We worked together the rest of the week and it was fine. He just knew not to go down that road. I doubt I changed his thinking but I bet I changed his perception of how universal his thinking was.
The real problem starts when people start to assume things based on race and joke about that. Because, lets be fair, how does that differ from making jokes about engineers or lawyers or any other group of people for that matter? The problem is that you cannot choose your race, just like you cannot choose where you are born. It is something you'll have to live with, whether you like it or not. But that doesn't mean that you can't joke about it. For example, I live in the Netherlands and we always make fun of the Belgians and they make fun of us. They can't change the fact that they are Belgian, nor can we change the fact that we are Dutch. We'll have to live with it. So in short, I do think you can make jokes based on race, but in a friendly fashion. One should never try to hurt people by making jokes. Discrimination is a problem that shouldn't be treated lightly, but life without humour is boring. And some people just need learn how to take a joke. Be it about their ears or about their race. Anyway, nice site and welcome to Hubski ;-)
It usually get's a pretty big laugh and by this point he's good at knowing when and how to deliver it. The point of his delivery is to show how absurd it is to blame an entire ethnicity/people for a specific problem or circumstance. Plus it has the effect of making whatever ethnicity he has singled out feel more comfortable and more ingratiated in to the social construct of the moment. By the end of the evening, the same "Jews" or "dirty russians" that my brother was "blaming" earlier are likely raising glasses and toasting him, he makes fast friends. Such is his power of using racial joking to break down any barriers and put it all out on the table immediately. I've also found that joking about race can be a good way to let someone know that you don't really care about their race/ethnicity... but you do care about whether or not they can take a joke and you really hope they can lob one back at you.
But then, we are all subtly prejudiced. If not by race, then by something else. Jokes can reveal a lot about a person.