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.
Force contradictions. This is why the "I don't get it, could you explain the joke" is such a silver bullet against racist humor. By making them think about it, you're forcing them to face the contradiction head-on.
The best part is that it's not only effective, but completely nonconfrontational. Even if they come to the conclusion "Yeah, I am racist." it won't resolve the contradiction because there's the question of "ok so what now...?"
Not sure if this is good practice, but "Hey how would you like it if black people did that to white people?" might be good if you're trying the play dumb route. Or "We all hate wokeness, I can't stand any more wokeness even if it's in white people's favor!" They may cackle with glee on being called a big scary bad guy, but they're sure to be at least a little irritated about being told they remind you of the overly moralistic goody two-shoes.
This is the sort of thing that should work but won't. It's the same language used by primary school teachers and basically a thought terminator at this point. Omega_Haxors lines work provided that the person just hasn't examined the jokes they/ve picked up from others and aren't actively racist.