I’m pretty much white, well my dad is creole, but I pass for white and that is all that matters in this society. Being as European as possible. (sarcasm)
However my mother is 100% Euro-American. And while being a liberal, progressive former hippie and radical feminist, she says racist stuff almost every day.
It’s not the klan hood kind of racist. Or any kind of blatant slurs. She just repeats verbatim the messaging about ‘Mexicans’ and ‘blacks’ that the entertainment news spews out every day.
She conflates Mexican with pretty much all Spanish speaking immigrants. And conflates all Spanish speaking immigrants with ‘illegals’.
She’s ostensibly okay with black people. She’s friends with a lot of older black R&B musicians from New Orleans. The guys from the Meters, Doctor John etc. But she is always letting slip that she has a low opinion of black people in general. Little things, like how she does not want her grandchild in a public school with all those black kids holding up the class?!
Or how it’s ‘too bad that all the blacks are moving back to New Orleans and the crime is going up’. Ugh, that is so bad I almost wish she would just plain say an actual racial slur so I could call her out on that, instead of having to explain the whole context of what is wrong with her statement.
Like you said, if she was another person I’d tell her to go to hell and have nothing to do with her. Instead I try to take a non-confrontational tactic and nudge her away from the 2nd hand from Fox news rhetoric.
She’s not a hateful or spiteful person. She always tries to paint things in a positive light. So I try and inject some perspective into her unintentional bigotry.
I let her know that increased policing almost never fixed crime. Increased access to jobs and job training does. Neighborhoods with low unemployment have low crime. New Orleans has a problem with crime because it is not longer a major port, and the whole economy runs on tourism. And most tourist industry employers will favor white candidates over POC.
I try and make it a dialogue and not an argument.
After all we can pick and choose our friends but not our family.
