Full text of Jay Smooth’s talk: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race at TEDxHampshireCollege conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: TEDxHampshireCollege – Jay Smooth on How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race
TRANSCRIPT:
I want to talk a little bit about race tonight.
Or to be more precise, I want to talk about how we talk about race, how we engage in race conversations, and how we might get a little bit better at it in some ways. And that’s a topic that I have always enjoyed; most Americans avoid race conversations like the plague. And we often take our ability to avoid it and use it as a measure of our progress and enlightenment, which, I think, is kind of telling in and of itself.
But I’ve always been drawn to those conversations and fascinated by them. In part, because growing up as a very light-skinned black man of mixed descent, I often find myself in sort of peculiar race-based conversations. Often times when I’m meeting someone for the first time, rather than making small talk, they’ll immediately present me with a philosophical conundrum, they will ask, “What are you?”
And I’ll have to explain: “I’m not a philosophy major; my father is black, my mother is white, and what are we…”
So I’ve always had a passion for studying and observing how we communicate about race and how we might get a little better at certain aspects of that communication. And I made a video commentary named “How to tell someone they sound racist”, which talks about a particular type of race conversation, which usually doesn’t involve any explicit racist intent, there’s no blatant racism involved. It usually involves well-intentioned people, but it’s a situation where one of us feels the need to tell someone that something they said may have had connotations they were not aware of, or they may have done something that had a hurtful impact they might not have been aware of.
And that’s a conversation we all find ourselves in from time to time, and it’s a conversation that usually goes horribly. Because no matter how clear you try to be in conveying that you’re not attacking the person, you’re just trying to offer a specific critique about something that just happened. When we are receiving that sort of critique, we tend to deeply personalize and take it as a personal attack, and we tend to respond by saying: “Are you saying that I am a racist? How can you so? I am a good person! Why would you say that I am a racist?” And you try to explain, I am talking about a particular thing.
You say, “No! I am not a racist.”
And what started out as a what-you-said conversation turns into a what-you-are conversation, and what-I-am conversation which is a dead end that produces nothing except mutual frustration, and you never wind up seeing eye-to-eye and finding any common ground.
So in my video, I offered some suggestions for how we might stay focused on the what-you-said conversation and find some common ground. Most videos on YouTube die off after 48 hours, but this video really struck a chord, which I think shows how hungry many of us are to find better ways to communicate on these issues.
And the two types of feedback I get most commonly on that video are one: “I really appreciated the perspective you gave about staying focused on what-you-are conversation.”
And the second type of feedback I get is: “I tried these strategies you suggested about staying on the what-you-are conversation, and they actually never work.”
And this is true, unfortunately, no matter what angle you take, as far as voicing that critique, the vast majority of the time, it’s still going to lapse into a defensive what-I-am conversation. I think framing it as clearly as you can, in that what-you-said form is still valuable because it makes the substance of your beef as clear as possible to other people observing the conversation, especially in public discourse. And it gives both of you the best shot at finding common ground and seeing eye-to-eye; it’s worth going for that 10%. But generally the success rate might be higher here in Hampshire College, but where I live, on the Internet, the success rate tends to be around 10%.
So since I made that video and took in that feedback, I’ve been thinking about what other approaches we might be able to take, and I think since we can never entirely fix that conversation by changing how we voice the critique, I think we might be able to also make it budge a little bit by considering how we receive that critique, and how we might be able to take a suggestion that we may have said or done something racist, take it in stride, and not completely freak out and assume that the world thinks that I’m a bad person.
So the first thing that makes it difficult to accept that critique, that you may have said something racist, is simply that it involves the possibility that you made a mistake, and none of us takes that too well, none of us enjoys that. But in most other situations, when the possibility arises that we made a mistake, we are usually able to take a few deep breaths and tell ourselves: “I’m only human, everyone makes mistakes.”
But when it comes to conversations involving race and prejudice, for some reason, we tend to make the opposite assumption. We deal with race and prejudice with this all-or-nothing, good person, bad person binary, in which either you are racist or you are not racist. If you’re not betting a thousand, then you’re striking out every time. And this puts us in a situation where we’re striving to meet an impossible standard. And if anything less than perfection means that you are a racist. That means any suggestion that you’ve made a mistake, any suggestion that you’ve been less than perfect is a suggestion that you’re a bad person, so we become averse to any suggestion that we should consider our thoughts and actions. And it makes it harder for us to work on our imperfections.
When you believe that you must be perfect in order to be good, it makes you averse to recognizing your own inevitable imperfections, and that lets them stagnate and grow. So the belief you must be perfect in order to be good is an obstacle to being as good as you can be. So it would make our conversations with each other a lot smoother, and it would make us better at being good, if we could recognize that we’re not perfect and embrace that.
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