Situation: An acquaintance is telling jokes you find racist, homophobic, sexist, or all three.
What to Say: Denouncing someone as a racist or homophobe is likely to start a big fight. How direct you want to be in your response depends on the situation—you may want to make less of a scene at a friend's dinner party than on the street—but you want to leave little doubt about your position.
- In the workplace, such talk can be grounds for firing. Use that as a way to scare the joker off the subject. Just put your finger to your lips, lean in close, and whisper, "The walls have ears." — Jeffrey Fox, author of How to Become a Great Boss
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Give the person a hard look and the straight truth. You want to make it very clear you don't agree with him: "This is not a conversation I would like to be a part of." — Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners
- "When something is funny to you but not to me, I don't know what to say." — Holly Weeks, instructor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and author of the Harvard Business Review article "Taking the Stress out of Stressful Conversations"
