Best practices

Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding

Prompted by Dog the Bounty Hunter’s racist tirade, Dave Niewert of Orcinus comments:

Here’s one thing about being a white guy: You hear a lot of "private" talk from other white guys who assume you’re on the same side of the fence as they are and feel free to start spewing …

The question then becomes what to say. Dave worries that his usual response — "expressing to them … my utter bafflement why they think I would ever be on their side" — is inadequate:

It doesn’t come close to conveying the depth of my feelings about this kind of talk and what it reveals. In my youth, of course, I was much more likely to get up on my higher moral ground and lay into someone, but I also found that did more harm than good. So my default response now is milder and more hopeful of keeping the conversation going, but, I think, too tepid. Besides, this is usually the point when conversation becomes fruitless.

His expression of bafflement fulfills one of the many obligations this situation presents one with: The obligation to disabuse the speaker of the notion that you agree with him. That’s necessary, but it doesn’t go very far toward either condemning attitudes that need to be condemned or toward helping to persuade the speaker to change (two other obligations that can be difficult to pursue at the same time).

Dave has tossed the subject out for response from his readers, and many of their comments are interesting, but I’m interested in your feedback here as well.

How do you respond when someone says something hateful about black people (or Jews, or homosexuals, or women, or Muslims, or …)? And how well does that work?