I was remembering this morning that a supervisor I had about a decade ago used to say stupid stuff to me that wasn’t really offensive but made him look like kind of a moron, and I ended up just sort of letting him do it to avoid conflict because it didn’t bother me that much.
What happened was my boss found out that I am a Zen Buddhist through some incidental thing and started ending conversations or randomly saying to me “namaste”. After the first few times I said something to the effect of “hey man, that’s not really something that’s relevant to me as a white dude who became a Buddhist going to college in LA, and it’s not something we say among ourselves.” He said “oh okay” and then kept on doing it and I just decided okay whatever.
One day I was in the break room talking to an Indian-descended friend of mine who is Catholic and from New York and this manager came in, got something, and left, but he did a to us both and said “namaste.” We looked at each other and then had a conversation about how we guess he just does that for anything remotely Indian. Then my friend said “I don’t know if that’s racist or just one of the dumbest things I have ever seen.”