RACISM/BLACKLIVESMATTER
When Will People Learn That Bigotry Isn’t a Joke?
Using the excuse that someone else found it acceptable isn’t valid either
One of the truck stop employees we chatted with said something horrible
I’m still reeling nearly a week after finding out that one of the employees at the truck stop we were just at for a little while made a bigoted joke. In front of the group that he was making fun of. It’s bad enough to make the actual joke but to think that it’s acceptable to make the joke to the marginalized group you’re making fun of is crossing the line many times over.
Do you want to know the excuse the guy used for making the joke? He used me and my partner as an excuse. Why? We aren’t even there and we wouldn’t support the use of the racial slur he used in his joke anyway. We would’ve rightfully given him a ton of shit for it and reported it to his manager.
He excused his behavior because I let some questionable behavior slide
Basically, this is how the events of the situation were explained to me. Yes, he waited until we left all the way to do this, by the way. We found out through one of his other coworkers who works in the restaurant at the truck stop. He mentioned that we were okay with him calling us the f-word which gay people usually get called as a slur. I brushed most of his joking and ignorance off as cute and hilarious.
That was until I heard that he did this. I’m not surprised, to be honest. Someone who’s so comfortable with using slurs against marginalized groups will eventually go to doing it to most if not all. He’s an older white man and he thinks that it’s funny to be edgy. It doesn’t matter how he makes his black coworker feel. And one of the regular customers, who is also black. They didn’t walk into that room that day ready to hear some bigoted white man say the word they heard him say.
He crossed the line and did something unacceptable this time
I don’t even want to give power to the words he said. Using that word in any context is racist and bigoted, even if you think it’s personally funny. For the record, I don’t think that using that word is funny at all. I say punching up is way funnier than punching down. And this is not punching up at all. This is just punching people right in the face.
It is a callback to a time when society was even more unequal and is definitely not an appropriate word for healing and equality all the way in 2023. I feel bad for the person or the people who taught him to accept that as being okay. Whether that was in his upbringing or in his adult life with the people he associated himself with.
I knew him only on a regular face-to-face customer interaction and not on a personal level. Sure, I knew other details about his life that he chose to share with me when I went in there but you can’t really know someone fully until they start showing you who they really are. I don’t like what I just found out and I certainly feel uncomfortable associating with him in the future.
We don’t want to associate with him anymore and I’m surprised he kept his job
The shocking thing that gets me right now is that he still works there. Yeah, nothing was done about his use of a very jarring racial slur in a joke. The management needs the manpower there and his utterance of a very offensive and powerful word directly to two black people should’ve been enough to get him fired in every circumstance. Yet, here we are.
We are likely going to end up seeing him again when we go back to New York sometime next year. I don’t really want to and I hope that they reconsider not firing him. There shouldn’t be the societal lesson that “casual racism” is acceptable in 2023. He flat-out said the word to people within that marginalized group.
I’ll say that even if he hadn’t and it was still said out loud in front of customers or coworkers, it’d still be unacceptable. At the end of the day, his working there today represents the culture around that business and the management’s own signing off on this behavior. It also signals that racism is still acceptable to some in this day and age and I’m just not okay with that.
Takeaways and thinking about the implications of the behavior
The thing is, maybe I should’ve also called him out for the f-word toward me and my partner, but I didn’t want to start any unnecessary trouble or create any extra tension. Knowing that he’s capable of doing this kind of stuff now though makes me regret not reporting that before.
It is not cute and hilarious for someone to say that slur or any slur for that matter. And at the end of the day, how we react to this affects how bold or how casual these people think this all is. We can definitely be better as a society to call out all of that stuff as it happens. I just wish his coworker, who I admire dearly, didn’t have to face his ignorance head-on.
