What Do You Do When Someone Makes a Racist Remark?

Janis Middleton thought she had insulated herself from hate in her adoptive cityof Atlanta. She surrounded herself with urbane, college-educated friends and colleagues who embraced progressive politics.

Her friends became the cornerstones in an invisible wall that she built to protect herself. She wasn’t naive. An advertising manager, she is an African-American who had grown up in the South. But she thought she had done all she could to keep racism at bay.

Which is why she didn’t see it coming.

She was visiting a white friend last year on the Fourth of July when it happened. After the hot dogs and burgers, chips and conversation, her friend’s mother used the N-word during a discussion about race in the living room. Middleton froze.

Her good friend looked away, and said nothing.

“You tell yourself, ‘I’m going to be prepared for it, the next time,'” Middleton said. “But you never are.”

As a black woman, I know what she means. Maybe you do, too. You think you’ve steeled yourself, braced yourself, prepared yourself. You think you’ve picked a city that is safe and nurtured a social circle where you won’t have to worry. Then you’re confronted with a racist remark. At your son’s soccer practice. At the local coffee shop. At your friend’s wedding or your office.

Each situation presents an opportunity to speak out against racism, but not all of us do. Why not?

Recently, we asked readers to sharetheir reactions in those moments. We wondered:Did you say something? Were you stunned into silence? Dozens of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds responded, describing fraught encounters with strangers, friends, co-workers and relatives.

Steve Douglas, a white lawyer who lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, said he didn’t hesitate when a neighbor used the N-word to refer to African-Americans.

“That word isn’t used in this house,” Douglas said he told him. “If you’re going to be in here, you’re not going to use that word or anything close to it.”

Another reader,who did not identify his race in his response, wrote that he intervened last year when a Hispanic man in his mid-30s started mocking an Asian passenger on the New York City subway: “I said, ‘Why don’t you leave him alone?'”

Both interventions had some impact. Douglas said his neighbor stopped using racial slurs in his presence. The man on the subway initially directed his ire toward other passengers, but ultimately left the train.

Others discovered, though, that speaking up stirred tensions and strained relationships. Kim Harris, a black advertising strategist, spoke up when a white co-worker told her and several other colleagues that Michelle Obama, the former first lady, “looked like an ape.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Harris, 48, who was working in Los Angeles at the time. “That’s racist.”

Her colleague got defensive, she said, challenging her tone and her interpretation of his remark. None of her other co-workers said a word.

Will Walker, a whitecollege student in Santa Barbara, California, hoped to have a positive influence at work when he confronted a white co-worker who was using racist language to refer to Asian, black and Jewish people. The encounter occurred this summer on a golf course near Dallas where Walker had a summer job.

But his colleague expressed no remorse. Instead, Walker said, “he seemed to go out of his way to make racist comments in front of me.'’

And what about those who stayed silent or struggled for the right response? Many described feeling pained by what was left unsaid.

Michael J. Imperiale, a professor of microbiology and immunology and associate vice president for research at the University of Michigan, who is also white, said he still thought about the day he bumped into a stranger at a restaurant. The man struck up a conversation about the previous chef, who had moved to a restaurant in Detroit.

The man described what he had told the chef: “I told him not to go to Black Town.”

Imperiale was stunned. “I froze, not knowing what to say," he recalled. “Finally, I said that I had lots of friends who live in Detroit.”

Afterward, Imperiale decided he needed a different approach.

“I think I learned that I needed to be better prepared for this in the future,” he said. “A good friend suggested that my response should have been, ‘That’s racist.’ I don’t know what sort of reaction that would elicit, but I think that’s what I’ll try to do next time.”

As for Middleton, she never expected the conversation with her friend’s mother to take such a turn on that Fourth of July. The older woman started out by asking about black people who use the N-word. Then she blurted out the racial slur in its entirety, abandoning the euphemism. Middleton was staggered, but the conversation in the room continued without any acknowledgment of the racial epithet.

Middleton and her friend never discussed what happened that day. But the episode shattered their friendship. They haven’t spoken for nearly a year.

“Being around her didn’t feel right,” Middleton said. “We never discussed it, but I think we both know why we haven’t talked to each other. It was a silent exit for both of us.”