Actually from Charmion who is too lazy to re-set the cookie.

My maternal grandmother (born in the English midlands in 1902) could not bring herself to say the word "Jew" until I was seventeen and brought home a Jewish boyfriend who happened to be the son of her lawyer; her preferred word was "Hebrew." My paternal grandmother (born in Beauport, Quebec in the 1880s) spoke of my cousin Leila's very black Guyanese husband and her Guyanese-English children as "darkies." What I found particularly interesting about both these ladies' attitudes was the apparent chasm they drew between those who are and are not "like us" in appearance or culture. The fact that members of the family had decided that those people were enough like us to draw them into the family circle did not induce them to change their mental labels.

It's so hard to be brave and stand up for a principle when you run the risk of spoiling the relaxed, fun atmosphere of a social centre like the neighbourhood pub. By doing so, you declare yourself a kind of watch-dog who notices when others fail to live up to a standard of behaviour. It's kind of like being a cop -- and they tend to socialize only with other cops because "civvies" won't relax when they're around.