Actual practice is underdetermined with respect to whether accusations of racism are based on the speaker’s attitude, communicative intention or the meaning of the utterance and whether in the latter case the racist meaning can be implicit or must be explicit. A common problem of these grounds for qualifying an utterance as racist is that they refer the question to the speaker’s own authority. The interactional model of utterance interpretation which forms the theoretical background of the present project permits us to elaborate a novel and robust conception of speaker responsibility. The speaker’s responsibility depends on the hearer’s most reasonable interpretation of the utterance in such a way that the speaker’s actual attitude or intention is irrelevant and also whether the meaning was explicitly or only implicitly conveyed.