Venue
Taix1911 West Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA
The Tab
(1) house IPA(1) Diet Coke
————————–
$9.75 + tip
What is the most racist drink you can order? After mulling the question, Andrew Ti, creator of the blog and podcast “Yo, Is This Racist?,” deems the Negroni, the gin-Campari-vermouth concoction, the winner, followed by the Irish Car Bomb. Ti categorizes the latter as one of those “kind of insensitive drinks.” Luckily, we’ve both ordered racially neutral beverages: the house IPA for him and a Diet Coke for me.
“Yo, Is This Racist?,” created on a whim in 2011, is a fairly simple operation that is intended to be serious but funny. One part is a Tumblr blog, updated roughly every couple of hours, consisting of user-generated questions about whether something is racist or not. Ti’s answers are usually brief, rarely polite, and often sprinkled with profanities. (One example: “Just be like, ‘Yo, I don’t talk to fucking racist assholes.’”)
The other component of Ti’s project is a regular 10-minute podcast on which Ti and a guest, usually a comedian, answer a series of questions left on voicemail by anonymous listeners. “If you have to ask a stranger on the Internet whether or not something is racist, then it is probably racist,” Ti jokes.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and we are the youngest customers by a good 40 years at Taix, a French restaurant and lounge. “It’s a weird place,” Ti says with a smile. Taix has been a fixture of Echo Park since the 1920s. It is a dimly lit place with exposed brick walls and a glass wine cellar next to the bar. We are sitting in leather chairs at a round table in the lounge. Behind the bar, a flat-screen TV plays sports highlights, flanked by the tops of decorative wine barrels. Ti started coming to Taix with friends to watch the presidential debates last fall. Now he just likes to come here to hang out. It’s close to his house.
On this day, Ti has come from the gym, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a gray chevron design. He leaves his sunglasses on the table next to his beer and looks a little flustered at first. But he quickly focuses as he describes his work.
Ti is somewhat vague about his definition of the term “racism”—perhaps deliberately so, since defining the term’s boundaries is part of what keeps his project going—but it’s safe to say he rarely errs on the side of narrowness. Racism can encompass everything from the horrific, like crosses on fire, to the trivial, like giving your pet a Japanese name. While sociologists might make distinctions between terms like “prejudice” and “racism,” Ti prefers not to get too academic about it. He tries to keep the conversation casual enough to avoid “spending the entire time arguing about the definition of the word.”
When I ask him whether he thinks the term “racist” is overused, he runs his hands through his hair and thinks. But I sense the answer is pretty obvious to him. “The only people who feel the word racist is overused are people who are doing racist stuff,” he finally says. “If you are the victim of racism, it’s not used enough.”
Creating this blog hasn’t changed Ti’s generally left-leaning politics. “There’s probably a good chance that my views are going to stay the same, if not continue to radicalize,” he says with a laugh. But he stresses that he is not a professional; he doesn’t do research, and a lot of the guests on the podcast are just friends of his, although people like comedian Paul F. Tompkins occasionally stop by.
Both the blog and the podcast rely on brevity. The daily podcasts run about 10 minutes, during which Ti and guest debate one or two questions. On the blog, Ti often answers in just a few words. In one post, for instance, a submitter asks, “Yo, I just got invited to a ‘Hawaiian’-themed party. What are the odds that this is gonna be super racist?” Ti’s answer: “100 percent dogg.” Ti explains, “I can answer a question while I’m in line getting coffee or in traffic. Not that you should text and drive.”
On Ti’s Tumblr, if he likes what you’re saying or he’s on your side, he calls you “dogg,” as in “We all know that, dogg”—his response to a comment that attributes most hatred of Islam to racism. He uses “wack” when he thinks you, or something you’ve mentioned, is crazy and racist. For example, “Holy shit, you just won the Wackie Award for the Wackest Question Of All Time!!!!!!!!!”
If Ti is quick to find fault, he is also quick to acknowledge his faults. About one recent podcast episode, which asked whether older white men looking for brides in Thailand are racist, Ti has some regrets. “That was one where I’ve gone back and been like, ‘Ugh, that wasn’t great,’” he says. He had argued that such men are racist (because it’s a case of wealthier white men seeking out impoverished Asian woman), while his guest, Jane Marie, then-co-editor of TheHairpin.com, argued it wasn’t proper to judge the relationship (if the end result is that two people are happily married, why not?). As they debated, Ti backed off. “Sure, I am wrong all the time,” he laughs. “You gotta acknowledge it in the most appropriate way and keep going.”
Ti, 33, grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I was, like, the only Asian kid in my high school,” he says. Race became especially noticeable to him in middle school, when everyone seemed to be pairing off and making obvious race-based choices. “It was very clear that the one other Asian girl in sixth grade was who I was supposed to ask out, and I really didn’t like her.” Ti recalls. “That was the first time I was like, ‘Something is wrong here, this is bad, and it’s probably not going to go away.’”
As a biology major at Columbia University, Ti found himself debating creationism (or “intelligent design”) advocates on the Internet. The debates got long and meandering and absurd, and it frustrated him to see that “people just sound like sputtering idiots even if they’re right.” That’s one reason why “Yo, Is This Racist?” is kept so brief. “I am really just trying to move the boulder toward the simple idea that it is not a problem to call out racism and to not apologize for it,” he says.
While Ti clearly has a gift for online invective, he hasn’t raised his voice once during our conversation. He hasn’t cursed, either. He’s been taking his time with all of his answers, gesturing with his hands when his points get more intense. This is also the demeanor he takes on when he is answering questions on his podcast, which is more reflective than his blog posts. Ti’s Tumblr side is clearly his punchiest.
Recently, Ti was the subject of a segment on “Tell Me More,” a weekly talk program on NPR. When I ask if he’s read the comments left in response on NPR’s website, Ti’s answer is immediate: “Nope. Never ever.” But he does ask me about them all the same. When I tell him one commenter called him a “reverse Colbert Report”—suggesting a hard-charging and aggressive host attacking ironically from the left instead of the right—Ti rolls his eyes knowingly. “I get that a lot,” he says.
Within months of debuting “Yo, Is This Racist?” Ti was answering over 100 questions a week. Today, the “Yo, Is This Racist?” Twitter feed has over 5,000 followers. He praises fans of the blog and podcast for their insightfulness (he affectionately calls them “racecars” on the blog), noting that they call him out when he’s wrong and supply him with supporting data when he’s right.
Like every successful blogger, Ti had a book proposal making the rounds, but he ended up turning down an offer because the timing wasn’t right. He is working on a better book proposal based off his blog as well as a sketch show and a movie he’s developing with a friend.
Ti says he deals with racism offline the same way he advises people to deal with it on “Yo, Is This Racist?” And when certain family members get too racist for him, Ti resorts to coping mechanisms that are refreshingly universal: “Peace the fuck out. Or sometimes—uh—get too drunk.”