My 2023 New Year’s Resolution Is To No Longer Hang Out With Racists

Because they have this sneaky habit of gravitating toward me

I‘m finally on vacation. It’s been a long and at times challenging year. When I turned on my out-of-office last week, I was ecstatic. I planned to rest over the Christmas break.

A friend of a good friend who I had met at a birthday party in November, reached out over Whatapps to ask if I’d be interested in getting our families together for dinner one evening.

I like to think of myself as someone open to new friendships, and so I agreed. We decided to meet at a Japanese restaurant for dinner a few days later. I was excited about the idea of meeting someone new. I wanted to hear about their lives, the places they had traveled to, and their hopes and dreams.

The evening started off well. We all hit it off and the discussion flowed easily, and effortlessly. We had a few cocktails and ordered some food. Their teenage kids were with us and I started speaking to their son about his hobbies. Their daughter had her eyes fixated on her phone and didn’t seem to want to socialize.

The evening followed its course and I even started thinking about when next we would get together. The husband commented on owner of the restaurant. He told us that it belonged to a Japanese magnate. I had read otherwise and told him that the owners were in fact Chinese. His face suddenly changed. It became serious, closed, and full of disgust. When he opened his mouth, he uttered the most hateful slurs about Chinese people. I was in utter shock.

What the hell just happened, I thought to myself.

I look over to his wife, she was white-passing, but her mother was Black like me. I expected her to correct him, to tell him not to say such things. My eyes were pleading with hers, begging her to say something, to chastise him, to show their kids and our daughter that this was not okay, that racism was not acceptable.

When she opened her mouth, it was worse. She said the most derogatory things about Chinese people before announcing that she wasn’t racist because she loved Japanese people and South Koreans. I was sick to my stomach. How the hell did I find myself in this situation: having dinner with f****** racists?

The ease and comfort with which they were openly racist in front of their children sent chills down my spine. I’d always had a hypothesis about how racism gets passed down from generation to generation, but here I had the proof right in front of my eyes.

Here we were, having a wonderful dinner, and out of nowhere, racism reared its ugly head. Racist remarks were uttered in a matter-of-fact, comfortable way.

I told the wife that her comments were offensive and racist and that I didn’t want to hear any more. She gave me a blank stare before heading off to the ladies' room.

I sat there seething, rewinding back in my mind our first encounter with them. Were there any comments they’d made then, any red flags that could have alerted me to the fact that they were racists? Is there any way I could have known they were before that dinner? I kept hitting myself, wondering where I had gone wrong. I guess that I had assumed that since her mother was Black, there was no way she or he could be racist. I was wrong.

Our dinner with them ended soon after that incident. I was annoyed, outraged, and disgusted by their racism and how they unashamedly and intentionally passed it on to the children. It was analogous to child abuse.

We exited the restaurant and, I welcomed the fresh air. My anger refused to subside. I felt cheated because I had spent one precious evening out of my holiday with racists, the very antithesis of whom I am and what I represent.

As my husband, my daughter, and I headed home, I wondered if I’d done enough, I felt like I should have done more, and still feel this way so many hours later.

I’ve gotten to the stage where I have decided to devise a test to detect whether the people I meet are racist or not before I even consider a social engagement with them. Because, at the end of the day, the reality is that I never want to be caught socializing with racists ever again in my life.

Thank you for reading my perspective.