I suppose that's one way to look at it.
Ok, let me try to find some common ground here so you might understand what I'm saying without the ban bait response.
First, you seemed to have gleamed over the fact that I pointed out the situation was inappropriate, ignorant racism. I'm not defending what was said or the person who said it. But I also realize that the circumstances of reality - an old white man, Georgia, Trump is President, a guy named Mohammad - there's a hundred worse ways this could have played out, there's a hundred worse things that waiter probably has to hear in any given week.
That's not to say that this is acceptable or normal. But to put a little perspective on the level of outrage, the degree of disgust, and the amount of vitriol I'm willing to throw back at this guy in particular. That's what I was referring to. The all or nothing mentality that the group commonly labeled as 'liberals' puts onto these situations. There's no attempt to understand
why someone would make a joke like that or what their real motivations or intentions are. Instead, the mentality seems to be
"you said this thing, you are a racist and you are just as racist as the most racist people on the planet".
That's clearly not the case. Can we at least agree that intentional racism born from actual hatred is worse than unintentional, inappropriate racism born from ignorance? Because if we can't agree on that, then yeah, we're not going to agree here at all.
Because what I see is a guy who grew up in a society with basically zero interaction with Muslims, living in a society that vilifies Muslims on national television daily, and who has a President who just tried to ban Muslims from entering the country on the basis of scaremongering bullshit - and yet, he took all of that and instead of blindly believing the crazy shit that gets pumped into his brain every day, he made an inappropriate joke about how
absurd it is. I absolutely see that as a positive step forward. The fact that despite everything happening right now, a person who most would assume would have Racism for Dummies in the glove compartment of his pickup truck was significantly less racist than expected. That's a win. The 'war' against racism isn't going to won by everyone just stop being racist altogether one day. It's won by people being a little less racist than they were yesterday. It's won by people being able to mentally overcome the racist, scaremongering garbage coming out of every orifice of the media and realizing that people are just people.
And that's what I think happened. Is it the best outcome? No. Is it an outcome devoid of racism? No. But I don't think old guy making inappropriate jokes should be publicly shamed like he's David Duke. And I think doing so doesn't make people join your side, it puts them on the extreme defensive. I don't think it helps anything by taking it to 11 on a guy who was maybe a 4 on the
"how racist is this" scale. Especially when you can easily find examples of
people taking that shit to 11 every single day. They are not the same. Yet we seem to treat them as such and I don't think that's a good thing. That's really all I'm trying to say.