Most of my wife’s brothers. If they get any right wing glurge about Obama- they hit the forward button. Doesn’t matter if it holds a drop of truth, if it smears Obama it gets forwarded. Not just political stuff, it’s largely the OH MY GOD HE’S A MUSLIM!!! stuff. They especially hate Muslims and forward all the comspiracy theory crap about Muslims outbreeding “us” to take over the world.
Through the wonders of Facebook, I found out my high school crush and my lost love are both right wingers. High school crush was quite the flaming right wing blogger on Open Salon till she gave it up- couldn’t take the blowback she got. Yes, I’m aware you can be a right winger without being a bigot, but her writing pretty well reeked of it.
Several people in my mother’s side of the family. What’s completely absurd is that the main flavor is xenophobia and they’re all immigrants per their own definition :smack:
My dad talks like a bigot but I don’t believe he really has much conviction behind what he says. His neighbors are black (the only black family in the neighborhood) and while they’re not the best of friends he is nice to them. He served in the trenches of Vietnam with plenty of black guys, I’m sure he didn’t unilaterally hate them.
His dislike of gay people is just plain stupid and I’ve told him as much. I always ask him why he spends so much time picturing dudes having sex that it offends him so much. He must be picturing dudes having sex with each other otherwise gay dudes are just dudes and that’s not offensive. That shuts him up.
Anyway I think the way he talks sometimes is just a product of having worked in a factory for 40 years with a bunch of ignorant loudmouths and it was easier to agree than to have your own thoughts. He also moved from one suburb to a new outer suburb with my mom in the 70s as an example of “white flight” so they have some sort of chip on their shoulder about “those people” taking over “their” hometown. Whatever.
Anyway my parents can talk like ignorant fools sometimes but really they’re full of shit. They are live-and-let-lives really.
My mom (who is in her early 60s now) went through this weird phase in her mid to late 40s where she seemed resentful of anyone who didn’t look like her. I was a teenager then and never had the slightest inkling she was bigoted in any way, shape, or form prior to that. I think it was the fact that the neighborhood we’d lived in (my parents had lived there about 20 years at that point) had been basically all white, and around that same time the demographics started to change. Whatever feelings she’d been able to suppress evidently came bubbling to the surface.
What’s weird is that even though my parents still lived there (the neighborhood is now predominantly Hispanic) for another 10 or so years after that, I don’t really remember my mom saying or doing anything that could’ve been considered bigoted, at least not when I was around. She still has her moments, though. One time about four years ago I was visiting my parents shortly after they’d moved into their new house (their move had nothing to do with the neighborhood changing, my dad had retired and for many years they’d been planning to move after he retired). The house next door was for sale and I mentioned there was a family looking at it. The first words out of her mouth were, “Are they white?” My dad just kind of rolled his eyes and shook his head. He’s not racist or bigoted in the least, and thankfully I’ve taken more after him in that department.
I never loved her, but there was this one girl I briefly dated in high school. I was on our school’s baseball team and she was on the softball team. One night, we were at the batting cages. She noticed some kids playing basketball at a nearby court and said to me, “You know, I think only white people should be allowed to play baseball and only black people should be allowed to play basketball.” Our relationship didn’t last much longer, but not before I informed her that I’d played on a basketball team for five years when I was younger.
Several of my brothers virulantly hate American blacks though they love Obama. When I pointed out the contradictation, their logic was as followed. Obama was black, but it was from his Kenya (African-born) father. He is not the descendent of African slaves; therefore, does not share the defective genes that allowed the ancestors of American blacks to be turned into slaves so easily. Sometimes you just have to shake your head and hope, maybe it’s a hormone thing that will eventually change.
My brother has become something of a bigot in his middle age. We were raised together in the most liberal of households and communities, and I’ve always believed him to be on a par with me politically. But he moved to Southern California two decades ago, and it’s doing a number on him. He is virulently opposed to Mexican immigrants, legal or not (but mostly not) and wants everyone without papers immediately deported–including children who were raised as Americans.
I think this position of his is based mostly on economic factors, or his twisted version of them. He blames California’s economic ills on immigrants. I can sort of understand this; it’s what he sees in his area. But he also seems to have picked up some homophobia along the way. He’s opposed to marriage equality, and since he’s not at all religious it’s all based on his own “ick” factor.
And then he will say things I think he can’t possibly truly believe, just to get my goat. I hope so, anyway. But the anti-immigration and the homophobia seem to be real.
My granny: Jews control the media, Mexican criminals are pulling strings behind the scenes to build a super highway though the US to inundate us with illegal immigration, and did you hear they’re drawing social security?!?!?!
Everyone else in my family just rolls their eyes, and I think it helps in our minds to equate bigotry with elderly rants.
I blame her nutty Lutheran synod in Idaho for the steady stream of misinformation and lies sent to her mailbox. I’d ask her to send them to me so I couold retort, but then I’m sure she’d think it was a plot to get my hands on her money…which she intends to gift to the church when she dies.
My brother and I make the worst kinds of racist, homophobic, hateful comments to each other. I think if anyone saw us interact, they’d assume we were both the worst kind of bigots. We do it because it’s funny to us, in the same way that Steven Colbert parodying a conservative is funny. I know a lot of people disagree, so I don’t talk like that around other people. Personally, I think it’s a way to blunt the edge of the words, and dilute them. Take the weapons out of the arsenal, so to speak.
My grandfather on the other hand shakes with anger when he sees a billboard printed in Spanish. I poked fun at him once, saying “I’m sure that grocery store is actually just coordinating the impending Mexican attack.” He replied, “How do you know it isn’t, smart ass? They could be writing anything on there, and you’d never know!” My grandfather, a member of Mensa, actually spoke those words to me as justification for making it a criminal offense to speak or write Spanish in public.
