Awesome reaction. You're making me think of my parents with your post.
Yeah... my mom would'a giggled
.... and sent a fruit basket. She was gloriously, utterly blithely unaware that her urban (and urbane), Modern Christian (United Church, aka "Church Lite"), I'm-very-inclusive-and-certainly-not-bigoted/racist-in-any-way posture belied a well hidden dis-ease with 'colored folk'.
I found the dichotomy (correct usage?) of it endlessly fascinating. She was seriously involved with helping immigrants settle into housing via. the church; I was frequently enlisted, as a kid, to help by either moving families (mostly from central Africa at the time) into their first apartments or playing with their kids... a task that was sometimes fun, but frequently very, very strange. Me, a 10 year old white Canuck, trying to "play" with a war-zone refugee kid who has probably seen stuff that would make me puke, just days or weeks after coming here.
Anyway, she'd do that, and invite all sorts of oddities of the Human kingdom over for Sunday dinners, and it was cool... but then, Mom and Dad would go on holidays on a cruise through the Caribbean, and she'd come back full of compliments about the "Boy" that cleaned their rooms and buttled (butlered?) for them!!
Or, the time she made me go with the new kid at school, an Indian, to his place for the weekend; Leon was cool, and while Mom did know they lived "in the country" and Leon's dad drove a nice, new van (they chatted outside of school in the pick-up zone many times), Mom didn't realize that Leon et. al. lived on Rosseu Reserve. In a half-rotted-out Government 3-bedroom housing unit with 10 people living in it. I learned LOTS of new words that weekend! Also, what a house full of drunk people is like. Dad, in his awesome way, figured out what was up, showed up with a case of beer and couple bottles of whiskey, dropped them off while pushing me into the car and chatting/joking with the people at the party and drove us home. Mom and Dad had a chat that night....
TL:DR - Older folks are awesome !!
(Note... TL:DR = "Too long, didn't read") (Note-note: Am I the only one who JUST learned that recently?)