexually promiscuous, and I was a genuinely not. They had a lot of friends, and I was a loner. That sort of thing made me a race unto myself. I could certainly imagine it working in reverse for someone who was not religious and worked with religious people. That person might have that same experience of not fitting in, and I can tell you not everybody who is religious is nice.
Race is a different story. People of the same race flock together, because they feel safe with people they understand. The separation between the groups causes rumours and misunderstandings to grow. This can just be an office clique or it can be centuries of time and a completely different language and culture. The longer the groups stay apart and don't mix, the bigger the misunderstandings become. The bigger the misunderstandings, the worse the tendency for racism. Naturally racism and religious persecution are usually activated by people with problem personalities. There's always somebody.
Apparently one of had a distant black ancestor.
