How To Talk to Someone Who Sounds Racist

I don't mean those anonymous comments on blogs or strangers who shout racial epithets from speeding cars. That's horrifying behavior, but we don't feel empowered to do much about it.

It's a different story, though, when someone we know, maybe even love, says something that makes our neck hairs stand up and our mouths drop open like codfish.

What do we do?

The one thing we shouldn't do, says Jay Smooth, is call the person racist.

"When you say, 'I think he's a racist,' that's not a bad move because you might be wrong," says Smooth, a video blogger in New York. "That's a bad move because you might be right."

Smooth is founder of the hip-hop video blog "Ill Doctrine," at www.illdoctrine.com. His video "How To Tell People They Sound Racist" is growing a following on the Web and is showing up in college curricula. And for good reason. In three fast, but powerful minutes, Smooth delivers a primer for anyone who wants to initiate an actual conversation about race.

"There's a lot of discussion about race, but it's a conversation full of trepidation," Smooth said in a phone interview last week. "Some talk about prejudice as if it were like a pregnancy: You either are or you aren't. But it's not always that simple."

This conversation is a personal one for the 35-year-old Smooth. His parents divorced when he was 3, and he spent his childhood navigating two worlds. His father is black and lives in Harlem. His mother is white and lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

"I went to a very elite school during the day and then often went home to Dad's place in Harlem," he said, laughing. "Makes you think about a lot of things."

Smooth is smart and funny, which makes him the perfect instructor in this imperfect world. Response to racism, he says in the video, tends to fall along one of two lines: the "what they did" conversation and the "what they are" conversation.

It's very important, he says, to choose the right conversation.

The first approach focuses strictly on the person's words and actions.

The other approach "uses what they did and what they said to draw conclusions about what kind of person they are." Smooth says this tactic is a "rhetorical Bermuda Triangle, where everything drowns in a sea of empty posturing."

In the video, he imitates the typical scenario that unfolds after a celebrity makes a racist comment. After an initial apology, a string of puffed-up celebrities insist their buddy is not a racist and say, "How dare you claim to know what's inside their soul just because they made one little joke about watermelon, tap-dancing and going back to Africa?"

Just like that, the conversation derails; the offender is let off the hook, and nobody learns a thing.

Smooth's advice reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend who is black. He listened patiently as I whined about how hard it is to nudge people on the issue of race.

Then he set me straight.

"Your problem," he said, "is that you want everyone to have that kumbaya moment and feel the change in their hearts. I don't need that. They can take all the time they want to drag their hearts along, but I want their words and deeds to change right now because what they do can have an impact on my children and on my grandchildren."

Smooth puts it this way:

"When somebody picks my pocket, I'm not going to be chasing him down so I can figure out whether he feels like he's a thief deep down in his heart. I'm going to be chasing him down so I can get my wallet back. I don't care what he is, but I need to hold him accountable for what he did."

Calling a person names never will change anything.

Calling a person out, though, just might change everything.

Watch Jay Smooth's video below.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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