Lunch Chat: racist jokes and discrimanation

[UPDATE: I was asked to add that we did not actually "tell racist jokes" at lunch but we were "discussing racist jokes and brought up a couple as examples".]

At lunch today someone told a racist joke. Or is it "racist joke" if you tell a joke about your own race?

I was brought up in the time of Martin Luther King, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, and the Moon Landing. We lived on the Stanford University campus and I remember student anti-war protests against the the Vietnam War. In this environment my parents taught me, and I feel it in bones, that racist jokes are wrong, harmful, disgusting, disgraceful, and grow from ignorance, intolerance and injustice.

So, what was I doing at lunch with people who tell racist jokes!?! :) Well, to put it in perspective, I was the only person born and raised in the USA at our table. Everyone else was born somewhere else (India, China, Palestine, Jordan, etc...). They are all my friends and colleagues, and most of them have told me stories of their hometown, family, childhood, school, higher education, or work experiences. We have a wide variety of experiences among us.

Well, the joke was a reference to engineer from India who blogged something like "WWID" which stood for "What Would Indians Do?". And so the question came up:

Is it racist for someone to make fun of their own race?

The discussion ranged from the Civil Rights movement, to affirmative action, to reverse discrimination, to discrimination in the US and the world today...and tomorrow...

We talked about how young the USA is when compared to the civilizations of China, India, Egypt, and Europe. And how perhaps the USA could learn from it's elders. That discrimination has been institutionalized in different cultures in many different ways (like the caste system and slavery) as a means of power and control using fear and distrust of "others" to control people and resources. And so we asked:

Will there always be discrimination?

Even in the short history of the USA we have had slavery, and discrimination against different groups of immigrants (the Chinese, Irish, Japanese,...). There has been religious persecution, gender and sexual preference bias, and don't get me started about the Democrats or Republicans! :) Many types of discrimination have bloomed, and faded. There are always differences that can be exploited to divide and separate people.

Finally is all discrimination created equal?

Is discrimination based on things that can not be changed (like skin color, height, age, gender,...) worse than discrimination based on things that can be changed (like hair color, clothing, musical preference, hobbies,...). Can people really change their musical preference? Or sexual preference? Or religion? Or gender?

What other interesting points did we talk about?
And...what do you think?