So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

Race is everywhere and racial tension and animosity and pain is in almost everything we see and touch. Ignoring it does not make it go away. There is no shoving the four hundred years’ racial oppression and violence toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube. In fact, it’s our desire to ignore race that increases the necessity of its discussion. Because our desire to not talk about race also causes us to ignore race in areas where lack of racial consideration can have real detrimental effects on the lives of others—say, in school boards, community programs, and local government.

As a black woman, I’d love to not have to talk about race ever again. I do not enjoy it. It is not fun. I dream of writing mystery novels one day. But I have to talk about race, because it is made an issue in the ways in which race is addressed or, more accurately, not addressed. When my employer enforces hairstyles in their dress code that ignore the very specific hairstyle needs of black women (see military restrictions against small braids, for example), then my employer is making race an issue in their attempts to ignore it. When my son’s school only has parent-teacher conferences during school hours, they are making race an issue by ignoring the fact that black and Latinx parents are more likely to work the type of hourly jobs that would cause them to lose much-needed pay, or even risk losing their employment altogether, in order to stay involved in their child’s education. When I take my kids to movies and none of the characters they see look like them, it’s the studio that is making it about race when they decide to make up entire universes in which no brown or black people exist.

We have a real problem of racial inequity and injustice in our society, and we cannot wish it away. We have to tackle this problem with real action, and we will not know what needs to be done if we are not willing to talk about it.

When you start to feel defensive, stop and ask yourself why. If you are talking about race and you suddenly feel the need to defend yourself vigorously, stop and ask yourself, “What is being threatened here? What am I thinking that this conversation says about me?” and “Has my top priority shifted to preserving my ego?”

If you are white, watch how many times you say “I” and “me.” Remember, systemic racism is about more than individuals, and it is not about your personal feelings. If you find yourself frequently referring to your feelings and your viewpoint, chances are, you are making this all about you.

Ask yourself: Am I trying to be right, or am I trying to do better? Conversations on racism should never be about winning.

It is important to learn how to fail, to learn how to be wrong in a way that minimizes pain to you and others and maximizes what you can learn from the experience.

If you screwed up and you hurt people, your good intentions won’t lessen that hurt.

Remember that it is worth the risk and commit to trying again. Okay, this conversation didn’t go well. In fact, it went horribly. And now you know that you have more to learn and more you have to do to get better at this. But you have to just keep trying, because the alternative is your complacency in the continued oppression of people of color.

Racial oppression should always be an emotional topic to discuss. It should always be anger-inducing. As long as racism exists to ruin the lives of countless people of color, it should be something that upsets us. But it upsets us because it exists, not because we talk about it. And if you are white, and you don’t want to feel any of that pain by having these conversations, then you are asking people of color to continue to bear the entire burden of racism alone.

White people—talk about race with other white people. Stop pretending that you are exempt from the day-to-day realities of race. Take some of the burden of racism off of people of color. Bring it into your life so that you can dismantle racism in the white spaces of your life that people of color can’t even reach.

I, like so many other prominent black women on social media, felt very alone and very abused. Because in our struggle for justice and equality, we are often exploited and discarded. White women will heap praise on my words calling for the destruction of the patriarchy, and then turn around and ask why I have to “be so divisive” or say dismissively that I “sound like Al Sharpton” when I dare bring up race. Black men will follow me by the dozens after each essay I write calling out White Supremacy, but will forget all of that and call me a “feminist tool of slave masters” when I demand that black women be treated with respect and dignity by everyone—even black men. And even though Black Lives Matter was founded by black women, even though black women have been at the heart of every feminist movement in this country’s history—nobody marches for us when we are raped, when we are killed, when we are denied work and equal pay. Nobody marches for us.

while I may have been pulled over due to luck of the draw, the thing is—I can’t ask why. The last time my brother asked a cop why he’d been pulled over, the cop leaned into the vehicle and asked ominously, “Are we going to have a problem here?” So he doesn’t ask anymore, and after seeing what happened to Sandra Bland, I certainly don’t ask either.