The crazy is wide and deep here. But I love my grandfather even though he’s whacked.
My High School girlfriend, Senior year, 1968.
We were 18, deeply in love (and lust), planned on getting married. We didn’t. Broke up several months after HS graduation (Thank God, he said with the wisdom of hindsight.) She was the first of my very few serious relationships. We had a couple of conversations (telephone) in the five years afterward, friendly enough. No contact since then, although I’d wonder about her from time to time. “First love” and all that.
Fast forward to 2010. I’m randomly interwebbing in a hometown news site, and come across a high quality color photo of her. Waving a little American flag at a Tea Party rally, apparently shouting, with an angry snarl on her face. YOW!!
The last time we’d spoken, about 35 years ago, I knew that her views were conservative. But it saddened me to see that 2010 photo her as an angry, ignorant racist.
About 10~15 years ago I’d a friend who was about 20 years older than me (I’m nearly 50 now). She was yer classic crazy cat lady type, had been married more than once, lived in sin (as they used to call it), had travelled the world. And finally settled down in Co. Cork with her current live-in lover, several cats, dogs, chickens, and I’m pretty sure there was a pony somewhere.
Anyhoos, she was a vivacious entertaining woman, who always had stories to tell and life experiences to share - trouble was she’d pepper them with non politically correct pejorative to refer to the indigenous peoples of Africa, India etc. She would use similar terms when speaking of the Traveller families that lived near her. It had the same effect as someone scrapping their nails on a chalkboard, and draw me right out of the story. I get the idea that she grew up in an era/location where it was the done thing to refer to “the natives” in those terms, but it still shook me to the core to hear her.
I did, often, suggest she might want to use other words, but it fell on deaf ears. I lost contact with her after we both moved house, and I’ve never really tried to find her again since.
My mother is a nice little old lady. And a raging bigot. Comes from being raised in Texas during the Depression, I guess. Never anything but polite and courteous to anyone in person, but full of comments about Meskins and Blacks and Queers in private. It really irks her that she raised such a non-bigoted kid.
Well my sister for one, although at this point ‘love’ is not a word I would use to describe my feelings towards her.
When she found out I an dating a black me she called me up, cussed me out and told me I was to NEVER let him anywhere near her grand children because we all know you can’t trust a black man around blond haired, blue eyed children.
She also knows that he doesn’t work, sits on the couch all day watching TV and drinking beer, beats me up, and I support him financially.
My father was a bigot, I used to call him Archie (Bunker), but he was a product of that time. I was surprised though for all his talk, that in practice he wasn’t so bad. I ran into a woman about my age who used to work with him. He worked in a male dominated field and none of them were too happy about women working in their area. So this woman and two others, all of them in their early 20’s at the time, came into the workforce, not only were they women but black too. She said my father took all three of them under his wing and if any of the other men in the plant dared to say a sexual, demeaning, racist word to them he was right there to stand up for them.
For all his racism and sexism, he would never stand back and watch someone being bullied or harassed.
Of course both of my parents had to deal with a certain amount when they got married, because not only was she marrying a city boy but he was a devil worshipping Catholic, and he was marrying one of those hillbilly heathens. Neither one of their families were real happy about it, but like most things people come around to accept it. I can still remember one of my aunts putting her arm around me and telling me ‘I can abide just about anybody except for a Catholic, except for you girls and your daddy, you are okay, I love you like you’re one of my own.’ I know she meant well.
Except for my sister, who should know better, I put most bigotry down to ignorance not maliciousness.
There’s nothing quite like someone finding out one of their children are gay or having a couple of bi-racial grand babies to turn a bigot around.
So yeah I can love a bigot, I can be friends with a bigot.
My grandparents have some old-school racism going on. Nothing severe, but they were surprised by one of my bridesmaids and commented to my mother that “We didn’t know there would be a black person here!”
They then proceeded to talk to her, find out who she was, how we’d met at college, etc. By the end of the day they were charmed and so was she. I don’t think she ever knew they were surprised by her skin color, and they were busy befriending all the other girls in my party as well. My friends and my grandparents all told me afterwards how nice it’d been to meet each other.
My husband used to be a tolerant hippie when we were younger, but as he has aged he’s getting distressingly bigoted. He seems especially fixated on gay men and says something crude and graphic every time some man on television seems even remotely un-macho. It gets worse all the time and is starting to upset me.
This behavior is despite the fact that he now has the best job he has ever had, and he gets along well with his great boss, who is gay.
My dad. One of the saddest days of his life was my wedding day, because my best man was black. He did finally stop using the n-word in my presence, more or less, but I’m sure he never stopped being a bigot.
It’s amazing how big a change there’s been on bigotry in a relatively short time. Compare what was “normal” in 1950 to 2000 and it’s like they’re two different worlds. This thread shows evidence of this as people talk about their family members from a previous generation.
My brother seems to have picked up some mild racism in college somehow. It boggles my mind. Maybe he’s been watching too much Mad Men. I’ve informed him that he has a pretty good chance of having brown nephews or nieces in the future, so he may as well get over it.
He also picked up some misogyny. It seemed to briefly disappear while he had a summer fling but come back in full force after the break up.
My dad came out with a surprisingly anti-Muslim rant a few weeks ago. Surprisingly, because he used to have quite a high-flying job, travelled the world, regularly spent weeks abroad, including Middle East countries, and is otherwise the most easy going, nice, chilled out, intelligent cultured guy you can imagine.
I’m not quite sure how to stop him repeating these views around my toddler
(yeah, I know I could just ask him not to, but that would set him off again!)
