So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

It is completely fair that a word used to help create and maintain the oppression of others for your benefit would not be able to be used by you without invoking that oppression, while people of color who had never had the power to oppress with those words would be able to use them without invoking that same oppression.

the fact that people of color can say words that white people can’t is an example of injustice—but it’s not injustice against white people.

At its core, cultural appropriation is about ownership of one’s culture, and since culture is defined both collectively and individually, the definition and sentiment about cultural appropriation changes with one’s identification and sentiment about aspects of their culture.

We can broadly define the concept of cultural appropriation as the adoption or exploitation of another culture by a more dominant culture.

In recent years, people of color have been able to draw more attention to the issue of cultural appropriation and the harm it causes, but it is still a concept that rubs many white people (and a few people of color) the wrong way. Many of us who were raised in the US were raised to think of America as a “melting pot.” Our beauty and our strength came from the exchange of cultures in this nation of immigrants. Aren’t we supposed to be appreciating other cultures? Doesn’t this fight racism?

Appreciation should benefit all cultures involved, and true appreciation does. But appropriation, more often than not, disproportionately benefits the dominant culture that is borrowing from marginalized cultures, and can even harm marginalized cultures.

The problem of cultural appropriation is primarily linked to the power imbalance between the culture doing the appropriating and the culture being appropriated.

Even if a culturally appropriative act means to respect culture, it cannot if it can’t understand and respect the past and present power dynamics defining that culture’s interaction with the dominant culture.

Rap has been long vilified by many in “respectable” white America. It is the language of “thugs” and is responsible for numerous societal ills from “black-on-black” crime to single-parenthood.

Rap is, in reality, a difficult and beautiful art form that requires not only musical and rhyming talent, but a mathematically complex sense of timing.

Some, with rare talent, will rise to the top, others with rare talent will continue to toil in obscurity. But if you are a white rapper, you can be “okay” and go multi-platinum. Not only can a halfway decent white rapper sell millions of copies of a halfway decent album, raking in money that most black artists would never dream of, that white rapper is more likely to be accepted as “mainstream.”

First off, let’s acknowledge that you can do whatever you want. You can rap, you can belly dance, you can do anything allowed by law. But whether you “can” or “should” do something is a different matter—that it may be racially insensitive or harmful is beside the point. You can.

If you love rap you understand that it is an art form that has been lovingly grown and nurtured in a hostile world. You also understand that the pain and adversity that helped shape rap is not something you’ve had to face.

Cultural appropriation is the product of a society that prefers its culture cloaked in whiteness. Cultural appropriation is the product of a society that only respects culture cloaked in whiteness. Without that—if all culture (even the culture that appropriators claim to love and appreciate) were equally desired and respected, then imitations of other cultures would look like just that—imitations.

the people of marginalized cultures are still routinely discriminated against for the same cultural practices that white cultures are rewarded for adopting and adapting for the benefit of white people.

But what actually is not fair, is the expectation that a dominant culture can just take and enjoy and profit from the beauty and art and creation of an oppressed culture, without taking on any of the pain and oppression people of that culture had to survive while creating it.

who defines what is sacred to a culture? Who defines what was born of struggle? Who defines what is off limits?

However this debate plays out for the individual situations you may find yourself in, know that it cannot end well if it does not start with enough respect for the marginalized culture in question to listen when somebody says “this hurts me.” And if that means that your conscience won’t allow you to dress as a geisha for Halloween, know that even then, in the grand scheme of things—you are not the victim.

I wanted the hair I saw on shampoo commercials, the hair I saw in magazines, the hair that boys would want to run their fingers through. I didn’t want my stiff, coarse hair that didn’t move in the breeze. I didn’t want my hair that kids called nappy and ugly. I wanted to be a beautiful girl, and beautiful girls did not have hair like mine.

So I had to settle for stiff hair burned, sprayed, and pinned into poor replicas of the styles I saw in magazines. By the time I reached the age of thirty, I had no memory of what my natural hair looked like, all I knew was the disappointment I felt when I looked in the mirror.

And as my hair grew out into fluffy coils I was finally proud of what I saw when I looked in the mirror. My hair still wasn’t what I saw in commercials or in magazines, but it was mine—no longer dictated by the preferences of White America—and it was beautiful.