At its core, police brutality is about power and corruption. Police brutality is about the intersection of fear and guns. Police brutality is about accountability. And the power and corruption that enable police brutality put all citizens, of every race, at risk. But it does not put us at risk equally, and the numbers bear that out.

black drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers1, between 1.5 and 5 times more likely to be searched (while shown to be less likely than whites to turn up contraband in these searches),2 and more likely to be ticketed3 and arrested4 in those stops. This increase in stops, searches, and arrests also leads to a 3.5–4 times higher probability that black people will be killed by cops (this increase is the same for Native Americans interacting with police, a shamefully underreported statistic). Even when we aren’t arrested or killed, we are still more likely to be abused and dehumanized in our stops. A 2016 review of a thirteen-month period showed that Oakland police handcuffed 1,466 black people in nonarrest traffic stops, and only 72 white people5, and a 2016 study by the Center for Policing Equity found that blacks were almost 4 times more likely to be subject to force from police—including force by hand (such as hitting and choking), pepper spray, tazer, and gun—than white people.6

those who demand the smoking gun of a racial slur or swastika or burning cross before they will believe that an individual encounter with the police might be about race are ignoring what we know and what the numbers are bearing out: something is going on and it is not right.

We have moments where we forget what our blackness means behind the wheel, when we are enjoying a great song on the radio, or leaving a fun event. For a few moments, we are driving like any other carefree American. But then our pulses rise at the sight of an officer on the street. Will this be the time? The moment the lights on the police cruiser go on we know—that’s for us. We are watching our speed and using our turn signals and yet when those lights go on we know that there is no other car that officer is going to pull up behind than ours. And we pray that our paperwork is all legit, and that the officer won’t be afraid of us, that we won’t make the wrong moves or say the wrong things. We hope that all we get out of this encounter is a ticket and a nervous stomach.

We like to believe that if there are racist cops, they are individual bad eggs acting on their own. And with this belief, we are forced to prove that each individual encounter with the police is definitively racist or it is tossed out completely as mere coincidence. And so, instead of a system imbued with the racism and oppression of greater society, instead of a system plagued by unchecked implicit bias, inadequate training, lack of accountability, racist quotas, cultural insensitivity, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency—we are told we have a collection of individuals doing their best to serve and protect outside of a few bad apples acting completely on their own, and there’s nothing we can do about it other than address those bad apples once it’s been thoroughly proven that the officer in question is indeed a bad apple.

people of color are more likely to be stopped by police, arrested by police, assaulted by police, and killed by police.

Our early American police forces existed not only to combat crime, but also to return black Americans to slavery and control and intimidate free black populations.

In the brutal and bloody horror of the post-Reconstruction South, local police sometimes joined in on the terrorizing of black communities that left thousands of black Americans dead.9 In the South, through the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement, it was well known locally that many police officers were also members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Our police force was not created to serve black Americans; it was created to police black Americans and serve white Americans. This is why even when police were donning white hoods and riding out at night to burn crosses on the lawns of black families, white families could still look at them with respect and trust.

This desire to control the behavior of people of color along with disregard for the lives of people of color has been woven throughout the history of American policing. This general attitude toward communities of color was also built into police training and police culture, and strong remnants of that remain today.

This belief that black people and people of color are more dangerous, unpredictable, and violent is not something that I believe most police officers (and other Americans) even know they believe. But they do believe it deep down. This implicit bias against people of color is so insidious that not even people of color are exempt from having it, which is why, yes, even police officers of color can show bias against civilians of color. Implicit bias is the beliefs that sit in the back of your brain and inform your actions without your explicit knowledge. In times of stress, these unexamined beliefs can prove deadly.

Nobody wants a solution to crime in black communities more than black people do, they are the people most impacted by it. But when you cannot trust the police to protect you, who do you call to report illegal activity? When a crime happens, why would you cooperate with a police force that you do not trust to enforce the law without bias or excessive force?

it is important to remember that the police force can be trustworthy public servants to one community, and oppressors to another community—just

our goal should be to ensure that people of all races are able to feel safe and secure with our police forces. We need to recognize that the fear that people of color have of police is not merely rooted in feeling or culture, but in the separate and violent history that our police forces have with communities of color. We must realize that there are two very different realities of how our police interact with white communities and with communities of color, and both of those realities have their own structure and history. We cannot address police brutality if we are not willing to recognize these differences and address the entirety of the specific history and structure of police interactions with communities of color.

What has happened to you is valid and true, but it is not what has happened to everyone. The experience of white communities with police are real, and the experience of communities of color with police are real—but they are far from the same.

If you do trust and value your police force, and you also believe in justice and equality for people of color, you will not see the lack of trust on behalf of communities of color as simply a difference of opinion. You will instead expect your police force to earn the respect and trust of communities of color by providing them with the same level of service that you enjoy. People of color are not asking white people to believe their experiences so that they will fear the police as much as people of color do. They are asking because they want white people to join them in demanding their right to be able to trust the police like white people do.

We should not have a society where the value of marginalized people is determined by how well they can scale often impossible obstacles that others will never know.

