#2. They Didn't Mean To Be RacistHere's what it feels like to be called out on unintentional racism: You're trying to make a complex argument for how to deal with Iran and someone keeps interrupting you to tell you you're pronouncing "nuclear" wrong. What a pedantic prick.
Here's what it feels like to receive unintentional racism: A guy is driving to get groceries and on the way he runs over you with his car. When you complain, he calls you a pedantic prick.
Natasha thinks whatever racial slur or stereotype she might have incidentally brought up is far less serious than the point she was making or the joke she was telling, and those Yvonnes out there are tunnel-visioned nitpickers. In most cases, most of us will have the opposite priorities.
This is why "Oh come on, I didn't mean to be racist; I was just trying to tell a joke" gets the same looks as "Oh come on, I didn't mean to run down a pedestrian; I was just trying to get groceries."
It's not so much "I meant well" or "I had good intentions" (although you get that too) as "I was talking about something completely different and you're changing the subject!" This is why they go on about "All I was trying to do ..." and how you "missed the point."
I think we make it worse by using the word "hate" to describe any kind of bigotry. If someone doesn't feel "hate" or anger or any strong feeling toward that group, they think they're off the hook. The grocery shopper probably didn't "hate" the guy he ran over, but the guy is the same amount of dead no matter how the shopper felt.
Another step beyond "I didn't mean to be racist" is "I wasn't thinking about race at all," and its buddy "You're the one making this about race."
When a manager hires 10 white people in a row despite having qualified minority candidates, quite often they "weren't thinking about race at all." For every blatantly racist asshole that won't hire some race because "They have no work ethic," there's a well-meaning manager with the same subconscious biases we all have, unintentionally feeling a better "vibe" from candidates similar to them.
When Manager Natasha gets called out, this is the first time in the process that race has been directly brought up, so it seems totally true to her when she says, "You're the one bringing race into it." Race has, of course, been heavily involved the whole time, but it's been doing its dirty work out of her subconscious.
Sometimes being less racist requires thinking more about race.
#1. They Totally Wouldn't Mind If It Was ThemPeople are always egregiously misusing some of the greatest wisdom in the world. In this case, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "Why do black people get so upset when I use the N-word?" asks Natasha. "I don't mind if anyone calls me a 'honky.' In fact, I laugh along. I guess the difference is that I have a sense of humor and they don't!"
The problem with testing any phrase or action that might offend, say, black people, by thinking of the equivalent phrase or action aimed at white people, is that there often isn't any. If there was some group that held the overwhelming majority of political offices and dominated corporate leadership in the most powerful country in the world and had previously enslaved white people for 400 years, and they had at some point during the slavery period invented a nickname that implied white people were subhuman and were still using it now, then sure, you could use that to guess how a black person would feel about the N-word, maybe.
Natasha might think, "OK, I'll just imagine how I would feel in that situation, then!" But no, that's a terrible idea. People imagine strange things about themselves in fictional fantasy scenarios; they're always suspiciously witty and badass and impeccably moral.
There are areas where we can never be "on the scene" and get firsthand evidence, and we take other people's word for it. We don't run most experiments ourselves; we take scientists' word for what happened. We don't fly to Syria to see what ISIS is really doing; we take our favorite reporter's word for it (for better or worse). But when it comes to how racism feels, people like Natasha seem compelled to go "on the scene" and verify it directly, through the power of imagining themselves into other people's shoes.
The issue is a lack of trust, which you can see in common Natasha phrases like "outrage culture" and "victim mentality," which mean "You're lying about how hurtful this word is to you, because you're playing some kind of power game." If Yvonne is white, there's an additional suspicion that maybe she's just pretending to care about the other group as part of this power game, to gain righteousness points.
If Yvonne can convince Natasha this isn't a power game and the goal isn't to shame her, Natasha might stop insisting on making the call about how other people should feel. But I realize this is like saying that if you could modify your car to fly, your commute to work would be easier.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-you-cant-convince-anyone-that-theyre-racis...