Mastering Difficult Conversations with Kwame Christian and Kenji Yoshino

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Kenji, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me, Kwame.

Oh, it's my pleasure, my friend. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

My name is Kenji Yoshino. I'm a law professor at nyu. Specifically, I'm the Chief Justice Earl Warren professor of Constitutional Law. But perhaps more importantly for these purposes, Kwame, I'm also the faculty director of the Meltzer center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.

This is great. And it's also. It's refreshing to have somebody else who has the legal background. And your career is really impressive. I mean, I even think back to con law when I was taking constitutional law and just how challenging it was. So. So to talk to a professor who has this background, not just on the legal side, but also has the heart for DEI and a focus on how to have those conversations, this is a beautiful combination.

Thank you.

Yeah. So let's jump right in and talk about the book, say the Right Thing. Tell us about that.

So this book really came out of my executive director, David Glasgow, and my a belief that there are tons and tons of allies out there. So, as a political writer, Matt Iglesias has said, what we're experiencing right now is a great awokening, and I mean woke there in its positive, original sense, rather than its distorted, more contemporary sense. And what he means is that this is a really interesting time where non black people are going to Black Lives Matter rallies, men are going to the Women's March in Washington. Straight and cisgender people are standing up for the LGBTQ community in ever greater numbers, and people without disabilities are standing up for people in the community with disabilities. So it's a really hopeful time, despite all the noise that we hear, where people who don't belong to particular groups are stepping in and stepping up to actually be allies to those groups. And one of the things that David and I found in this hopeful moment was that we weren't realizing its full potential because so many people who wanted to be allies said, I want to do the right thing. I want to step in, but I'm terrified of one thing in particular. And we heard this over and over again. I'm scared of saying the wrong thing. I'm scared of saying something inappropriate and hurting someone I care about. Realistically. I'm also scared that I'm going to get canceled myself if I say something in the wrong way. So we wrote this book in order to provide some, hopefully, comfort and safety for those people who want to do the right thing by giving them some guardrails around. How to say the right thing.

I love this. I'm smiling for a number of reasons. First, because you're absolutely right. This is necessary. We need to have the skills to have these conversations. Second, people want to be involved, but they struggle to get involved because they're afraid of saying the wrong thing. And then third, there was a selfish smile because. So last year I had my second book came out, how to have Difficult Conversations About Race. And it's just validating to see the research that you did is showing what I found as well when it comes to the reasons why people have the conversation. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on this little element, because there's that fear. So many people would say that fear of saying the wrong thing. That holds people. People back. What I found is that a lot of times they themselves cannot even identify a specific conversation that they had that went poorly, but they are still afraid, even though it might not have actually personally happened to them.

I totally agree with that. And I should say at the outset that I'm so delighted to be with another lawyer. And I also have just as much to learn as to teach here, I suspect, if not more so, given that your prior work. So I really look forward to this conversation as well. And I would say that people are often unable to even articulate what they're feeling, much less drill down to the level of a specific conversation. So oftentimes, it's just this inchoate discomfort that people keep alluding to of. I'm really uncomfortable. And one of the things that we really try and do at our center is to say, look, just what are you feeling? And people really can't articulate it. And so we have to make a multiple choice, Kwame. And we have to say, is it fear? Is it guilt, Is it anger? Or is it hopelessness? Because in our experience, those are the dominant emotions. Fear would be what we're just talking about. I'm going to get canceled. Guilt would be. Well, maybe people are right in what they say about me. Maybe I do harbor these unconscious or maybe even conscious biases about others. Hopelessness is. I'm never going to get this right. When I speak up, people tell me to shut up and share the air. When I'm silent, people tell me silence is violence. And then I need to actually do better. And let's see, what do we do? Fear, anger, guilt and hopelessness. Anger I guess is the one that we've left out is this notion of I'm furious. A lot of times people are just so angry that they feel like they have been burned in the past, or they're angry because they feel like their own group or their own identity is beleaguered in American society. And oftentimes they can't distinguish or disambiguate those four emotions. The first step is really just being able to name it and then we have some control over it. It pushes it up from our reptile brain into our more conscious brain where we can manage it. But I agree with you, once you actually get it out in the open, it's actually rare that people are able to say, here's a conversation or here are the life experiences that led me to have this fear, for example. But we regard that to be a really hopeful thing because once you understand that there is no real basis in your personal experience for that fear, that can actually give you a lot of courage.

