I'm about to be really vulnerable for a second which is probably a mistake on social media, but here I go. I'm German, I moved to the US when I was 9, and it's staggering how much Nazism is a joke here. I was going through old pictures and I've deleted several of myself doing the Hitler salute because my friend group thought it was funny at the time to make me do it. I don't blame them. I never told them it made me deeply deeply uncomfortable to do it, much less to have pictures taken off me doing it. To them it was an edgy joke.
I've had so many people, from fellow teenagers to adults, make Nazi jokes at me when they find out I'm German. I always responded with 'haha yeah'. It wasn't until my late 20s/early 30s that I got more comfortable not laughing and telling people that it's not funny. I'm so blessed that social media wasn't a thing when I was a teenager, that the pictures I deleted never made it online. If you're one of my friends and you still have pictures of me doing anything like that I would like you to delete them. I don't know why it took me so long to even realize I could ask that, but it did.
I should have felt comfortable to tell my friends that I was uncomfortable but teenagers are young and dumb, they want to push boundaries through edgy humor. Again, I don't blame anyone, I'm not mad, I don't feel like they did it to harm me and I'm not living with trauma or anything. I'm mentioning it cause I'm older, I remembered this happened and I can say something about it.
But I never should have had an adult make a nazi joke at me. As adults we need to be better.
