(Note to anyone in my family or anyone who knows people related to me: neither of my grandmothers are racist. They are both very nice ladies who love black people very, very much. In fact, one of my grandmothers is the vice-president of the unofficial Chi McBride fanclub! Seriously. Why would I make that up? Everything written below is fiction, and nothing but fiction. I would never ever dream of exploiting my family for entertainment purposes. I make haha’s for $ based on imaginary situations. Do we have to go over this again? No? OK? Good.)
I just found out that my grandmother is a racist. This was pretty shocking. I don’t know how we got on the conversation, but my grandma ended up telling me that if I married a black woman, she would not come to my wedding. I wanted to say to her, “Grandma…I don’t think you’re going to be alive by the time I get married…..not because you’re going to die from old age, but because in my spare time, I like to murder racist people.” Yikes…I should not have said that. That was joke was a little dark. My grandmother probably wouldn’t have liked that one at all…for two reasons.
What am I supposed to do with a racist grandma? I can’t divorce her, she’s my grandma! And besides, we never signed a prenuptial agreement. This sounds horrible, but I really do give her behavior a pass due to her being 90 years old. I really think that if someone is over 75 years old, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, their behavior should be excused, no matter how ridiculous it may be.
“Daddy! Grandpa is licking the flypaper again!”
“He’s 87 son, let him be. One day you’ll be licking flypaper and you’ll also want to be left alone.”
“Good lord, Grandma just said the holocaust never happened! She’s wrong!”
“Where you there Billy? She knows better than we do, she was alive back then. Now go back to reading your little book on World War 2.”
You can’t change someone’s point of view at that age. I doubt there’s an instructional video that can be shown to old racists to change their misguided views. Like I could show this video to my grandma, and when its over she’d jump out of her chair and yell, “Wait a minute…Slavery IS disgusting! Segregation IS horrible! Oh my god! I just figured it out…..African-Americans are fucking awesome!! Oh my god! I can’t believe that word came out of my mouth! Did I just say…African-American? Yes I did! Because I have respect for people of color!”
It’s so easy for a person to become racist due to influences from their family and society. But how did racism start? There had to be a first racist. Please enjoy my theory on how racism started:
There was some guy yelling at his friend, “I hate that guy Charlie!!”
“Why?”
“because he’s black!”
“Yah, but why don’t you like him?”
“Because he’s black!”
“I know he’s black, but did he hurt you, or do something bad?”
“…….He’s black! GRRRRR….”
And then the guy who hates black people left. And then his friend was like, “Wow, that guy was probably German. He was complaining a lot. I hate German people. They complain too much.” Then he went and told this story to his friend, and his friend said “Wow, I hate Polish people, they’re always gossiping.” And then the Polish guy told a black guy about all of this, and then he said “Wow, I hate white people, they always tell boring stories…” And the cycle continues.
Am I a genius, or do I just have way too much free time? You decide.
