Comment on I may swear like a pirate, but I'm a fucking PRINCIPLED pirate
fartographer@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
My grandparents on my dad’s side used to make jokes that were funny when I was a kid, more concerning when I got older, and especially concerning as their dementia set in and they began outright stating people’s races in the jokes. In the years since their passing, it’s made me wonder what their beliefs on racism were, even though they raised me to never judge anyone by their race and that race will usually be a factor in how people are treated in the real world but should never be a factor in my personal interactions with anyone.
But those jokes had been weighing kinda heavy on me in recent years. I know they had dementia, but was this possibly at the core of their beliefs?
I recently heard a story, unprompted, from a family member who was present when my dad was in high school or college, in the '70s, and made an off-color joke . Apparently my dad said that a car with a poorly done paint job “looked like a Mexican car.” Without missing a beat, my grandmother punched my dad in the jaw with a right hook and yelled, “WE DO NOT MAKE DEROGATORY JOKES ABOUT PEOPLE FOR THEIR RACE!” My grandmother was always known for how passive, playful, and gentle she was, especially with her kids.
Turns out grandma was not only adamant about race sensitivity, she was kinda a badass. And the jokes I thought were possibly racist were truly homophone humor about regional dialects and not about people’s nationality.
Ashiette@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You know, let us be honest for five minutes.
Psychology has shown that we have biases against anyone who doesn’t look like us. It’s just survival 101 from not so ancient times.
So maybe your parents had theses biases, unconsciently. Maybe even, they have been raised in a society which was racist, by definition. If they have lived anytime before the eighties, things were really rough (not that it’s not right now, but it was something else…)
Now, let’s just say that at their core, they were racist. So what ? Is it really important ? They have shown you how to behave, what is right and what is not. They have worked to better themselves, so that is the only thing that should matter.
Because, in the grand scheme of things, your parents would have told you from age two : do not shit in your pants, and they would have done the same. With dementia, maybe at some point they even forgot that one rule so… Being racist is excusable, because, and I’m sorry, they were not themselves in their final hours.
fartographer@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I appreciate and understand your perspective, but I want to clarify some context:
This was my dad’s mom, so my grandparents. Had they been my parents and I’d known them at the age at which they raised me, then I’d immediately know how they raised their kids. But since this was my grandmother who raised my dad, it left me wondering what kind of parents my dad had. Was my dad a non-judgmental person in spite of his parents?
And the answer was, “no.” He learned to cast aside prejudices from my grandmother’s sick right-cross. It was mostly that kind of revelation that I needed to feel my catharsis.
(Added context: my dad is dead and I never heard that story from him. He died before my grandmother did, so I never got the opportunity to ask him about what her views on race were when he was a child.)