So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

The promise that keeps racism alive tells you that you will benefit most and others will eventually benefit… a little. It has you believing in trickle-down social justice.

Trickle down justice

It is about race if a person of color thinks it’s about race.

That doesn't mean it is necessarily only about race. But when a POC experiences it that way it is at least also about race

Once you know that your wild gesticulation is harming people (even if you’ve been raised to believe that it’s your god-given right to gesticulate as wildly as your heart desires without any thought of consequences), you can no longer claim it’s an accident when somebody gets hit.

It still hurts when it is unintentional. Presence of racism imposes an obligation on you to put your actions in context

There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist.

Simple obvious truth about why all white people in white societies are racist, even when we try not to be.

You may think that someone is making a mountain out of a molehill, but when it comes to race, actual mountains are indeed made of countless molehills stacked on top of each other. Each one adds to the enormity of the problem of racism.

The racist molehill mountain