“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.

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