Racial Discrimination

I don't know if it's because I may be naive or just completely unaware of my surroundings at times, but up until recently, perhaps one or two years ago I didn't think that I had ever been a victim of racial discrimination. I come from a bi-racial family, grew up in the suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland and went to Catholic and private schools up until high school. Throughout my entire life I had been exposed to different cultures and races, and even until this day many of my close friends come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds than me. Whenever I was treated unfairly, I choose to believe it was just because that particular person was a jerk, and would have treated a Caucasian the exact same way. That changed a couple of years ago when my daughter was born. My daughter is also of mixed race, and to me she just looks like a little brown baby, I cant pinpoint any one race that I see in her, but apparently other people view her in a different light. There have been several different incidents where me and my daughter have been out in public, sometimes with her father, and we have gotten such outright, dirty looks, it  makes me want to tear up at the fact that there are people out there who will treat my daughter unfairly just because they are assuming what race she is.
One particular incident was extremely disturbing. I had my daughter with me at Wheaton Mall, which is in a predominately Latino neighborhood. An African American couple walked by us, looked at me and my child,  and the man said out loud, "God, these people are just taking over, and they always have so many damn kids." I'm assuming by "these people" he suspected us to be Latino, and for whatever reason I had to let him know I did not appreciate his comment. I'd like to think that I am pretty reserved, but something struck a nerve and I proceeded to yell and cursed at him and his wife for a good ten minutes, letting them know how ignorant I felt they were, along with a few other choice words. Its hard for me to believe that in 2011 there are so many ignorant and racist people. Screaming and yelling may not have been the best way to go about it, and if I could go back, I probably would have told that couple in a more polite way to die slow, and stop worrying about what me and "these people" are doing. Even than, I feel like there is little that can be done to change a person's biased or prejudice views. Hate is learned, and by the time these people are adults, there ignorant views are so embedded in their brains, any other opinion is probably foreign to them. However I plan on continuing to live my life as I see fit, and ignore these uneducated, racist people, and teach my daughter to do the same.