Absolutely. And it takes a lot of courage first to even go through this introspective process to figure out what it is that we're feeling. Because when we feel that discomfort, a lot of times we just want to, we don't want to explore it. We're like, I feel bad when I think about this, so I'm not going to think about this anymore. So I'm glad we're starting here because naming it, I mean, this is classic psychological research. We name it to tame it. When we actually articulate how we're feeling and name those emotions, then we can start to become better able to control and manage them. So we can then overcome them.

Exactly right. And we actually, in the first chapter of our book, describe those let's flee from this conversation reaction and these four reactions that we call adda behaviors, which is avoid, deflect, deny and attack. So someone comes to me and says, Kenji, you were on the hiring committee for the law school last year and the diversity numbers of the candidates you hired were terrible. Do better. You know, I would hope that I would be able to have the resilience and the curiosity in order to respond to that in a mature and level headed way. But in point of fact, it's quite likely, more likely than not, you know, that I will react in one of those four ways. So a void would be, look at the time, I have another meeting to go to. Can't have this conversation. Right. Deflect would be, oh, I really appreciate that conversation. But I don't really appreciate the tone in which you put it, I thought it was a little inappropriate. Thereby, you know, changing the, the topic of the conversation from the substance to the tone in which it was framed. Deny would be, I deny that you have a legitimate case. So if I say something like, oh, I don't think diversity should play any role in our hiring. It should be based on merit alone. An attack is carrying war into your conversation partner's camp. The most aggressive reaction, which is, why do you have to make everything about diversity? Why do you have to make everything about race and just really attacking them? Why are you such a snowflake? Why are you so thin skinned? The minute that you can actually describe those four reactions in yourself and connect them up to the emotions that we were just discussing, then you're just way ahead of the game because you can just see that these are unproductive responses. All your colleague is trying to do is to open up a pathway for you to have a conversation about diversity on the faculty. If you can't even sit in your seat for that, then we're not going to get very far.

This is really helpful. I mean, it's almost like, it's almost like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse for relationships. This is really helpful because when John Gottman did his research on marriages that work, I forget the four horsemen that he identified, but I know sarcasm, contempt, those type of things. I love the fact that you've given us four very clear ways to identify a conversation or an interaction that is not going well in these. Okay, I see avoidance, we get denial, we get attacking, we get. I think the other one was defending defensive. Deflect, deflect, deflect. Right. And so I think one of the things that's so powerful about this is that if we all just slow down and look into the mirror, we have all demonstrated these behaviors. We probably did it today in some capacity, Kenji. And we. It helps us to recognize that again, we have to take responsibility for the quality of these conversations. So if somebody demonstrates this behavior, we should be able to say, hey, I saw this coming. These are predictable responses and I have the tools to overcome this. But then for ourselves, we can slow down and actually take that look in the mirror and say, you know what? This is. I'm doing this, I'm attacking, I'm avoiding. And it can help us to course correct in the moment and get the conversation back into moving into a pro productive direction. I've got a quick story for you.

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Is a true story.

