Preparation key when confronting racist clientele

Q. I am a middle-age white female who works in a retail setting with colleagues whose skin tones are every color imaginable. I respect them and they respect me.

Our company generally does whatever makes the customer happy. But this is the South, and because I am white, other white people think I am a safe place for their coded racist remarks. Yesterday, a customer remarked to me that she had to move to a city up north because, "when you have a very pale, blond, blue-eyed daughter, you have to get her out of [our diversely populated city], if you know what I mean."

It caught me completely off-guard, and she breezed away before I could process what she said. I stood there and just let it happen. I looked at the young girl I was working with, who has brown skin, and I was ashamed I didn't defend her. I need my job, but this has to stop. I want to make a stand, but how can I confront covert racism on the company dime?

A. I can't wait for the day when emboldened racists realize their moment is over and they need to slither back under their rocks. (This is hardly about just the South.)

Until then, I suggest you have employment-friendly responses handy. "I beg your pardon?" for example, is deceptively powerful. Feigned ignorance is a well-known expression of disgust - plus, forcing someone to repeat their ugly words is encouragement to rethink them.

Preparation is key, since being gobsmacked renders this whole discussion moot.

If you're not to the point of quitting, your preparation can and should include consulting your supervisor. "Whatever makes the customer happy" does not translate simplistically into "Ignore customers' racist remarks." For one thing, another customer could easily witness an employee's nonresponse to such a remark and choose to shop elsewhere.

And, a company will struggle to serve customers if its staff has poor morale and high turnover - a reasonable risk if such exchanges are or become common, and if you're instructed to look the other way.

Q. Here's the other side of the story about the wife [in a recent column], whose husband keeps pressuring her to change her hair color (http://wapo.st/2nev5D2). Wife keeps insisting that husband get a haircut. His hair grows long and unruly and unattractive to wife. Husband thinks wife is "controlling;" wife feels resentful because she feels husband doesn't care enough about her to practice normal grooming.

A. Partners owe each other an effort to be attractive, yes - but they also owe each other an effort to see the beauty in each other's results. And pushing someone beyond their sense of self is not loving, respectful or appropriate.

That's likely where things have gone wrong here. Make a conciliatory gesture. Say you respect that these are his choices and apologize for putting him on the defensive. Say you're asking him one final time to consider this single gesture for you, and then dropping it either way. If he still refuses, then he accepts the consequence of choosing to repel his wife. The approach applies to hair and just about anything else. Good luck.

• Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, or chat with her online at 11 a.m. each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.