This is why we should all have ‘the conversation’

I just finished watching the latest installment of David Letterman’s Netflix series, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” in which Dave spends an hour interviewing interesting people one-on-one. This month his guest was rapper and business mogul Jay-Z, and I was suitably impressed.

Before I watched this show, I didn’t know anything about Jay-Z except that he produced and performed hip-hop music and married one of the world’s most beautiful women, Beyoncé Knowles. I didn’t know anything else about him because I don’t listen to hip-hop music, and before you call me a racist, I also don’t like opera, sappy country music, polkas, show tunes and the majority of freeform jazz.

So anyway, I started watching the show to learn something about Jay-Z and hoping that he might say something interesting…and he did.  Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, is a thoughtful, intelligent, articulate individual with great depth and a dubious history that he turned into a successful career by overcoming his environment and pushing ahead against the obstacles in his life until he moved them out of his way.

Among other things, he's a loving husband and father, a star in the music business and the owner of several successful business ventures. He also established a charitable foundation that helps underprivileged children from poor backgrounds attend college. I’d suggest you google him if you want to know more.

My point is this: I didn’t have to watch this show. It would have been much easier to write him off in my mind as “just some rich black guy" talking to the privileged white man David Letterman, which is probably what roughly one-third of the country would believe. You know which third I’m talking about, and that is really what inspired this essay.

I won’t recap the whole interview (you can watch for yourself if you subscribe to Netflix), but the underlying theme was the importance of having “the conversation.” In other words, instead of stereotyping them and walking away, white people like Dave (and me) should sit down more often and talk with people of other races and cultures to find out who they really are.

If you do that, most likely, you’ll learn that while people may have their own set of wants and needs, ambitions and desires, successes and failures and cultural norms, on balance those values tend to intersect at some point in time, and that’s when we find out we’re not that different from one another.

That can only happen if we have the conversation.  

At one point, discussing Donald Trump, Jay-Z said it might be good that Trump came to power when he did because it brought racism out of the woodwork and showed us that “something we thought was gone” is still around – and possibly in greater numbers than we had imagined. It got people talking about the issue once again. “What he’s forcing people to do is have the conversation, and people to band together and work together,” he said. “Like, you can’t really address something that’s not revealed.”

Letterman, for his part, pulled no punches when talking about Trump. “We don’t need any more evidence,” he said. “Is he a racist? Is he not a racist? (If) you’re having a debate over whether a guy is a racist, chances are that guy is a racist.”

Now I’m not delusional enough to think that a one-hour internet talk show featuring two multi-millionaire celebrities – one white and one black – will end racism in America, because clearly it won’t, but I know of at least one other multi-millionaire who could benefit greatly if he would only sit down and actually listen to someone who would tell it to him straight.

OK, so that’s not going to happen, but as for the rest of us, I can recommend having "the conversation" whenever the opportunity presents itself. I promise you it will reveal truths that tend to hide under the hood of racism and help us all understand each other. It’s a little like having a medical procedure that you don’t think you need but which your doctor recommends. I mean, at the end of the day, they do the test and you find out you’re okay. No harm has been done, and you feel better after the fact.

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“My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” is a web-based talk show that Letterman hosts once a month on Netflix. The six-episode series consists of interviews with one guest per episode both inside and outside a studio setting. His first guest was Barack Obama, followed by actor George Clooney, Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and Jay-Z. Future guests during this first season will include Tina Fey and Howard Stern.