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Exactly right. And you know, I'll break some news here and say, like, we don't do this by name. We use an anonymous professor, but the professor is actually me. Where a student says, you are using the words about, you know, 10 years ago, illegal alien right, when you teach your constitutional law class. So if you cast your mind back to con law, you know, Kwame, you'll remember, right? Cases about the alienage distinction. And again, I would have expected and hoped for better for myself, but, you know, I said, you know, I'm going to, you know, defend myself and say, this is what the Supreme Court uses. So are you saying that it's wrong to quote the language from the Supreme Court? The student was like, yes, kind of right. Like, we shouldn't take their judgments for our judgments and at a minimum, just, you know, use their language when you're quoting from the case. But when you're using your own terminology, use your own terminology. And then again, I would have hoped that I would have been able to rise above and to listen to this critique, but I went and immediately defended and deflected to my own credentials. And I said, you may not know who I am, but I spent my entire life working on civil rights. My specialty is the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. I've spent all of my life working on these issues. So it makes me think that you don't know who I am. To launch this criticism at me. The poor student was like, no, no, no, I do know about all that stuff. And that's exactly why I was surprised to hear you use this term, which is disfavored. And that's why I felt like I could bring this to you. And ultimately we got to a better place. But the first round did not go well. Ultimately, I ended up saying to the student, I apologize for being so defensive. You're actually right on the substance. And I'll change the terminology that I'll use, but I tell stories like that, Kwame, not to kind of self flagellate myself, but simply to open up the space to say, I have been in the diversity inclusion space for a number of years now. I'm still making these mistakes. I'll do that till the day I die. And so the point here is not to be perfect. The point is to be able to identify when we've fallen short of our own ideals and to be able to correct it.

First of all, thank you for your courage in sharing that story. And I say courage because I think now we're in living in an age where it's really hard for people to recover from making certain types of mistakes. And I think. Let me actually say it this way. There is a perception that it's hard to recover from making certain types of mistakes, because the punishment for saying the wrong thing, cancellation. Those types of things. That's real. And it can come swift and forcefully. Right? But you're living your ethos by actually saying, hey, I make a mistake, I make mistakes, and I still will. Here's an example, and I think the most encouraging part about this is that you said the first round did not go well, but you recovered by apologizing, and the conversation ended up in a positive space. So we will make mistakes throughout life, but we'll also make mistakes throughout these conversations. But if you have the right skills and the right mindset, you can course correct in the moment and get things back on track.

Exactly right. And one of my huge role models in this space is a wonderful scholar, a psychologist who's a colleague of mine at NYU named Dolly Chug. And one of the things that she does is in her classes, she puts up a slide of a professor, and she says, here's a day in the life of a professor. She said, this professor confused two people the same ethnicity and called them repeatedly by each other's names. This professor misgendered a student. This professor laughed repeatedly at inappropriate jokes about identity. This professor had a syllabus that was stacked towards dominant groups without any justification for why that needed to be. And you probably see where this is going, Kwame. The next slide is. And that professor was me. I think what an incredible act of courage, as you put it, and role modeling for her students to say, none of us need to be perfect. None of us can be perfect in this space, but all of us can get better. And part of getting better is admitting when we've made mistakes and trying to improve rather than bunkering down and trying to pretend that we have it all sewn up because none of us do. One of the things that David and I are really trying to argue for is a gear shift from cancel culture to something that we call coaching culture. I hasten to add that as critics of cancel culture, we're pretty mild. Sometimes people do engage in egregious behavior over time and then the so called cancellation is just consequence culture. But for the vast majority of people of goodwill, cancel culture is really inappropriate and unproductive because someone makes one mistake and then they risk being ostracized for that one mistake. And our criticism of that kind of cancel culture is really twofold. One is that it's indiscriminately punitive, so it's unfair. And then the other one is that it's actually in the end not very practical because it doesn't teach us any skills, because being ostracized is not the same as being taught a skill. So our hope for this book, which is arrayed across seven principles that are all meant to be kind of tools in a toolkit that you can use immediately after reading it, the goal in the book is really to be like, this is not a high concept book. This is not a fancy theoretical book. It's a screwdriver. It is a multi tool that allows you to have these conversations a little bit better with a little bit more confidence that you know that things are not going to go off the rails.

This is great. And again, kudos because as we could talk as lawyers, I. I'm an adjunct, I'm not a full professor. But you know, coming from academia to a certain extent here too, there is a lot of pressure in these professions that really love prestige to make things almost difficult to access in order to amplify that level of perceived prestige. Right. So for somebody at your level, with your credentials to write a book that is a screwdriver and not a theoretical manifesto, again, that takes courage. Because at the end of the day, what we want to do is we want to give people the tools to be able to have these difficult conversations more effectively. You can read the book and you can do the things. And so many of the books that are well meaning in nature often make the concept so inaccessible and so theoretical that it makes it impossible for somebody to actually put it into practical action in their lives.

