We’ve all been there. You’re having a conversation about social issues that quickly pivots to an argument about race in America, with one person making increasingly uncomfortable statements.

You try to avoid making a scene, but then you realize that you don’t owe this person anything – least of all a platform from which to project their racist overtones – so you interrupt them and say “Dude, that is massively racist and completely inappropriate.”

Cue the hailstorm of response bullets!

One by one, from the “I’m not racist, I don’t see color” to “We’re so busy wrapped up in PC culture these days that everything has become racist” to finally “I can’t be racist, I have a black friend!” And that’s when you snap back again, because you know that it’s usually the person who is very much outwardly racist that uses the one person of color in their life as evidence of their universal tolerance.

It doesn’t work on you, of course, because you’re enlightened, fantastic, and fully woke, but does it work in general?

New research suggests this phrase actually DOES make people appear less racist – at least when it involves Asian Americans. A study published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that people viewed a white man who disparaged minorities as less racist if he mentioned having minority friends.

“This article is the first to examine whether minority friendships actually protect majority group actors from observers’ attributions of prejudice,” states one one of the study’s researchers, Michael Thai. “We demonstrated that they do, albeit not fully.”

Via Raw Story: