So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

We talked about when to not discuss race (say, in the middle of the workday when your black coworker is just trying to get throug...

my mom has become more fearless in her support of my work, now that she better understands the role she can play.

My mom has shifted her focus on race from proving to black people that she is “down” to pressuring fellow white people to do better.

NOT ALL OF US ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE CONVERSATIONS on race with white people willing to take the emotional risk of investigating the role they play in upholding racism.

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.

The truth is, we live in a society where the color of your skin still says a lot about your prognosis for success in life. This is the reality right now, and ignoring race will not change that. 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.

YOU’RE GOING TO SCREW THIS UP. You’re going to screw this up royally. More than once. I’m sorry, I wish I could say that reading this book would guarantee that you’d never leave a conversation about race feeling like you’ve gotten it all wrong and made everything worse. But I can’t. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen, and you should have these conversations anyway.

State your intentions. Do you know why you are having this particular conversation? Do you know why this matters to you? Is there something in particular you are trying to communicate or understand? Figure it out before moving forward and then state what your intentions are, so that the people you are talking with can determine whether this is a conversation they are willing to join. Very often, these attempts at conversation fail because two people are entering with two very incompatible agendas and proceed to have two very different conversations, and that doesn’t become clear until it blows up in anger and frustration.

Remember what your top priority in the conversation is, and don’t let your emotions override that.

If your top priority is understanding racism better, or addressing an incident involving race, or righting a wrong caused by racism, don’t let the top priority suddenly become avenging your wounded...

When stressed, when angry, when tired, or when threatened, our worst selves can come out.

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 too heated to ask yourself these questions, at least try to take a few minutes away to catch your breath and lower your heart rate so that you can. This is something that happens to people of all races, and not only can it stop us from hearing things that need to be said, it can stop us from saying what we really mean to say.

Ask yourself: Am I trying to be right, or am I trying to do better?

Do not force people of color into discussions of race. People of color live with racism each and every day with no say over when and how it impacts their lives. It is painful and exhausting. When people of color have the rare luxury to choose to not engage in additional dialogue about race, do not deny them that. Even if this discussion is really important to you, you never have a right to demand it. There will be other opportunities.

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.

I know that it is very hard to leave an emotional conversation unfinished. It is hard to leave feeling unheard or misunderstood. A resolution can still happen, provided you haven’t already burned all the conversational bridges around you, but not right now. It’s obvious, by how things have been going, that you are not in a state to find a whole new, productive path for this conversation. Step away, and take some time to calm down. Then think about where things went wrong, and what, if anything, can be done to revisit that conversation later in a productive and healthy way.

you have to just keep trying, because the alternative is your complacency in the continued oppression of people of color.

No matter what, when you are having a conversation about racial oppression, you will not be the only one who is nervous and you will not be the only one taking a risk. These conversations will always be hard, because they will always be about the hurt and pain of real people. We are talking about our identities and our histories and the ways in which these are used and exploited to elevate and oppress. These conversations will always be emotional and loaded to various degrees—and if they are not, then you are likely not having the right conversation.

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.

Take care in your conversations, remember that you are dealing with the real hurt of human beings. But be brave in that care, be honest in that care. These conversations will never become easy, but they will become easier. They will never be painless, but they can lessen future pain. They will never be risk-free, but they will always be worth it.

But here we were, more people of color in one tiny park than the entire neighborhood had probably seen in the decades since people of color had been priced out of the neighborhood.

A few hours into the shindig, a group of black men walked over hesitantly from the basketball courts. They had a look of curiosity on their faces—likely wondering by what magic this large island of picnicking black people had suddenly appeared in the middle of this ocean of whiteness.

In the following days I couldn’t stop thinking about those men who had approached us at the picnic. I couldn’t stop thinking about the silence of our group as they walked up. Why had it been so awkward? Why would our own people, fellow people of color, make us so uncomfortable?

We had been patting ourselves on the back for creating this great community, for creating a home for people of color in a hostile city—and our unexamined privilege had kept out those most negatively impacted by overwhelmingly white, wealthy Seattle—those who, unlike us, could not cushion some of the blows of racism with at least some of the indicators of success that white Seattle valued. Yes, we had worked very hard for what we had been able to accomplish, but we’d also been very lucky. But we forgot the luck and wore our status as a symbol of pride—creating a hierarchy in a group in desperate need of solidarity.

if we weren’t going to be there for and with all people of color, we should probably at least stop pretending to be creating a radical space of acceptance and just admit that we were simply a social club for comfortable people of color.

