I need to see some unlikely allies.

[Promethea]

I need some help regaining hope in humanity after the last few days. Something that can help is to see instances of someone standing up for someone else, when you think they wouldn't.

You know, when someone is being harassed or opressed, and you see a person approaching, and your first impression is "oh boy, this is getting ugly", but then that person does the opposite of what you feared and defends the victim.

The redneck standing up for the black person.

The religious standing up for the queer.

The nationalist standing up for the expat, I mean immigrant.

You get the idea.

Preferably candid videos of real situations. "Social experiments" only if the situation and acting are believable. I don't think there's any What Would You Do episode that I haven't watched.

Reenactments are fine. So is people telling about what happened, be it in video, audio or written form.

Anything, really.

[RobynD]

There was a great one yesterday about some customers standing up for a breast feeding mom that was getting harassed by some idiot. I will find the link.

I agree with you it's nice to see good news.

[itsApril]

An engineer I know (blond white guy about 50 who grew up in the hill country of North Carolina) speaks with a very pronounced southern style of speech.  At a party, he was talking to someone he had just met, another person from the south.  The person he met assumed that the guy I knew must be a fellow racist and started making disparaging remarks about black people ("n" word included).

The engineer's jaw dropped for a second.  He said, "Let me just stop you right there, pal.  You stupid piece of s**t!  You think because of the way I talk that I must think like you.  I'm nothing like you."  He proceeded to give this racist a tongue-lashing I will never forget, and the guy left the party in confusion and humiliation.

It was beautiful to behold.  The part that sticks with me is that I could have confronted this racist jerk, but there's no way that I (from north and west US) could possibly have had the same impact on this guy.  What floored him was that he was confronted by someone who shared his racial and regional background.  Just hearing my acquaintance talk, he assumed that he was addressing a fellow bigot, and he learned the hard way that he wasn't.