So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

If I call a white person a cracker, the worst I can do is ruin their day. If a white person thinks I’m a nigger, the worst they can do is get me fired, arrested, or even killed in a system that thinks the same—and has the resources to act on it.

Further, this approach puts the onus on me, the person being discriminated against, to prove my humanity and worthiness of equality to those who think I’m less than.

Those terms are 100 percent racist. It’s crime. We don’t call crime that happens in white communities “white-on-white” crime, even though the majority of crimes against white people are perpetrated by other white people.

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.

Recognize everyday wins, just as you would white children, not as rare exceptions or as othering “triumph over adversity” stories, but as expected achievements of children just as capable as any other.

Whiteness is default in our society, and that goes for how children are depicted on television, in books, in movies, and in our minds.

when our society only defines “children” as young people of a certain skin color, it can prevent some from seeing children of color as children to be loved and protected.

He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body.”

Challenge the stereotyping of black and brown youth, and the criminalization of black and brown youth culture.

Our kids do not get to fuck up the way other kids get to;

white people have inherited the privilege that these words made possible. They have inherited the advantage of not having, in this generation and previous, the specific set of disadvantages placed in their way that these words placed on the lives of people of color.

Why would you want to rub in the fact that you are privileged enough to not be negatively impacted by the legacy of racial oppression that these words helped create?

my hair was still a source of shame.

We still live in a country where our hair determines how professional we seem, how respectable we seem—even how intelligent we seem.

our hair products have to take up one tiny section of a completely different aisle in the store.

Don’t force people to acknowledge your good intentions.

Tone policing prioritizes the comfort of the privileged person in the situation over the oppression of the disadvantaged person.

hurt feelings and rudeness are not oppression, and will always come second to the oppression being discussed.

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.

do not let your feelings about a person within the movement become the focus of your work toward fighting racial oppression.

Your efforts to dismantle White Supremacy are expected of decent people who believe in justice.

white person does something racially insensitive and harmful, it is pointed out to them, and they go nuclear.

I do not know a single person of color who does not broach these conversations with a very heavy heart, and they almost always leave with one even heavier.

the burden of racism has always been on us alone.

In a hostile world, people of color have the right to cut off contact with people who have harmed them. They do not have to stick around to see all the progress you’ve made.

can you think of social or political issues that many people currently believe are not about race, but actually may be?

How might that upbringing have influenced the way that she wrote this book? How might it have influenced the personal events she describes in the book? How might this book have been different if written by a black person with a different upbringing, or if written by a person of color of a different race?

What are some of the racial microaggressions that you have encountered or witnessed? What are some that you may have perpetrated on others?