I feel like some of my life-long friends have been slowly falling down into a racist suburban american paranoia ideology.
For example: I've lived in a lot of neighborhoods as an adult that are less than 99% white. Therefore where I live is "ghetto". That my friend will somehow be a victim of random acts of crime for visiting. That they can't visit after dark etc.
Or sometimes they'll just pull statements out of the air, usually with little to no prompt. Like In a group chat, someone brought up the month of June, another friend said "is that Juneteenth? Do we need to pretend to care when that is?" Very thinly-veiled "humor" and that's being extremely generous by even pretending to call it that.
The instinctive answer is "find new friends lol" but I don't like that answer.
First, because I genuinely believe my friends are good people, and want to do good, despite their ignorance. Second, the basis of most racism is that I believe they fear what they don't understand. And sure, there sure be some onus on them to attempt to learn. But how?
Third, I hope that by challenging their views in a constructive way, perhaps they might reconsider even for a moment how they view the world. And forth, if I found new friends, this people would continue to exist, now unchallenged by opposing thought which will only further incubate themselves in their sinkhole ideology.
So what are some ways to approach this? If I say the obvious "like this is racist as fuck", it's only going to make them defensive. And it's kind of dumb I even have to be gently cognizant because white people see racism as an immortal, intentional act. So the conversation goes nowhere if you call a white person racist since they'll automatically get defensive.
I'm kind of rambling at this point. Would like to hear ways everyone here tries to save friends you see sinking down the suburban pipeline when it comes to micro (and semi-macro) aggressions.
My first instinct is to jokingly bully them, but they’d almost certainly jokingly bully you back and their micro aggressions would just become blatant racism. Last Man Standing style.
Calling them out in the group chat itself is a bad idea because white fragility is so tied up in protecting reputation. So maybe take a guess at who’s the most likely listen to talk with them one on one? Doesn’t have to be explicit “can you help me get them to stop saying this shit?” It should come off as you just venting, which will imply to them that they’re less racist than the others in the friend group. Ideally this should be true. See if they pop in next time someone says some sketchy shit. Even them DMing you like “was that fucked up?” is a good start.
There’s a decent chance if this goes “well”, you’ll get a few people talked to behind the scenes and some of them will be receptive while others will double down and resent you. The latter people you never had a chance with anyway. You should be able to tell the difference between the two based on behavior changes. That might even open things up to more directly standing up for yourself once you know you’ve got people in your corner.