I shouldn’t have to be exceptional to be just barely getting by. But we live in a society where if you are a person of color, a disabled person, a single mother, or an LGBT person you have to be exceptional. And if you are exceptional by the standards put forth by white supremacist patriarchy, and you are lucky, you will most likely just barely get by. There’s nothing inspirational about that.

I receive Facebook comments, Twitter DMs, and emails telling me that “people like me” are the reason why race relations are as bad as they are. My insistence on voicing my anger, on using terms like “White Supremacy” and “racist” to define White Supremacy and things that are racist, my insistence on being seen and acknowledged as black—that is the real issue. White people would love to join me in my fight for freedom and justice, but I’ve made it too unpleasant for them.

what Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X fought for was the same: freedom from oppression. At times they used different words and different tactics, but it was their goal that was the threat. Their goal of freedom from racial oppression was and is a direct threat to the system of White Supremacy. And for all of Martin’s actions of peace and love, he was targeted with violence, harassed, arrested, blackmailed, followed by the FBI, and eventually murdered.

For all of the pedestals MLK is now put on, far above the reach of ordinary black Americans, Martin was in his life viewed as the most dangerous man in America.

For hundreds of years we have been told that the path to freedom from racial oppression lies in our virtue, that our humanity must be earned.

Do you believe in justice and equality? Because if you believe in justice and equality you believe in it all of the time, for all people. You believe in it for newborn babies, you believe in it for single mothers, you believe in it for kids in the street, you believe in justice and equality for people you like and people you don’t. You believe in it for people who don’t say please. And if there was anything I could say or do that would convince someone that I or people like me don’t deserve justice or equality, then they never believed in justice and equality in the first place.

No discussion about racism is just about one incident for people of color, because we cannot divorce ourselves from the past pain of systemic racism, or the future repercussions of current abuse. When people of color talk about systemic racism, far more than feelings have been hurt and far more than feelings are at stake. When people of color are talking about racism, no matter the immediate subject, they are also always talking about lifelong abuse at the hands of society.

When you talk about oppression with oppressed people, you are talking with hurt, scared, angry, and grieving people. If you’ve been privileged enough to not suffer from the cumulative effects of systemic racism and are therefore able to look at racially charged situations one at a time, and then let it go, please recognize that very few people of color are able to enter into discussions on racism with the same freedom.

To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.

There will always be people within movements that you do not like. There will always be actions that people within movements take that you will not agree with.

But do not let your feelings about a person within the movement become the focus of your work toward fighting racial oppression. Even if you do not agree with the way in which someone is going about their fight for racial justice, recognize when they are indeed fighting for it, and that you do have the same goals. When you instead shift your focus to getting people of color to fight oppression in a way in which you approve, racial justice is no longer your main goal—your approval is.

Drop the prerequisites. That goal should not have any preconditions on it. You are fighting systemic racism because it is your moral obligation, and that obligation is yours as long as systemic racism exists, pure and simple.

Build a tolerance for discomfort. You must get used to being uncomfortable and get used to this not being about your feelings

You are not doing any favors, you are doing what is right. If you are white, remember that White Supremacy is a system you benefit from and that your privilege has helped to uphold. Your efforts to dismantle White Supremacy are expected of decent people who believe in justice. You are not owed gratitude or friendship from people of color for your efforts. We are not thanked for cleaning our own houses.

Conversations about race and racial oppression can certainly be tough, but that’s nothing compared to how tough fighting against racial oppression can be. Our humanity is worth a little discomfort, it’s actually worth a lot of discomfort. But if you live in this system of White Supremacy you are either fighting the system, or you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice—it is not something you can just opt out of. If you believe in justice and equality, we are in this together, whether you like me or not.

And if you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist. If you are able-bodied, you are ableist. If you are anything above poverty in a capitalist society, you are classist. You can sometimes be all of these things at once.

Now is an opportunity to learn more about yourself, to see yourself and your actions more clearly, so you can move toward the person you truly want to be. The question is: do you want to look like a better person, or do you want to be a better person? Because those who just want to look like a better person will have great difficulty with the introspection necessary to actually be a better person.

In order to do better we must be willing to hold our darkness to the light, we must be willing to shatter our own veneer of “goodness”

if someone is telling you something about yourself and your actions and you feel your hackles raising, take that as a sign that you need to stop and listen. If your blood pressure rose too quickly to really hear what was being said, take a few deep breaths, ask the person to repeat themselves if necessary, and listen again. Don’t add to what the person is saying, don’t jump to conclusions, don’t immediately think “Oh you think I’m a monster now,” just try to actually hear what they are trying to communicate to you.

Your intentions have little to no impact on the way in which your actions may have harmed others. Do not try to absolve yourself of responsibility with your good intentions.