Our new friend is a racist -- should we dump him?

My husband and he have so much in common -- but his beliefs are pernicious and wrong!

By Cary Tennis

Read more: Racial Issues, Race, Advice, Conservatives, Liberals, Cary Tennis, Since You Asked, Life

Jan. 3, 2008 | Dear Cary,

My husband and I live in a small town in the same rural area of northern New England where he grew up. I grew up in a suburban setting in southern New England, but I have lived here my entire adult life -- more than three decades now. (I'm 49, my husband is 60, and we've been married 18 years.) I always knew this was the only place on earth I wanted to live (I have very strong family/ancestral ties here), and I love everything about living here. I get along well with both "natives" and "transplants," and I am often mistaken for the former (which, I have to admit, pleases me, as I think it can sometimes be very hard to crack the inner circle in a small town when you're "from away").

Politically, I consider myself strongly liberal, particularly on social issues, and my husband, although he was raised in a more conservative family, is also quite liberal. He has a hard time with any sort of label and refuses to register for a particular political party, but years of self-evaluation and introspection -- he is a recovering alcoholic, sober for over 25 years now, and went through a good bit of therapy in the early years -- have made him very open-minded. So it's safe to say that our political views make us both liberal-Democrat types.

If there is anything at all that occasionally bothers me about living in our area, it is a tendency toward conservative politics and narrow-mindedness that I've observed among some of our neighbors. It saddens me to hear some parents' racial and ethnic prejudice and homophobia reflected in overheard conversations among our teenage son's peers at the local high school, but I'm very proud of our son's ability to think for himself, and I think we've done a good job of raising him to be kind, tolerant and open-minded. I've had no trouble finding like-minded friends and acquaintances myself, and I'm happy and comfortable with our life here.

My husband and I have a relatively new friend whom we both like a lot. We've known him fairly well for about a year now, and he and my husband have really enjoyed spending time together, watching and talking about sports, current events and their past lives. He's single, about five years older than my husband, and retired here about 10 years ago from Massachusetts. Coincidentally (neither of us knew it when we first met him), he is also a recovering alcoholic (with, I believe, about 20 years of sobriety). Needless to say, this revelation gave him and my husband even more in common, and their friendship has grown until my husband considers him among his closest friends.

Now the problem. My husband and I have both always recognized that this friend is more conservative than we are, but we've been able to discuss our differences over politics and social issues with humor, while "agreeing to disagree" -- until a few days ago, when we both became suddenly and uncomfortably aware that our friend is, to put it bluntly, a racist. The three of us were having a pleasant conversation about football, when he remarked that he couldn't stand it when a certain black sports commentator "slipped into jive talk whenever there's another black guy in the booth." Successive remarks led us to realize the extent of his prejudice, and finally led me to say, incredulously, "Please don't tell me you honestly believe that white people are smarter than black people?" I was hoping he was putting us on, and I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach when he said, "Yeah, I do." He went on to say, "Except for people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but, as a rule, yeah."

My husband and I were both floored, and we continued the discussion in hopes of getting him to -- what? I don't know, retract his statement or change his mind, I suppose. He gave several examples to illustrate his position -- rough gangs of black kids he had gone to high school with, the behavior of some of the black men he had served with in the Navy, black men he had known who abandoned their pregnant girlfriends -- while we both tried to get him to see that culture, not genetics, was responsible for what he perceived as innate differences between the races. He ended up by assuring us that he always "treated them nicely" -- had some black friends in the service, tipped the black server at the doughnut shop, etc. -- unlike his father, who was, apparently, a raving racist who talked about "jigaboos and jungle bunnies" when he was growing up.

I'm sure it was obvious that my husband and I were upset by his remarks, and we made it clear that we disagreed with him vehemently. It felt very different from the half-humorous political differences we've expressed in the past, and at one point our friend said, "I hope this doesn't affect our friendship." We did change the subject before he left, but things were definitely awkward.

My question is: Where do we go from here? Do we continue the friendship as before, skirting the issue of racial prejudice? Do we tell him we're sorry, but we no longer feel comfortable being his friends? Do we say nothing, stop inviting him for coffee, and let the friendship lapse? I feel sad to think that my husband may lose a friend with whom he has found so much common ground, but how much of a difference in viewpoint can a friendship sustain? And how much of a stand do we need to take to be true to our own values?

It's a terrible feeling to be disappointed by someone you care about, and right now my husband and I feel sorely disappointed. We both like this guy a lot, but we both feel strongly that racism has no place in this world. While I know our friend's prejudice comes, in large part, from the family in which he was raised, I can't help thinking that if my husband has been able, as an adult, to learn to think for himself and become more open-minded, our friend could have done the same. But if he hasn't done so by this age, it seems unlikely that anything we say is going to have much of an effect on his views.

Cary, I'd love to hear what you, and other readers, think.

Disappointed

Dear Disappointed,

It is indeed a terrible feeling to be disappointed by someone you care about. People fail you, they do.

This friend of yours appears to have mistaken beliefs. It is difficult for those of us with all the correct beliefs to extend courtesy, love and understanding to those with mistaken beliefs. But it is an affliction of your time to believe your own beliefs -- to believe your own beliefs are the only ones that matter and are correct and represent the pinnacle of social progress. If you take an imaginative leap to the 12th century, or the 18th century, or the 1930s, you will notice how radically beliefs change. We who are now alive think we know what is right and correct, as did the Spanish in the Inquisition and the Protestants in the Reformation and the Maoists in the Cultural Revolution; it is the privilege of those on top to think they know what is right and correct. It is a nice privilege indeed. Doubting ourselves is hard.

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