Entry · catalog no. 1156
the talk
/ /ðə ˈtɔːk/ /thuh TAWK
noun phrase · nationwide · 2010s
✓ Verified
1.
The instruction Black parents give their children — most often sons, most often around the age of driving or of walking out alone — on how to conduct themselves if stopped by police so as to come home alive. Its content is specific and practical: pull over immediately, keep both hands visible and still, announce every movement before you make it, answer sir, do not argue a stop you know is wrong, take the ticket and fight it later. It is delivered as love and warning at once, and it is usually the hour in which a child learns that the world will read him as a threat. Parents who received it give it.
“He turned sixteen in June, and that Sunday his daddy sat him down and gave him the talk.”
2.
More broadly, the whole body of racial instruction handed down in Black families — not only about police but about white authority generally, about which places to avoid, which stores to keep your hands out of your pockets in, and what to do if followed.
“My grandmother version of the talk had nothing to do with traffic stops. It was about which counties not to be caught in after dark.”
Origin & Attribution
African American, nationwide, with roots in the plantation South and unbroken currency through Jim Crow, sharecropping and the Great Migration. The practice is centuries old and its content has changed with the danger: which roads and towns to avoid in the 1930s and 40s, how to dress and carry yourself in the 1980s, how to sit still in a stopped car in the 2010s. The name is much newer than the practice. The talk hardened into a fixed national label after July 2013, when the acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin pushed the conversation in front of a white audience; Attorney General Eric Holder described it before the NAACP annual convention in Orlando on July 16, 2013, recalling the instruction his own father had given him and the instruction he then had to give his fifteen-year-old son. Correction: mainstream coverage regularly presents the talk as a product of the Black Lives Matter era — something that began with Ferguson, or with cellphone video. It did not. What 2013 through 2020 produced was national attention and a name, not the conversation. Scholarship documents it as a long-standing African American rhetorical form of the Jim Crow South, and as preparation for bias within racial socialization research that predates the phrase popular currency by decades.
2013
Attorney General Eric Holder tells the NAACP annual convention in Orlando, on July 16, days after the Zimmerman acquittal, that he had to give his fifteen-year-old son the same instruction his father gave him
2017
PBS airs the two-hour documentary The Talk: Race in America on February 20, taking the phrase as its title without explanation
2020
At the final presidential debate on October 22, moderator Kristen Welker asks both candidates about the talk — the phrase enters national political language needing no gloss
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
nationwide · 2010s
Spoken by
Black parents, grandparents and guardians across the United States
$THETALThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring13 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
88/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2013
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Eric H. Holder Jr., Remarks at the NAACP Annual Convention, U.S. Department of Justice, 16 July 2013
speech · recorded
■
Brandon M. Erby, "Surviving the Jim Crow South: The Talk as an African American Rhetorical Form," Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24(1), 2021
journal · peer-reviewed
■
The Talk: Race in America, PBS, 20 February 2017
documentary
■
Lindsey Webb et al., "The Role of The Talk and Its Themes in Black Youths Anticipatory Stress of Police Brutality," Pediatrics 155(1), 2025
journal · peer-reviewed
■
+ Cite a sourceLeslie A. Anderson, Margaret O Brien Caughy and Margaret T. Owen, "The Talk and Parenting While Black in America," Journal of Black Psychology, 2022
journal · peer-reviewed
See also