Yeah, thank you for seeing that so clearly because it was the cause of some sleepless nights where I was thinking, like, if you look at my early work. I was insecure and the words were very, very long and the sentences are very, very obscure because I was trying to protect myself in exactly the ways that you describe. So I knew that the right decision was to make this as to meet the need that I saw that was out there. What problem am I really trying to solve here? The problem is not like I need people to respect me more as an academic. The problem was, like, I'm trying to solve a societal issue that I see where people of really goodwill are still terrified of having these conversations. And what would the world look like if those individuals felt like they could be mobilized to live up to their ideals rather than living under their ideals. Right. So that was a goal. And I did, you know, in candor, have some sleepless nights over whether or not my reputation would take a hit. Because, you know, it is a really kind of basic, you know, there are bullets at the end of every chapter. It's a really short, you know, you can read it on a plane flight kind of book. But, you know, to their credit, my colleagues have been really wonderful about it, at least to date. Right. It came out in February, so we'll see, I guess, Kwame, maybe it will come later. But people have been really, really supportive of it because they see what we're trying to do. Right. And they understand that if we want to meet the need. This book is for really, really busy people in all walks of life who are not necessarily going to have your legal training or my legal training. Right. And so it's really important that we meet the reader where that reader is, and to be as kind of plain throated and as helpful and as relentlessly practical as possible.

I love this. This is great. And let's get into the principles because there are three principles of the book that I want to make sure that we can cover here. So we have cultivate curiosity, disagree respectfully, and apologize authentically. So let's just run through some of those.

Absolutely. So cultivate curiosity is one of my favorite principles here because I think oftentimes we think that we are much better prepared for these conversations than we actually are until things go disastrously wrong. One of the things that we were thinking about is where do the gaps in knowledge lie? And one gap in knowledge is where you know that you don't know something. Like, you know, if I raise my hand to be an ally to the neurodiverse community, and then I start having the conversation and then suddenly I realize, gosh, I just don't know enough to be an effective ally. Here, that may be embarrassing, but I kind of know what to do with that, Kwame. Like, you know, I'm a researcher, you're a researcher. We got this, right? We can just go out and read the books on neurodiversity or listen to the podcasts or watch the documentaries, and we're good. The really hard question that we came across with the Curiosity chapter was, what happens when you don't even know what you don't know? This is Donald Rumsfeld's famous distinction between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. The unknown unknowns are the trickiest because you're ignorant of your own ignorance and you don't even know what you don't know. So how the heck am I supposed to fill a hole when I don't even know that hole is there? And the person who was so amazing on this is a philosopher. So a lot of the times in this book we're dealing with social scientists, psychologists, organizational behaviorists. But here, the humanities saved us because this philosopher named Christy Dotson, who's an epistemologist, says, whenever you're in an identity conversation, and you may not know until the minute the issue arises that you're having an identity conversation, a conversation about our demographic differences, she says, here's one line of advice for you. Put yourself in a nuclear physics seminar. What does that mean? It means that if I'm having an identity conversation, I'm going to put myself in the nuclear physics seminar and say, kenji, you may think you have this and you know all there is to know, but you don't know anything. You're in a nuclear physics seminar. If you were in a nuclear physics seminar, you think of yourself as a pretty smart guy, but you'd be incredibly humble. You would listen incredibly attentively. You'd share very, very tentatively and drafts rather than in complete utterances. And you would have a posture of radical humility to say, I've done all the reading. I've tried to be prepared, I've tried to listen, but I really don't know this field. It's a really hard field, so I'm going to be very cautious. That's going to save us from so many errors. And as a riff on that, when Charlien Ifill, the former president of the ldf, came to my center, I asked her what cases the Supreme Court had decided on race she would want to have had decided differently. And she rejected the question in her inimitable way. What she said was, kenji, I hear the question as, what do I want the Supreme Court to do differently. It's not about a particular case. It's about a mindset. Because the justices are not arrogant people where they know they don't know something like a case about social media. They will be very, very cautious. They'll hire a special master. They'll do their own research. They'll send the clerks out and research. They'll read the briefs really carefully. But she was like, a weird thing happens when it gets to race, where the justices believe that simply because they've grown up in a multicultural, multiracial society, they have it all down and they know everything there is to know about race just by living in society. And she's like, that just seems like such a fallacy, given that they don't. And so many people have devoted their entire lives to the history, the politics, the sociology of race. So I remember thinking when I came across Christy Dotson's work, Sherrilyn Ifill would give Christy Dotson a hug. Because what Christy Dotson is saying is, all of us, when we're talking about issues of identity, should put ourselves in that nuclear physics seminar and convince ourselves that we don't have this. It's going to be just my luck that all your listeners are nuclear physicists. But if that's the case, they should think of some other terrifying area of knowledge that they think is super arcane and hard, like literary theory. But I think of myself as a decently smart person, but I know if I were in that nuclear physics seminar, I would be very, very, very cautious. So I tend to think, like, when I'm trying to be an ally to the woman in my life. I have a sister. I have a mom. I have lots of women in my life. So I got this. But in point of fact, a much more helpful way to approach those conversations is to go from the baseline of this is nuclear physics. I don't. And I should actually listen incredibly attentively and share incredibly tentatively. Wow.

