“Am l Overreacting for leaving my white bfs parents house after seeing a racist gnome in their lawn?”
I black (25f) and my bf (23M) is white. we have been together for a year now and he's the sweetest and most genuine man i have ever met. our relationship is pretty great. I met his parents earlier in our relationship and they were super cool and nice.
I had one incident with my bfs dad saying something inappropriate to me but my bf immediately checked his parents and made them apologize to me. So i would say my bf has always advocated for me towards his family and very aware of his parents behavior. moving on, I haven't seen his parents in person since that last incident but would text them since we had a group chat. so at this point there's no bad blood, i moved on from it and cool with his parents again.
So his parents asked me and my bf if we could house sit for them while they go on vacation. so we did. his parents ended up coming home earlier than expected due to the hurricane hitting FL. so they get back we are all having a really good time until my bf and i decided to go smoke in his backyard. As we are smoking i see this weird gnome in the yard and i thought i was tripping!!!! I move closer to it and was honestly shocked!!! I said "babe, wtf is this?!??!" My bf was immediately embarrassed and put the gnome up and apologized to me. I was so confused bcs wtf?!?? i was like "did you know it was there?"
and he was like
"Yes and i didn't move it and that's my fault, we grew up with it around so i didn't think to move it, there's no excuses for why it's there and i will go talk to my parents". honestly i was just speechless and extremely disappointed bcuz my bf has always made me feel safe and heard as a POC. another thing, he recently had to move back into his parents house so it's not like we could've just left to go back to his place. anyways.. he tell me that his parents told him growing up that "the gnome is a lawn jockey and it's suppose to show slaves that their house is a safe place to hide".. like what the actual fukk?!?! idk how to feel. it was getting late so i spent the night and left the next morning.
I love my bf so much but im so disappointed and don't really know how to process this and how to move forward...