So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

The goal is simply equal opportunity for female applicants and applicants of color.

Argument 4: Affirmative action is unfair to white men because it causes them to lose opportunities to less qualified women and people of color.

When you say that a representational number of women or people of color cuts out more deserving white men, you are saying that women and people of color deserve to be less represented in our schools and our companies and that white men are deserving of an over-representational majority of these spots.

Either you believe these disparities exist because you believe that people of color and women are less intelligent, less hard working, and less talented than white men, or you believe that there are systemic issues keeping women and people of color from being hired into jobs, promoted, paid a fair wage, and accepted into college.

Argument 5: Affirmative action d...

While affirmative action may not have been the racial panacea that some had originally hoped, it has been one of the most successful programs for helping combat the end-effects of racial discrim...

even if implemented across the public and private sectors, even if vigorously enforced, affirmative action will never be more than a Band-Aid on a festering sore as long as it’s still just trying to correct the end effects of systemic racism.

We must never forget that without systemic change and without efforts to battle the myriad of ways in which systemic racism impacts people of color of all classes, backgrounds, and abilities, our efforts at ending systemic racial oppression will fail.

OUR PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM SEES BLACK AND BROWN children as violent, disruptive, unpredictable future criminals.

Black students make up only 16 percent of our school populations, and yet 31 percent of students who are suspended and 40 percent of students who are expelled are black.

Seventy percent of students who are arrested in school and referred to law enforcement are black.

Or, I can assume that the school system is marginalizing, criminalizing, and otherwise failing our black and brown kids in large numbers.

children of any color are amazing gifts of unimaginable possibility to be cherished and protected.

we have a serious problem with how our schools are educating and disciplining black and brown children. And that problem is called the school-to-prison pipeline.

The “school-to-prison pipeline” is the term commonly used to describe the alarming number of black and brown children who are funneled directly and indirectly from our schools into our prison industrial complex, contributing to devastating levels of mass incarceration that lead to one in three black men and one in six Latino men going to prison in their lifetimes,

The disproportionately punitive levels of school discipline toward black and brown children does more than impact a student’s year.

Young boys whose fathers have served jail time are more likely to be deemed emotionally “unready” for school, repeating the cycle of trouble and disproportionate discipline in their classrooms.

Racial bias of school administrators. Our school employees are not exempt from the racist influences of our society.

Studies have indicated that race is really a deciding factor of how and whether students are disciplined.

Racial bias of teachers.

Lack of cultural sensitivity for black and brown children.

The vast majority of teachers are white females, and many are unfamiliar with and not trained to work with the different ways in which black and brown children—especially black and brown boys—can interact with each other and with adults.

The pathologizing of black children.

schools who find themselves ill-equipped to work with black students who are having interpersonal issues in class are quicker to give students a blanket diagnosis of learning disability than they would with struggling white students.

While black children are no more likely than children of other races to have developmental or learning disabilities, they are the most likely to be placed in special education programs.

One in four black, American Indian, Pacific Islander, and mixed-race boys identified by schools as having a developmental disability was suspended in the 2011–2012 school year.6

Zero-tolerance policies. Fear of violent black and brown youth, compounded by high-profile school shootings primarily perpetrated by white youth, led to the rise of zero-tolerance policies in schools beginning in the ’90s.

Increased police presence in schools.

These officers have become an easy way for schools to delegate their disciplinary responsibilities to a criminal justice system that has already shown quantifiable racial bias.

schools with SROs have nearly five times the amount of in-school arrests as schools without SROs.

Is this a logical fallacy?

Include the school-to-prison pipeline in your broader discussions of racial inequality and oppression.

Talk to your schools and school boards. Even if you do not have black or brown children, you should be asking your schools what their disciplinary procedures are, what the rate of suspension and expulsion for black and Latinx students is, and what the racial “achievement gap” for their school is and what they plan to do about

(I and many other people of color prefer the term “opportunity gap” as that focuses on the cause of academic disparity shown in grades, graduation rates, and testing scores—less opportunity for children of color to flourish in education than white children—instead of the end result.

Recognize the achievements of black and brown children.

Normalize black and brown childhood.

Challenge language that stereotypes black and brown kids.

Challenge the stereotyping of black and brown youth, and the criminalization of black and brown youth culture. A swagger is not intent, baggy jeans are not intent, a bandana is not intent.

Discuss deeper causes of defiant and antisocial behavior in black and brown youth.

Don’t erase disabled black and brown youth.

once criminalized, disabled people of color are more likely to face brutality by police.

Challenge the legitimacy of white-centered education.

When our kids spend eight hours a day in a system that is looking for reasons to punish them, remove them, criminalize them—our kids do not get to be kids.

Do not wait until black and brown kids are grown into hurt and hardened adults to ask “What happened? What can we do?” We cannot give back childhoods lost. Help us save our children now.

WORDS HAVE POWER. WORDS ARE MORE THAN THEIR dictionary definition. The history of a word matters as long as the effects of that history are still felt.

Words are how we process the world, how we form our societies, how we codify our morals. In order to make injustice and oppression palatable in a world with words that say that such things are unacceptable, we must come up with new words to distance ourselves from the realities of the harm we are perpetrating on others.

if this is where you say “what about the Irish” note that the word “cracker” certainly played absolutely no part in the oppression of the Irish, and that oppression was perpetrated by other white people).

I do not feel comfortable invoking the painful history of words used to oppress Native American people, Asian American people, Latinx people, and more, when my community has not had to suffer the consequences of how those words have been used to justify genocide, internment camps, and more. But, looking at American history, words have been used to separate, dehumanize, and oppress, and the power of those words is still felt today.

Today, black people are still suffering from the ghettoization, poverty, police brutality, and everyday discrimination that these words helped build.

the important question is, why would a well-meaning white person want to say these words in the first place? Why would you want to invoke that pain on 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?

words only lose their power when first the impact of those words are no longer felt, not the other way around.