Edmund Burke once wrote “…duty demands and requires that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.”
I failed that duty today and it’s making me sick, wanted to see some responses and what you’d do. To cut a long story short, standing behind a older guy, very jolly and normal looking, must have been about 70 to 80 trying to get cash out of a cash machine. For some reason it didn’t work to his pleasure, had less money than he thought or something. As he’s scratching his head and turning to go he makes a jokey comment to me about the plight of the economy and bankers, I just tut and agree. Then he says to me about how his bank is “probably owned by Jews”, still in the same ‘jokey’ way, then talks about how they steal money as part of their worship in “their temples” and bits of other nonsense I can’t even recall. My jaw dropped to the ground, eventually all I could manage was a dirty look and silence.
All I could think afterwards was qui tacet consentiret; silence gives consent. The rest of the day my brain was wrecked by l’esprit de l’escalier, what I could have said to demolish this hate-filled nonsense, tell him what that kind of thinking accomplished. In the past I’ve made a point of studying of anti-Semitism, how the total fabrication Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which he was practically recalling) lead to the gas chambers. How many people like me in 1930’s Germany also paved the way?
But all I could muster was stunned silence at being presented with an anti-Semite in the flesh. What what you have done? Did I fail in my duty or am I overreacting?
As a Jew (posting on a mobile phone and therefore lacking the inclination to provide the length of answer that the question deserves), I vote overreacting. There’s not much you can do in that situation; you’ll never change an old man’s mind. If it was a kid, it would be a different story.
Wow. I came here expecting something considerably more heinous than the befuddled anti-Semitic muttering of an elderly chap.
I can understand why you were stricken speechless, and I can also understand why you were somewhat paralyzed at the time.
You are seriously over-reacting. Prejudiced old people are nothing new. Most of them are like that just because it’s how things were when they were young, not because they’re planning to become the next Hitler.
If you’re concerned about anti-Semitism, I certainly encourage you to support the Jewish community with volunteer work and outreach, but all this recreational outrage over some old guy (who might just be spouting out with socially inappropriate stuff because he’s starting to slip into dementia) is kind of absurd.
You were caught off-guard. If you feel you still have a moral obligation to uphold, then I suggest you think about how you would have preferred to react, so that if this sort of situation happens again, you are prepared.
But I think that in this particular situation, you did nothing wrong – particularly since you did give him a dirty look and a silent response. If you’d chuckled or nodded to go along with his comments out of politeness, IMO that would have been much more of a failing.
Nothing. You’re not going to be able to say anything that could change the mind of someone of that age. And since you were the only witness, you’re not going to affect anyone else’s opinion either. So don’t worry about it.
In that circumstance, I might have said something to the effect of “stop spouting nonsense.” I’ve sometimes told people to stuff it when they’ve shared racist or antisemitic garbage with me. But it would depend on the situation.
I probably wouldn’t even call it hate filled non-sense. He was brought up in a time where when something went wrong with money, you blamed it on the Jews. Didn’t matter whose fault it was, it’s just what you did. I’d be surprised if he has any actual contempt for Jews that he sees IRL, just the faceless ones behind the big corporate logos on the ATMs and law firms.
The same way he’ll probably blame all vandalism and robberies on “the blacks”, but he would treat them like any other person if he was in the same room as them.
There’s plenty of older people in my family that were brought up that way. They’ll still talk like that when not in mixed company, so to speak, but it’s mostly just talk.
Of course he could be a racist dirtbag as well. Hard to say from here.
Either way, nodding and letting him walking away is the best thing you can do. He didn’t go home and think “Awesome, that guy agreed with me, +1 for us”. He didn’t even give it a second thought. Arguing with him would have either just caused, well, an argument that would have changed no one’s mind or he would have just walked away from you. It’s just not worth it.
Also, if you take a look here, we talked about a very similar circumstance not that long ago.
I vote over-reacting, too. You likely wouldn’t have been able to change anything, including his attitude.
When you can change something, it’s often worth doing. I remember being in a store waiting for the people in front of me to finish at the cashier - it looked like a mother and (adult) daughter. The mother didn’t speak English, and the daughter was translating to help resolve some issue or another. The cashier was unhappy about this, and asked how long the mother had been in the country. The cashier actually said something like ‘She should either learn English or go home!’.
I reported this to management. No idea if anything changed, but I figured there could be some good from it.
Had I just passed by that conversation on the street between random people, I likely wouldn’t have done anything except shake my head.
Handy-dandy all-purpose response: “I beg your pardon?!?” said with all the shocked incredulity you can muster. Then shake your head slowly as though you simply cannot believe a civilized person would speak that way.
Should the other person challenge you, sigh deeply and audibly and say as patronizingly as possible, “Whatever.”
I was riding in a car the other day with some acquaintances coming back from an athletic event we all participated in, and they started playing with one persons new i-Phone and started asking the Siri bot straight line questions from jokes like this to see what kind of answers it gave. When Siri did not cooperate with the set up lines they provided their own answers and howled with laughter.
I was quite disappointed with them, but it was not my car and I did not say a word.
You’re being too hard on yourself. Even if this man were calculatingly racist, his comments are shocking enough to the average person that any of us would be caught off guard the first time we encountered them. Now you know, people really do say shit like that, and it couldn’t hurt to have a polite but firm counter comment.
But.
Having said that, I’m going to throw out something that never would have occurred to me until I saw my father display symptoms of dementia:
That man may not have been in his right mind. He might not even have had a right mind left. Dementia does weird things. It leaves implicit skills and knowledge in place for a long time, but it starts wiping out the things that make us human beings - social filters, higher cognition, empathy, reasoning. First he had trouble at the ATM, then he blamed the Jews. Not your normal thought process there.
The trouble is, if it is dementia, there is no self-awareness of the problem and no ability to correct oneself. Telling him he’s a racist putz will only increase his sense of victimization and hostility.
In the end, you did the best thing you could have: kept silent and left him alone.
I had a thread on a similar issue. While not quite as blatantly outrageous as your story (the guy in mine didn’t actually say anything out loud, and the prejudice was inherently more subtle), I think the comments I got there still apply to your situation.
Thanks for the replies guys, feel a bit better now about how things went down. I’ll be honest, it never even occurred to me that he wasn’t in his right mind, which thinking back was a possibility.
cjepson, the first thought I had was to say “I’m Jewish” (I’m not, but I reckon I could pull it off, so to speak), quickly followed by the idea that it would rather miss the point, stuff like that shouldn’t be said simply because the target audience is wrong.
If someone younger spouts this kind of nonsense at me I just hope that next time I’m not paralysed by surprise.
Early on in my career I had a call about some criminal mischief done to a residence. The old lady seemed fine until I started asking her the specifics.
“Ma’am, when did this happen?” “The Viet Nam War.” (This was in 1998)
“Who do you think did this?” “The Jews”
Then I heard a long story about how the “Jew Klein” who lived behind her was torturing and killing FBI agents and sprinkling their bones in her garden. The whole time her husband was on the couch watching TV. When asked about it all he would say was “She’s fucking nuts.”
Maybe this woman was an anti-semite all her life. Maybe she wasn’t and her illness just fixated on something. But no way I would say she was evil and there would have be nothing to gain by engaging her about her world view.