SoapZone Community Message Board

This happened at work Saturday...I was working with "S", who I don't get to work with often but when I do, I always enjoy it. S is pleasant and has a lot of different interests that we can discuss, and she never minds doing the "grunt" work. She and I also have very, very similar religious beliefs, so we've had a few conversations about faith that were fun.

S is also very, VERY white. This is important to the story...Saturday late afternoons and early evenings are often extremely NOT busy (I seriously wonder why we don't close at 5:00 on Saturdays like all the other boutique stores "downtown" but I know that since our store is corporate, they won't go for that...even though they're losing money heating/cooling the store and paying employees when nobody's coming in unless they're killing time before their dinner reservation...but I digress). So I was almost surprised when a lovely, lovely couple walked in a little over an hour before closing. They were considerably younger than our usual customer base--usually if someone under the age of 50 comes in, they're shopping for Mom or Grandma or picking up a gift card for Mom or Grandma--and the wife was looking for something for herself. She ultimately bought a poncho, a pair of matching earrings and a pin. Which...is not relevant; what IS relevant is, as we're supposed to do, both S and I engaged in some light chit chat with the couple. They mentioned being out on a dinner date to celebrate their anniversary and mentioned their three kids were home with the grandparents (the toddlers with the dad's mom and the 8 month old baby with the mom's mom and...that's also not relevant). And as often happens, the proud parents pulled out their phones to show us pictures of their kids.

The couple is interracial. She's Black, he's white. S and I exclaimed how beautiful their kids are (their kids really are--no faux flattery here) and then S said "I told my daughter to marry a Black man so I could have beautiful darker-skinned grandchildren".

Um...what?

To their credit, neither the husband nor the wife seemed put off by this comment. Hubby joked that his favorite colors had always been black and white and now he had that in his marriage; the wife smiled indulgently (probably has heard that before a hundred times). I had to go to the back room to get something and missed the rest of the conversation but S later said the husband is a pastor and he said it's important to talk about interracial couples because it can help combat racism. But the comment made ME uncomfortable. I told S that she shouldn't have made such a comment, that she should've stopped at "your children are beautiful" because while THIS couple was (seemingly) fine with what S said, someone else could find her words racist or offensive. To her credit, S *did* apologize and seemed to understand what I was telling her.

Thoughts?