So, Kenji, first of all, one piece of feedback from your book is that you should have published it two years earlier so I could have read the book and then cited you in my book. This is so good. I really love this because I think negotiation experts, people in conflict resolution and communication, we always talk about curiosity, curiosity. And we talk about the need for genuine curiosity. Because if it's just strategic, people can say, okay, cool, Kenji, setting me up. This is a cross examination. It's over soon. I know it's going to be bad for me, but true curiosity is powered by humility, and it's not often easy for us to generate humility in the middle of a conversation of consequence. And I think this. This mindset of saying, put yourself into this nuclear physics type of mentality, I think that's a perfect way to say it, because I remember. I remember taking astrophysics in undergrad, not I was a psychology major. I was just curious. I thought it was really interesting so I could come in and feel confident in the fact that, hey, I know the things that I do know, and I know enough to know that I don't know anything about this thing. Right. And I think we are. It's almost like the Dunning Kruger effect in action in all of these interactions, because we vastly overestimate the level of confidence we should have in these topics just because we have tangentially interacted with them in some capacity. My dad's a doctor, my wife's a doctor. That doesn't mean I know anything meaningful about medicine. And so I think that genuine humility is the lost piece of a lot of that curiosity that we're looking to foster in these conversations.

I couldn't agree more. That was beautifully said. Thank you.

Thank you. No, this is really great. Well, listen, if this is principle, the first thing we're going to talk about, let's go to the next principle. Let's see if we can keep on this momentum. So disagreeing, respectfully, tell us about that.

