I suppose it is easy to say that without some of the context and complexity of the situation. I don’t support racism, am not racist, and don’t willingly spend time with racists. I think there is a lot of “OH I WOULD HAVE DONE THIS” that is much easier to say behind the keyboard. I don’t say that in any offensive sense, I just mean that it ignores that I’d be essentially ruining my girlfriend’s birthday, putting a strain on an already weak relationship with her sister, and possibly instigating with someone foolish enough to be racist in public and drunk on top of it. I wanted to get away from him as soon as possible in a way that wouldn’t escalate the situation and I’m surprised no one seems to appreciate that.
Yeah I really don’t see your point. By failing to leave you in a sense endorsed his behavior. You wouldn’t have ruined your girlfriend’s birthday. The douchebag already ruined it
We were attempting to have fun despite him trying to derail it with his nasty bullshit. Sort of…not trying to feed the troll, and keep the peace between girlfriend and her sister, which has been tenuous because of a divorce situation.
I agree with you, AnthonyElite. This man was probably raised a racist and no one will change his mind. It would have added more drama to a night that was supposed to be about celebrating the girlfriend’s birthday.
When you add alcohol into the mix, it’s better to walk away from the bad situation. I congratulate you on being able to keep your calm when someone is being such a dick.
The situation is not complex. You, and if I’m correct your girlfriend, were not comfortable with the ‘n’ word. If it bothered you, or her, that bad one of you should have said something.
The only way to get from ‘oh I would have done this’ to ‘I did this shit’ is to do that shit.
From what I’ve read, and I could be wrong, your GF is a homebody. Maybe you should have asked her in private what she wanted as it is her birthday. If she wants to go home then it is an easy out for you. If she wants to hang out with her sister but not the douche then find a way to dump him. Easiest is to tell the sis to dump the douche and if she doesn’t then dump both of em.
The sisters situation is not the responsibility of your GF or you. She has to put on her big girl panties and deal with it. It was your GF’s birthday party and everyone there, not only you, allowed one person to fuck it up.
So you stayed, and you had a terrible time, bad enough to post about it. And have you asked your girlfriend if she had fun?
Believe me, you both would have had more fun if you just left.
I do believe you, and I agree. However, I felt socially obligated to stay. If it were up to just me to make the decision I would have left immediately. She did have some fun with my sister, her husband, and I, thought it was shadowed by douche’s words.
Now, can you help me start this wood chipper?
This is largely why I choose to not spend time with my father. While he never uses the N-word or other specific racial slurs*, he makes his contempt for non-whites and their cultures pretty obvious, and always finds some way to work his opinions on the matter into just about any conversation.
Somehow or other, I never picked up on his racism when I was growing up, and as a result I ended up totally non-racist. I suppose it helped that I grew up in an almost-all-white community, and the topic simply never came up. When I was 5 years old, my mom briefly babysat a 4-year-old black boy, and in junior high school I was friends with all three of the black kids in my class, the Filipino brother and sister, the Japanese kid, and the Chinese kid, and I never saw them as anything other than “people like me”. And I had the royal hots for the Filipino girl (though I erroneously thought, at the time, that she was Vietnamese - I was utterly unfamiliar with Spanish and didn’t recognize her last name as Spanish. Hmm. And thinking about it, I realize I’m now only assuming that she was Filipino: Asian appearance + Spanish last name … it didn’t occur to me at 12-13 years old to ask her ethnicity).
When I was 17 (1983), we moved to a new city, an agricultural community that saw a seasonal influx of Mexican migrant workers. I’d had no previous experience with Mexicans, so had no thoughts about them one way or the other. And my dad (a police officer) loudly decried the way the Mexicans were treated by the “town fathers”. It wasn’t until 10 years later, when more and more of those migrant workers started settling here permanently that my dad’s attitude seemed to change and he became more outspokenly racist. And not just toward Mexicans, but toward other races as well.
Though looking back to my childhood, I can now recognize the racism in a lot of those “funny stories” my dad used to tell about his time in the Marine Corps (1963-67) and his early years as a police officer (he started in 1969). I guess I just never picked up on it because he was a good enough storyteller that he always framed the “humor” so that it seemed to be poking fun at “the system”, not at the minorities in question.
But I seriously don’t know where he acquired his attitudes. Neither of his younger sisters ever showed any racist tendencies, and his mother (my grandmother, duh) was one of the most open-minded, accepting people I’ve ever known. My grandfather died when I was 10 and I didn’t see him often, so I don’t know what his attitudes were, and my dad’s older brother was a career Air Force guy who always lived far away and so I never got to spend much time with him. My dad grew up in a tiny, all-white town (except for one Native American kid who’d been adopted by my dad’s aunt and uncle), so it wouldn’t seem he had enough exposure to other races to develop any serious prejudice. All I can figure is that, once he got out into the world and started meeting people of other races, he unfortunately allowed negative experiences with “bad apples” to shape his opinion of all people of the races in question. It would explain why he and I have completely opposite opinions about Mexicans: As a police officer, the vast majority of the Mexicans he had contact with were criminals. As a professional cook, the vast majority of Mexicans I’ve had contact with have been friendly, hard-working, decent people.