I’ve found from my conversations and from witnessing the conversations of others that very few people actually know what privilege is, let alone how they would go about checking it.

We may not fully “get” privilege, but we have a feeling that understanding our privilege will change what we feel about ourselves and our world, and not in a good way.

Privilege, in the social justice context, is an advantage or a set of advantages that you have that others do not.

Yes, I do deserve to feel proud of my degree, but it isn’t deserving of the general reputation that I, as a college graduate, am a smarter, more responsible, and more valuable citizen than those without a degree (especially when you consider all the advantages listed above that helped make my degree accessible to me).

When somebody asks you to “check your privilege” they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing and may in fact be contributing to those struggles.

When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.

Sit down and think about the advantages you’ve had in life. Have you always had good mental health? Did you grow up middle class? Are you white? Are you male? Are you nondisabled? Are you neuro-typical? Are you a documented citizen of the country you live in? Did you grow up in a stable home environment? Do you have stable housing? Do you have reliable transportation? Are you cisgender? Are you straight? Are you thin, tall, or conventionally attractive? Take some time to really dig deep through all of the advantages that you have that others may not. Write them down.

Being privileged doesn’t mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right—it means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.

This will also help you better empathize with the feelings of anger, fear, and shame that people feel when confronted with their privilege and may help you approach someone about their privilege with more generosity. It is also easier to explain privilege to someone else, if you should choose to do so, if you are familiar with explaining it to yourself.

Someone is giving you an opportunity to do better, no matter how unpleasant the delivery. Thank them.

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.

I’m not capable of cutting away my blackness in order to support feminism that views the needs of women of color as divisive inconveniences. I’m not capable of cutting away womanhood in order to stand by black men who prey on black women. I’m a black woman, each and every minute of every day—and I need you to march for me, too.

WHILE THIS BOOK IS ABOUT RACE, I’M SURE YOU KNOW that we as people are far more than just our race. But even further, our experience of race is shaped by far more than just our skin color and hair texture. And just as racial identity is not the only type of identity in our society, racial oppression is not the only form of oppression in our society. Racial privilege is not the only form of privilege in our society.

As a black, queer, middle-class woman, my queer identity may often be overlooked by anti-racist or feminist movements; my female identity may be overlooked by anti-racist or queer movements; my black identity may be overlooked by feminist or queer movements; and my middle-class identity may well cause me to overlook poor people in all movements. And when that happens, none of them can really help me or many others.

Because of how rarely our privilege is examined, even our social justice movements will tend to focus on the most privileged and most well represented people within those groups. Anti-racism groups will often tend to prioritize the needs of straight men of color, feminist groups will tend to prioritize the needs of white women, LGBTQ groups will tend to prioritize the needs of white gay cisgender men, disability rights groups will tend to prioritize the needs of disabled white men. Imagine where this leaves a disabled Latinx trans woman on any group’s priority list.

If your needs have always been among the prioritized in your social justice movements, that is going to feel like the natural order of things for you.

Intersectionality forces people to interact with, listen to, and consider people they don’t usually interact with, listen to, or consider.

People like to form groups with people they consider “similar” to themselves. Many of us spend a lot of our days with “people like us”—people with similar backgrounds, goals, identities, and personalities. This is human nature. This also means that our social justice efforts often self-segregate in this way as well. Intersectionality requires that we break free from these divides and reach out to people we have not reached out to in the past. While many people would not consider this unpleasant, it is often uncomfortable—at least at first.

one time when I was pulled over at sixteen; I quickly reached for the glove compartment when asked for license and registration and the officer’s hand immediately went to his gun as he yelled “STOP!” As I sat there frozen in fear, he proceeded to lecture me to never reach for anything in front of a cop without saying what I was doing first. “That’s a good way to get yourself shot, young lady,” he said to me. Then he nodded and took his hand off of his gun, satisfied with the favor he had done me by not shooting a sixteen-year-old girl for reaching for her identification.

“How do you know it’s about race?” And the truth is, I didn’t know it was about race, and I still don’t. There’s a very good chance that I just won that horrible lottery and my car, with three black individuals, was the one car to be pulled over out of pure luck. Maybe we’re all just really unlucky, as a race.

And 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.

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. My fear, as a black driver, is real. The fact is that 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 are being targeted. And you can try to explain away one statistic due to geography, one away due to income—you can find reasons for numbers all day. But the fact remains: all across the country, in every type of neighborhood, people of color are being disproportionately criminalized. This is not all in our heads.