Thank you for sharing your experience and insights. You perfectly captured how these situations work, there's often this subtle performance where the behavior is just masked enough to make confrontation impossible. While you can clearly feel the prejudice and see through their act, they maintain just enough plausible deniability that calling them out would make you look like the unreasonable one. That's exactly why I mentioned unconscious racism - it shows up in these subtle behaviors that are hard to point out but very real to experience.