Here was my director singling me out, in front of my coworkers, not to shame me, but to shame other black women for making different choices than I was now making. To shame other black women for spending a lot of money to not have to have the embarrassing and demeaning conversation I was now being forced to have.

The hair of a famous white woman can become a style sensation. I remember “The Rachel.” Because your hair is “good” hair. Your hair is the hair represented in the haircare aisles at stores. Your hair is the shining example of health in the shampoo commercials.

My hair is a mystery on my head, just beyond your reach.

I’ve had clerks touch my hair at stores, servers touch my hair at restaurants, bosses touch my hair at company parties. And it is never okay, because they never got permission.

When I asked my friends of color what some of their least favorite microaggressions were, hair touching came up time and time again with my black friends. We do not like it. And it’s happening far too often.

Touching anybody anywhere without their permission or a damn good reason is just not okay.

It’s weird. Hair is growing out of somebody’s body, coated in different beauty products and a fair amount of sweat and oil. Touching someone else’s hair is weird and gross.

Hands are dirty.

Curls are precious.

It is a continuation of the lack of respect for the basic humanity and bodily autonomy of black Americans that is endemic throughout White Supremacy.

Since the first black Americans were brought over as slaves, our bodies have not been our own. We were objects—property. Our bodies were curiosities and tools to be inspected and exploited. Our bodies were sources of judgment and shame. But they were never beautiful, and they were never our own.

If our hair was pressed stiff and straight with burning irons, or irreparably broken with toxic chemicals, we might be seen as a credit to our race—we were, after all, trying to be less black.

We still live in a country where our hair is seen as “wild,” as “unattractive,” as “unprofessional” as “ghetto.” We still live in a country where our hair can cost us jobs, even our place in the military. We still live in a country where our hair determines how professional we seem, how respectable we seem—even how intelligent we seem.

we still live in a world where little respect and autonomy is granted to black people, where we are constantly reminded of how little control over our lives we have. So maybe for now you set your curiosity aside and allow someone the space to determine who does or does not touch their hair, without labeling them rude, sensitive, or divisive.

I patted my hair all of the time because of all of the times my hair had been referred to as “poufy.” Nothing bad was meant by it, nobody was trying to hurt. It was just an acknowledgement that in a time where people were literally coating their strands in silicone, my hair’s volume was a noticeable and unpleasant contrast.

had taken on quite a babyish voice a few years earlier, after all of the jokes about how my loudness was so “typical for a black girl”—

My butt was also too big, that was made very clear with references to hip-hop songs glorifying large butts that were often recited to me by smiling classmates.

I began rattling off the colleges that I had hoped to go to when a student cut me off and said, “I mean, you don’t have to try that hard anyway do you? You’re black, you don’t even have to do well in school to get into college. You don’t even have to be in this class.”

And although it hadn’t been explicitly said, the message was clear, “You don’t belong here.” Even in this group of nerds, this group of people who loved the same boring books and random facts and all raced to be the first to answer the same questions in school as me, I didn’t belong. Because I was black.

I wasn’t just a fat kid; I was a fat black kid. And I knew that rushing to eat the pizza that I so desperately wanted would confirm what was insinuated the many times I’d heard people say, “well at least you’re black, they think fat women are attractive.” What hadn’t been said, but had been meant was, “It’s not okay to be fat, but it’s the most we can expect from a black girl.”

Microaggressions are small daily insults and indignities perpetrated against marginalized or oppressed people because of their affiliation with that marginalized or oppressed group, and here we are going to talk about racial microaggressions—insults and indignities perpetrated against people of color.

Regular exposure to microaggressions causes a person of color to feel isolated and invalidated. The inability to predict where and when a microaggression may occur leads to hypervigilance, which can then lead to anxiety disorders and depression.

Microaggressions are small (hence, the “micro”) and can be easily explained away.

Microaggressions are cumulative.

Microaggressions are perpetrated by many different people.

Many people do not consciously know that they are perpetrating a microaggression against someone.

Microaggressions are constant reminders that you don’t belong, that you are less than, that you are not worthy of the same respect that white people are afforded.