My sister (26f) is treating her bf (24m) like a fashion accessory and I don't know if I should get involved

TLDR: My sister is dating someone from a different ethnicity and the way she treats him is really gross. I want to call her out but I don't want to make things uncomfortable for him. What do I do?

My sister and I are close in age (I'm about 1.5 years younger) and we live in the same city. We've never been very close and we bicker a lot but we have quite a few mutual friends and we're both close with our family so we end up seeinh quite a lot of each other.

She quite recently introduced her new boyfriend. He comes from another country originally but is a citizen of our country and seems to be very well integrated. I'm trying to keep the details vague but if you imagine an ethnicity that is commonly fetishised by nerdy white women you can probably make a guess where he's from. My sister has idealised his home country since she was in her early teens mainly due to enjoying the pop culture. From what I can tell, he doesn't seem to share those specific interests.

Her boyfriend is very beautiful. I'm not interested in men so I'm not saying this because I'm attracted to him. He looks like a model. However he is quite shy and insecure. He mentioned being bullied a lot growing up and having a hard time fitting in, he's also from quite a poor background. Honestly he could do a lot better than my sister. She's average looking and she's quite a difficult person. She also really doesn't treat him well or seem to care about him at all as a person.

Having spent time with them together, I strongly suspect my sister is only with him because of his ethnicity and his looks. She is constantly taking pictures of him/them together and posting them on social media as if she's showing him off. The captions and tags are gross and 9 times out of 10 she'll find some way of mentioning his ethnicity or where he's from. It honestly reminds me of how some people are with their pets. Some of her friends are just as bad when they're around him and the poor guy seems so uncomfortable.

When I've spent time with them as a couple, she seems more interested in taking pictures than listening to what he's saying. I've seen her literally interrupt him and tell him to stop talking while he's trying to speak to her. When our friends and family have asked him quite basic questions about himself, she has often been surprised and said he never told her, but presumably because she never asked him. He seems like a really sweet and interesting guy but whenever he says more than a few sentences he starts apologising even if she's not in the room. When she is in the room, she often cuts him off and I have literally heard her say in a really patronising voice "aww, stop talking".

We recently had a family dinner and someone asked about his family, my sister was surprised to hear his mother died when he was a young child despite them dating for several months, it seemed to be completely new information to her. It made me so angry, the poor guy looked so hurt when she was like "what? I never knew your mother was dead?" Afterwards, I (privately) called her out on using him as a fashion accessory and not caring about him as a person. She said that I'm the one who is being racist because I wouldn't accuse her of that if he wasn't from another country.

I've mentioned it to a couple of mutual friends who agree that she's treating him badly. It almost seems abusive to me and I think people would be disgusted if it was a white man treating a woman of colour that way. I know it's probably not my business but it's hard seeing someone being treated that way and he doesn't seem to realise that it's not okay. Is there anything I can do?

Submitted November 14, 2022 at 01:57AM by ThrowRA-aitah https://ift.tt/KOsk5Xv