Will the real racist please stand up?

We were out to dinner with eight other people last Saturday night to celebrate a friend's birthday. These are good friends (the birthday girl & her husband, not all the rest, as you'll see), the kind you consider family. M has been friends with the husband for many years. They moved here together from the east coast when they were in college. He was the best man in our wedding (can you call it that when you elope? Whatever. They were two of the four people there.).

It's kind of turned into a thing -- every year for her birthday, we go out with them and all these other people. The other people are our friends' neighbors. When they first moved to this neighborhood four or five years ago, we were a little jealous. It was a new neighborhood, with big shiny new houses and lots of families with young kids. They have a fabulous neighborhood pool, and a burning hot family social scene. We do stuff with this whole group about two or three times a year. It's things like our friends' kids' birthday parties. It's usually pretty fun -- they seemed like basically nice people, and B likes all the kids.

As time has gone by, we've gotten a little less jealous. For one thing, we like our little old house (not that we couldn't love a slightly bigger new house too, but that's another blog posting). We like living perched on the foothills, where we can walk five minutes and take a hike or a run in a big open space park, or drive five minutes and be in the mountains. Their house is so far east they're practically in Kansas. But the main reason we got over the jealousy thing was because we realized their friends were actually a little crazy. Dysfunctional marriages, raging alcoholism, spectacular consumerism, and now, it turns out, latent racism. (I'm still jealous about the neighborhood pool though.)

So the woman who's always drunk got rather drunk Saturday night. Toward the end of the evening, she asks if she should tell a joke. Everyone groaned and said "It's not the Leroy joke, is it?" She said it was. Someone called her a racist in a mostly joking way, to which she said, "I am not! I love black men!" Then she launched into her joke. It started like this: "Three black women are hanging out..." I was mortified. How can a joke that starts with "Three BLACK women" not be racist? Why can't it just be "Three women?" Obviously the fact that they are black is integral to the joke, which makes it, by definition, a racist joke.

So what did I do? Did I call her out? Did I tell her I didn't want to hear it? No. I excused myself and left the room. I told myself that I didn't want to make a scene at my friend's birthday party. It wouldn't make this woman less racist if I did, it would just ruin my friend's party.

Had my son been there, or even worse my son and my daughter-to-be (who will not be white), hell yes I would've said something. I would've smacked that joke down before she finished the first sentence, and called her out on her racism. But the kid(s) weren't there, and I didn't.

Was I a coward? Should I have called her out anyway? What would YOU have done in this situation?

Afterthoughts:

After thinking about this all day (obviously, I'm having a very introspective day today), I've come up with a couple of things I should have said earlier:

1. Though it really goes without saying, we will avoid hanging out with these friends-of-friends in the future.

2. I am lucky to have friends who I don't think would even dream of telling a racist joke. Honestly, it's been years since I've heard one (except for a few from some idiotic yahoos in my distant family). I'm glad I'm surrounded by kind, thoughtful people.

3. It was probably unfair of me to paint that whole group of people with the "latent racism" brush. I know our friends aren't racists, and maybe it was just the one woman who told a stupid joke. Nobody spoke up to say "Hey, you're being racist," including me. So if I'm going to label them as racists based on their silence, I'd have to include myself. I don't believe that would be an accurate representation of who I am. At least I hope not.