Yeah, when very old people start to say inappropriate things I think it’s more reason to be concerned about senility than reason to take offense.
Sometimes. But old people can be assholes, too.
You have no business deciding “for the family” if he is banned, and IMO no business organizing a family-wide ban. You can refuse to invite him to events in your home, and you can refuse to attend parties elsewhere if you expect him to be there. And if someone asks why, say so. Let them decide what, if anything to do.
That is all.
So if he took a knife and starting stabbing the table yelling out politician’s names with the word “dead” you would ban him from the table? Not very presidential of you.
I think you should have taken your uncle aside and told him of your feelings towards racist jokes. Then you should have told him that if you hear him tell another one, you would beat the snot out of him. That is, if you really and truly have such a strong opinion that racist jokes are all that offensive to you. Instead, you turn to a bunch of strangers to ask their opinions. So, I’m expressing mine. You either have the power of your convictions or you don’t.
No, I disagree. This interpretation means that any joke that alludes to a politically-motivated assassination is racist if applied to Obama.
Now, if the question was “What do Martin Luther King and Obama have in common…” then the racial analogy is obvious. But white-bread Kennedy as the predicate? No.
(Obviously, other information, like learning that joke was told in the middle of a rant against uppity negros, would change my view.)
Come on, this has to be a wind-up thread.
I’m going through something similar now with my mother. When we were growing up we literally had our mouths washed out with soap if we said anything racist or repeated a joke that we didn’t really understand. Now that she’s in her 80s and senility is creeping in she’s become frightened of and angry at anyone different and it comes out in terribly racist remarks. No minority is excluded - she even made a racist comment about Native Americans right in front of my partner, who is Lakota. I try to cut her some slack because of her age but she knows enough not to say those things in front of her grandkids or in public so she can control it when she wants to. She lives on the east coast so I don’t see her often and I’m torn between confronting her about it and keeping the peace because I’m not sure how much of her behavior comes from senility and how much is just pure racism that she’s hidden until now. So far I’ve gone with ignoring it because she isn’t going to be around much longer and I don’t want to ruin our already strained relationship.
I agree that no one has the right to tell the rest of the family to cut him off. You only get to control what you do.
Seriously?
Wow.