[Vision2020] An Easy Guide to Avoiding Racial Offense

[Andreas Schou]

(1) If you have to refer to race for some reason, call people what
they ask you to. If they have to correct you, "oh, I'm sorry, I'll try
to do better" will suffice. Don't be stubbornly antiquated. For
instance, don't use the word "negro." You are not a seventy-year-old
man in a seersucker suit that's half-drunk on mint juleps: pleading
ignorance is not an option.

(2) If you do something racially insensitive by accident, apologize,
but don't freak out. You've just done something rude, but, hell, we've
all used the wrong fork at an expensive dinner.

(3) If you do something racially insensitive on purpose, don't whine
when there are consequences. If it is, for instance, your job to say
things to people, and you are speaking into a microphone, and
everything you say is recorded, do not pretend that it isn't gross
incompetence to say the wrong thing.

(4) If you are white, do not pretend that because your grandparents
came over from the Old Country, you, in particular, have experienced
any particular racism. I can't tell that you're
Irish/Italian/Polish/whatever. Neither can anyone else. People have to
know this in order to discriminate against you. Some exceptions may
exist for people who have lived in Hawaii. Every other white person in
America is out of luck.

(5) We all have freedom of speech. That means the government can't
shut you up. That doesn't mean that I can't object to what you say.

(6) Don't think you can use racial slurs because people of the same
ethnic group use them on each other. It's baffling in the same way
that telling "yo mamma" jokes to your siblings would be, but not
offensive in the same way that a stranger shouting a "yo mamma" joke
out of their car window would be.

(7) That Chris Rock impression you're going to do at the NAACP
conference? Yeah. That's probably a bad idea.

It is not a tremendous imposition on you to do these things. It's rude
not to. Why is that such a big deal?

-- ACS