Yeah, Here I really have to give a shout out to my co author, David Glasgow, because he was so powerful as an architect of this chapter. And his kind of initial insight was when we have disagreements about identity, oftentimes we miss each other because we are at different points on what he calls the controversy spectrum. So if you think about a controversy spectrum stretching from left to right, you can imagine over on the least controversial side, something like tastes, and then it escalates to facts, and then it goes to policies, and then it goes to values. And then finally, we have equal humanity as the most highly controversial topic. So starting with tastes, if you and I disagree about which Netflix show is better or which sports team is better or what flavor of ice cream is better, we're actually probably going to become closer rather than further apart. If we disagree, we can just razz each other and it'll be like friendly banter as we move over to facts. So long as we're really talking about journalistic facts, like who did what, where and why, as opposed to debates over values by proxy, like alternative facts. If we're really talking about journalistic facts, then we're probably still okay. When we move to policies, things get a little hotter values hotter still. And where it gets really kind of white hot is with regard to equal humanity, where one or both parties feel like the disagreement is implicating their equal humanity. And oftentimes what we see in disagreements and identity circumstances is that one person is having the debate as an issue of policy and the other person is having the disagreement as an issue of equal humanity. So just to give you an example of that, because I think examples almost always help us get our arms around this idea, I can give a personal one. So I am in a same sex relationship and now married to my husband for 14 years. But prior to 2015, when same sex marriage was made the law of the land by a Supreme Court decision, as a constitutional law professor, I used to go around the country arguing for same sex marriage against individuals who believe that it didn't have a constitutional dimension. And in green room after green room, on prep call after prep call, I got the same advice from my party opposite, which was, Kenji, we know you're in a same sex relationship, so this is personal to you, but please leave that aside. When you go up on that debate stage, we think that making that kind of human appeal is kind of unfair to us. So let's have an intellectual debate about that. And I was always so puzzled by that because on the one hand I was thinking like, well, of course I'm not going to go up there and talk about my memoir. This is constitutional law, and I'm a constitutional law professor. But on the other hand, I was also thinking you could have done yourself so much good, and I don't think you would have deprived yourself of a single substantive argument if you had been able to acknowledge that we are at different points on this scale. So if you had been able to say, we are going to argue this is an issue of values, but we want to acknowledge that this may land differently for you. And we'll try to honor and respect that as we have this conversation. And to the extent that we fail at that, we would love to hear about it. We would love for you to give us feedback. I don't think that that would have deprived them of a single substantive argument, but I do think it would have made the conversation much more human and humane. So one of the things that we say is oftentimes when you disagree with somebody on an issue, right, the other person's reaction, particularly if you're on the more empowered side of the exchange, may seem really outsized to you. And if it seems like shaken up can of soda has exploded in your face. One thing to ask yourself is, could we be at different points on the controversy scale? Am I arguing this as an issue of policy when the other side is experiencing it as a strike at their fundamental humanity? And Kwame, lest I sound like overly pious or like, this is super easy, why can't everybody do it? I acknowledge that this is hard. Right now that we're on the other side of 2015, the shoe is on the other foot. And the people that I'm debating in legal circles are people who want exemptions from laws of general applicability now that same sex marriage is the law of the land. So the Christian baker is debating me or his lawyers are debating me, saying, we don't want to have to bake the cake. We want a religious exemption from this non discrimination law. And I will die on the Hill of saying those exemptions should not be granted. Like, I just think that that makes a Swiss cheese of our civil rights commitments. But in these conversations, I have to take my own medicine. And in those green rooms and in those prep calls, I try to say in some way that is appropriate to the occasion. I acknowledge that I'm arguing this is a matter of policy. But I want to acknowledge that for you, it may feel like an issue of equal humanity, because this is about your capacity to live out your faith in the public sphere. And I, I think I understand where you're coming from. And I want to honor that as we have this conversation. My priors are my priors. I've thought deeply about this. I am not going to change, I don't think anything that I believe with regard to the right outcome in these cases. But that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge your equal humanity stakes in this conversation. And the conversation goes so much better if I have the gumption to utter those words.

This is so incredible. And just as an aside, author to author, now you're showing me how to appropriately market a book. Because I'm just like, I need to read this now. So kudos to you. This is great. I agree with you 100% that mere acknowledgement can go a long way in changing the complete dynamics of the conversation. Exact same conversation, more or less, but it feels so much better now. What is it that makes it so hard for people to give that acknowledgment to the other side?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I'm not sure how smart I'm going to be about it, but my guess is that people have a hard time acknowledging it because they really don't want to humanize the other side. They really want that person to be demonized to some extent so that they can make what they believe is the strongest arguments, you know, for their position. And I worry about that. You know, I think it's a really natural impulse to say, you know, I don't want to empathize too much with this person because then I'll be able to see their side of the story. But this goes back to sort of classic kind of John Stuart Mill type principles, right? Of like, you know, if truth grapples with error, like, we want truth to prevail and we expect truth to prevail. So why am I so threatened by a person who holds views that are different from mine? You know, if I believe that I have the truth, you know, if I'm wrong about something, then I'm the winner, right? In the debate, when I lose the debate. Debate, because I've actually learned something, right? So if we can just approach the debates right, in that way and say, you know, I lose nothing in humanizing, really, just in seeing the humanity, I think is a better way to put it, of my opponents, and I still have the capacity to disagree. It's just that the disagreement will be a lot more agreeable and a lot more respectful if we can talk to each other as human beings. Right. Rather than demonizing each other as people have nothing in common.

