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I would be willing to bet the airport attendant was more annoyed at the lady because she was traveling with children than her race. You must have been on an airline that doesn't allow people with kids to board first? Or maybe they were older kids. Anyway, there are two type of people (customers and workers both) in an airport. Those that love kids and are helpful and kind and generous when you are traveling with them. And those that absolutely loathe kids (maybe not in general, but in the airport), and that it is a crime against humanity that someone would have the audacity to bring children under 18 to an airport. My kids are for the most part pretty well behaved and I remember one time getting scolded for the way my kids were all ASLEEP on the plane! They were all buckled and sleeping peacefully and yet that particular flight attendant still felt it unreasonable that kids were on his airplane! (The beef was that one of my kids feet was lightly resting on the seat in front of her, and even when the kind lady in front of her stood up and argued for my cause with the flight attendant he still wouldn't let it go! Eventually I had to WAKE HER UP so I could readjust her legs to get him off our backs! Of course after that she was cranky and couldn't fall back asleep and caused way more fuss than if he had just minded his own business.) Oh well, moral of the story is that things that happen in airports and airplanes should mostly be taken with about 4 metric tons of salt and the motivations behind any type of behavior there could be one of a million things.
On a completely different note it saddens me that the ratio of people who love kids vs loathe them seems to be turning in the wrong direction (at least the wrong direction IMHO), and it is also starting to seep out of the airports and such and into everyday life. In our little town in Oregon it is no big deal, but going to some places in "The BIg City", Portland, we practically get sneered at. Especially with four (in a hipsters eyes) dirty, foul, pollution generating monsters, but even my sister in law who only has one child and lives in Portland deals with anti parenting bias daily. From small thing like people sighing or leaving or rolling their eyes when they see you walk into the restaurant they are in, to full on confrontations with people who think they are better than you because they are not contributing to the "over population problem", or "why would you bring a child into a world like this one?" or "Why would you waste your money that way". It amazes me the bravado and cajones of some of the random strangers that have come up to me in Nordstroms and flat out told me I am a bad person for having children!
More than a racial issue I see these things, just like the rude flight attendant or your rude ticket taker, to be a selfish, amoral, egotistical issue. It is all about making one's self feel better by sneering at someone who made different, and therefor worse / wrong choice in life and thus reenforceing to yourself that you made the right choices and you are better.
And in fact one of the holier than though pedestals that these type of people love to get on is being the PC police and actively admonishing people for any hint of unintended racism or sexism or any other type of ism, smh. And being rude or not follow the rules to the letter of the law is exactly and "ism" these folks like to jump on... like cutting in line, ESPECIALLY if it was unintentional ;) "How can you be so rude or blind to NOT notice you were cutting in line ::GASP::"
As far as Ichiro goes I don't know if I would say he was subject to any racism, certainly people in general don't like change, or anything out of the ordinary. And baseball folks are even more to the extreme of that camp. Not being anywhere near the actual day to day of the team or Ichiro himself, all we can really comment on is how fans from afar see Ichiro, and I would say the defining characteristic of this group is that Ichiro is an extremely polarizing figure. Much like Tim Tebow or Barry Bonds, or any number of other controversial out of the ordinary famous people. Of course inextricably tied to Ichiro's differences and out of the ordinariness is his race, upbringing, history, actions, personality, etc, etc, etc. So in a very general and vague way you could say that any of his lows came about in some small way because of his race, but then you would also have to say that any of his highs (and he has had a lot of very high highs) also came about by his race.
Anyway, there are my can't sleep, arrg I have to be up in 5 hours, why cant I sleep!, 3.5 cents :)