If you don’t laugh, the jokester will shake his head at you and say, “Come on. It’s all in good fun.” Yet. the ethnic joke he’s told makes you cringe. That’s your conscience responding to an attack on the human family. At that moment, you are inwardly aware that someone’s dignity is being attacked. Deep inside we know that such put-downs only feed bad feelings or stereotypes, keeping them alive. They are hurtful rather than healing in our world.
A step toward protecting human dignity is to stop tolerating those insults. There are two rules in doing this: 1) use a response that is natural and comfortable for you, and 2) make your point but don’t humiliate the person you’re speaking to. For example, you might say, “That joke makes you sound prejudiced, and I know that can’t be true.” Or, “My brother-in-law is Irish and he’s not a drunk.” Sometimes people’s attention just needs to be drawn to what they are actually saying.