Brilliant. I love it. And with all of these points, listeners, I hope you respect my restraint here, because I want to dive into all of them again. But we're going to get to this last principle, which is apologize authentically. Ooh, this is good. And on the eve of my anniversary. This is great.

That's hilarious. Yeah, this one is really near and dear to my heart because we had this experience where initially we were kind of throwing up our hands in despair, thinking this is such a complex topic that really deep thinkers have addressed. And how on earth are we going to distill this down into what lawyers like to do? As you know, Kwame, of here are the kind of four elements of a successful apology. So, sure enough, though, after we sent an army of research assistants out into the theological literature, the psychological literature, the pop cult literature, the social science literature, what we found was that you can really find some commonalities in what all of these kind of scholars and thinkers say are the elements of a successful apology. So maybe oversimplifying a little bit, but I don't think terribly. We think that there are four elements, and so we call these the four Rs of a successful apology. So the first one is recognition, the second is responsibility, the third is remorse, and the fourth is redress. The first one is recognition. And the danger word that we want you to look out for here is the word if I say to you, if I did that, I'm sorry, or kwame, I'm sorry, if you feel that way, I should immediately bite my tongue and start over because one of two things is happening there. Either I'm really not sure of what's going on, and if that's the case, then I should exercise more curiosity. If I really don't know what I did that hurt you, then I'm back to curiosity. But more likely than not, I know exactly what I did. And what I'm trying to do by using the word if is to soften the blow on myself, is to kind of limit my exposure because apologies make us feel so vulnerable and exposed. If I can say if I did that, then I'm not quite copying to the fact that I did something wrong to you. But that non acknowledgement is something that you'll hear loud and clear as a recipient of the apology. And what Aaron Lazar, one of the most brilliant thinkers on apologies, has said is you're trying to limit your exposure and you're trying to offer an authentic apology, but you're going to succeed at neither of those ends if you give an if apology because the apology won't be authentic and you will not have really protected yourself because the apology will be rejected. And like as not, you'll have to apologize for the apology not going well. The second one is responsibility. And the danger word here is but. So if I say I'm sorry, comma, but I was having a miserable day, or I'm sorry, comma, but you know, I was really stressed, you're left wondering as a recipient of the apology, what happens next time Kenshi has a terrible day or is stressed. Right. Am I to expect a repeat of the same behavior? Our favorite example of this is Roseanne Barr's apology for a tweet that she sent out about Valerie Jarrett that was racist. She acknowledged that it was racist. She apologized, but then she said, I'm sorry, comma, but I was Ambien tweeting and it was 2am in the morning. So if you look at that, Sanofi, the maker of Ambien, tweeted out, racism is not a side effect of any of our medications. So it's like if you don't want a big pharma company Dunking on you. Then don't use the word. But because it just sounds so insincere. I think one of the things that we've really learned in our work is that. That there's really nothing wrong and a lot good with saying I'm sorry, period. There is no excuse, period. Rather than lapsing into I'm sorry, comma, but formulations, the third element is remorse. And there are no real danger words here. Kwame. It's much more about context. And I think the way that I can sort of land the plane on this one is with the Mario Batali apology for alleged sexual assault. So he rendered a passable apology until the very end, and then he blew up all of his good work by saying, you know, oh, for those of you who are interested in, like, a holiday recipe, here's one for cinnamon rolls. I'm just like, what? You know, so wait.

Wait, wait, wait. So after his apology, he gave a random recipe?

Yes. It was like, I'm so sorry for engaging in this alleged sexual assault. By the way, here's a recipe. I'm like, these two things do not go together. So choose one. Choose the apology or choose the recipe. But once you put them together, I'm done. I'm not making the recipe and I'm not accepting the apology.

Kenji. I just imagined somebody really mad listening to the ebology, like, oh, okay, this is good. Well, you know what? Now I'm going to make some cinnamon rolls.

