I have 2 dogs. One of which is Bella, an adorable black working cocker spaniel of 3.5 years old. She's usually sweet and listens to my commands so well that I got used to let her off her leash most of the time. The only times when I was certain to have her on a leash was if I expected traffic around.
Another things is that we live in an area with an extremely high percentage of immigrants and people with an immigration background. I would say that easily 50% of the neighborhood is black, about half of them from Africa. And this is a problem.
What I have learned is that amongst the black Africans there is a big group of people who are afraid of dogs. And I mean really terrified if a dog runs in their general direction. This makes them run away, show they are scared etc. Bella interprets that as something that means it could be fun to chase them. Like she would chase a cat. And even though I tried to correct the behavior as I got aware of the problem, finally resulting in me not letting her run free around the built up area, that has become only worse. Because nowadays Bella starts barking in a rather aggressive way whenever she sees a black person. It's like totally obvious that she reacts to their blackness. She doesn't do the same if she's coming accross people who aren't black (all shades). But the pattern is so obvious that it almost looks like I trained her to be that way.
It's kind of embarrassing and I have no idea how to make her stop doing this.