How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race

Jay Smooth is amazing. I've written about him once before here. In this TED Talk below he explains why we need to continue to talk about race. He explains that talking about race and thinking about race can be difficult because people think of things in terms of being racist or not racist and therefore good or not good - and that makes considering your own views and working on them very difficult. As he says "The belief that you must be perfect in order to be good is an obstacle to being as good as you can be."

I really recommend watching this talk, it explains, in a hopeful sense, the need to continue the discussion amongst ourselves in order to change the overall larger structure of racism that remains in our culture.

One point I found interesting was :
" The race constructs that we live in in America were shaped specifically by a desire to avoid making sense. They were shaped for centuries by a need to rationalize and justify indefensible acts. So when we grapple with race issues we are grappling with something that was designed for centuries to make us circumvent our best best instincts. "

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race

Jay Smooth

I'm going to be doing a post here or there on dudes who rule, sort of as a continuation of this post. I don't know much about Jay Smooth other than that he vlogs at Ill Doctrine and blogs at Hip Hop Music and is the founder of New York's longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad. Jay is sort of like your high school basketball coach who seems a little silly with his Brooklyn "I'm down with the kids" voice but who you secretly adore because he is incredibly intelligent and always standing up for the underdog. He manages to take controversial topics about racism and sexism in pop culture or hip hop and explain them in just a few minutes with an amount of depth, fairness, and complex humanity that most writers can't get across in entire books on the subject.

In this video he explains an Asher Roth scandal I hadn't heard of but don't worry he'll explain it. This explanation of what our country is going through in its racial dialogue is pretty good, it put together a lot of things I'd been thinking but couldn't quite sum up.


This is a great approach to the conversation of abuse in the Rihanna & Chris Brown scandal.


Disregard the intro in this one. Here he does a really funny twist on that Miss USA gay marriage uproar.


This is a thoughtful and unique way of looking at Michael Jackson's death and the media frenzy that followed.