That would be a much more evolved person than I am capable of being at this point. Yes. And then the fourth one is redress, which is you can't talk your way out of something you've acted your way into. So if I apologize to you and I do the same thing tomorrow, that's not really an apology. Right. You're right to reject my apology. And so one of the things that we underscore is that the reason that apologies can be kind of scary is that we all kind of implicitly know that we're closing the book on something, but we're also opening the book onto a future course of conduct. Right. We're effectively promising that we're not going to engage in the same behavior again. And so that's a real kind of commitment to act differently in the future. And so it can be a heavy lift. But that's intrinsic in an apology, we believe. But we think that if you hit those four elements again of recognition, responsibility, remorse, and redress, you're going to be really good. Right. And a lot better than most of the Apologies, you see, in the public sphere, because you'll be able to sort of hit these elements. I loved what you said earlier about strategic apologies. We're not in the business of offering up these four elements of a strategic, you know, of an apology for strategic purposes. What we're trying to do really, is to say, here are the elements of a strategic apology. Can you authentically adhere to them? So if I think like, like, oh, like, I can't really take responsibility for this. Right. And my tell is that I'm using the word but a lot. And so I don't really feel like I owe this person an apology because I don't really feel like I was responsible. Well, at that point, we would much rather have you say, I can't meet. One of the successful elements of. Sorry. One of the elements of a successful apology. What does that tell me? It may tell me that what I really want to have is a respectful disagreement rather than an authentic apology. And we would prefer you to have that respectful disagreement over the inauthentic apology anytime.

Again, one of those situations where I'm.

Going to need to use restraint, Kenji, because you know what? If you accept my invitation, I'd love to have you back on because there's so much to explore with this. And I think that's really important, this last point, because we're not suggesting that you apologize for things that were not wrong. If you genuinely don't believe, then you were wrong. I think think this is an opportunity to have a conversation and it's not a. I think that's really empowering for people because I've seen that in a lot of situations where somebody says, this person thinks I did something wrong and they're wanting an apology. I genuinely, upon reflection, don't believe that what I did was wrong. And what you're saying here is that that's fine, now you have an opportunity to have a respectful disagreement. I think this is a really, really important fork in the road for a lot of relationships and conversations where people understand now I still have a viable option that can still leave the relationship intact.

Exactly right. And we hear. So first of all, I should say extremely yes anytime you want me back, as my kids say extremely yes to that. But I also feel exactly that this is a really important sort of fork in the road where people often ask us, like, am I allowed to disagree? So a student kind of broke our hearts. And we write about this in our book, when he came to us, both of us, after an event, and said, you know, I made a comment and as a man and a colleague of mine as a woman, thought I was being sexist, and I didn't think I was being sexist. Am I allowed to disagree? And it broke our hearts because we're like, of course you're allowed to disagree. You're in an institution of higher learning. Even if you weren't, like, you should be allowed to disagree for the sake of your own integrity and authenticity. But we also got where he was coming from. Not just this notion of the climate that we're in and cancel culture and self preservation, but also from this notion. And I believe he was really coming from this place of curiosity of, like, I don't have a woman's lived experience, and so therefore, like, I may need to defer to her. I could be wrong about this. But, you know, sharing tentatively that you disagree is something that we all have to be able to do. And put a little bit more sharply, Kwame, if we shut down the capacity of people to disagree in these conversations, we're also shutting down drastically the number of conversations that are going to be had about identity. Because if people feel like their only options are going to be to, like, nod in agreement or to roll over and apologize, they're not going to want to enter into these conversations. Sometimes our integrity and our authenticity demand that we be able to disagree. And even if we're wrong to say, I could be wrong, but I just don't see it that way, of course we have to be able to say that in these public debates.

This is so good, Kenji. I appreciate you and listeners, I. For those of you who say this episode is too long, I don't apologize. I respectfully disagree.

That's a mic drop right there.

And so before you go, Kenji, please remind the listeners about the book and how they can learn more about your work.

Yes, absolutely. So the book is called say the Right how to Talk about Identity, Diversity and Justice. And David and I are both available on the NYU website. If you just Google Kenji Yoshino or David Glasgow and nyu, we'll pop up.

Perfect. Kenji, really appreciate you. Thanks for all your great work.

I appreciate you, Kwame. Thank you so much.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

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I'll catch you later.