Heh. Way back when I was a 16-year-old virgin, I proudly told my dad that I was going to name my first son “Charles”, after his father/my grandfather. I thought he’d be proud. Instead, his exact words were, “Well you’d better make sure you’re married to his mother, because I ain’t having no bastard named after my father!” (Yeah, he was also prejudiced against “illegitimate” children and those who spawned them, probably because they turned into “welfare bums”). I was … shocked, to say the least. When I got older and finally discovered that my dad was a racist, I decided it would be amusing to marry a Mexican woman and name our first son “Carlos” 
- Actually, I do remember my dad using a couple racial slurs, both directed at Asians with whose countries we had been at war. I suspect this was because he was in the USMC during the Vietnam War (though he never served there), and his drill instructor was a veteran of both WW2 and the Korean War who slung around terms like “Jap” and “gook” freely.
Uh, no.
You voluntarily sat and spent time with a racist. In my youth I might have done the same, but really you should man-up and accept what you did.
If your GFs sister keeps the guy around, he will be a part of your family, like it or not. Unless your GF severs relationship with her sister----is she likely to do that?
A man needs booze and the company of understanding folks to whom he can speak his mind.
Do you want to be the guy who listens patiently to racist ranting, because the racist is a friend of a family member?
Sooo okay, OP didn’t handle this as well as he could have. I’m sure everyone here always does everything exactly the way they should have in hindsight, but our dear OP here is human and didn’t take A Stand. In spite of this, I say his complaints about douchery ruining the evening are valid.
I’d be interested in hearing how future visits go if there are any.
Sometimrs I fail to remember that other people have their own lines that should not be crossed. Just because his is different doesn’t make him wrong…just different.
Sorry if I jumped your shit. There was no reason for me to add stress to the situation.
I second this. Sometimes you are just completely stunned and have no idea what to do in the moment - and realize maybe you should have handled it differently. No need to jump on someone for what in hindsight seems what should have been done.
Key point is that it was girlfriend’s birthday celebration - means girlfriend calls the shots.
It really sounds like your girlfriend is trying too hard to be “family” with someone who isn’t deserving of it. I can understand the situation you were in. You were there for her, and she wanted to be there for her sister (against all reason). When your girlfriend tacitly ignored the douche in order to continue spending time with her sister, that was a cue to you to stay quiet about it because that’s what she wanted. Of course you could’ve assumed she was too shy or non-assertive to call the guy out herself but it was her night, and you didn’t want to chance ruining it further so you took her cue to ignore it. I could see her possibly blowing up because you ruined her chance to hang out with her (obviously uninterested) sister. A result you want to avoid as well.
Really though your girlfriend should understand that just because people share blood doesn’t mean they have to force interactions with anybody. She should just let her sister go her merry way and it sounds like everyone would be happier.
I hate to admit this but some racist remarks or items don’t affect me.
Yep, like if someone calls me a greasy WOP, it just cracks me up!
But thankfully we had another talk last night and she admitted what a mistake it was to have her sister along for the ride. It has been hard for her to reconcile in her mind that her sister is making her own choices - they just aren’t good ones.
Macca you summed it up perfectly for me - I tried to make the best of a terrible situation, and wasn’t successful. We were clinging onto an awful night and we should of just let it go, called the racist out, and left.
And girlfriend is understanding more and more that she can choose NOT to have her times ruined by inviting someone that thinks she is too good to be there anyway.
As a side note - whats up with classless, trashy people acting uppity? How does that work?
Okay, okay, enough everybody. Enough dumping on our OP for how he handled it or didn’t handle it. But good on everybody here for suggesting how it should have been handled.
So now, that evening is over. It’s done. It’s history. Past tense.
Here’s an important thing: NOTHING the OP did done, or didn’t done done, commits him to acting the same in the future. They may all think, if you put up with douchbag’s jerkitude once, you’ve somehow established a “contract” that you will do so forever. If so, baloney. OP has absolutely NO obligation to put up with any of this in the future.
EVERYTHING that happened, and EVERYTHING that’s been written in this thread, is stuff for our OP to keep in mind. For future events, you have NO obligation to engage in any social activity with GF’s sister, let alone her jerk-buddy. You could go out with GF and her sis again if you want, but insist that jerk-buddy not be there. Or refuse to socialize with GF’s sister at all. Or if you get stuck with jerk-buddy around, and he mouths off or otherwise acts jerky, speak up.
ALL the ways you could possibly have responded on that night, are still on the table and you have all these options still available to you next time.
It’s good that you’ve talked this over with your GF, and good that she seems to agree with you. The only potential problem you might have, is that this could cause some friction between you and your GF, if you insist on writing GF’s sister out of your life. But sounds like that won’t be such a problem with your GF after all. If it is, you’ll need to deal with that. At worst, your GF becomes your ex-GF as Boyo Jim suggested, but from your recent posts here, it sounds like it won’t have to come to that.
Let that bad party night be bygone now, and look forward to the future – without GF’s sis and jerk-buddy in the picture.