So You Want to Talk About Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

And while many Asian Americans suffer these economic disadvantages and lack of resources, they often face lower acceptance rates to colleges and universities because they are seen as “overrepresented” in US higher education.

While Asian Americans make up between 35 and 60 percent of the workforce in top tech companies like Google and Facebook, they are less than half as likely to reach management levels in the tech industry as their white counterparts.

This same Martin/Malcolm dichotomy is applied to all people of color, and especially black people, who fight for racial justice. A few of us are good and worthy of support. Those of us who manage to say “not all white people” enough, who manage to say please, who never talk of anger, who avoid words like “justice,” who keep our indictments abstract and never specific—we are the Martins. Those of us who shout, who inconvenience your day, who call out your specific behavior, who say “black” loudly and proudly—we are the Malcolms.

Tone policing is when someone (usually the privileged person) in a conversation or situation about oppression shifts the focus of the conversation from the oppression being discussed to the way it is being discussed.

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. The oppressed person reaching out to you is already disadvantaged by the oppression they are trying to address. By tone policing, you are increasing that disadvantage by insisting that you get to determine if their grievances are valid and will only decide they are so if, on top of everything they are already enduring, they make the effort to prioritize your comfort.

But know that if you are a privileged person trying to impose your wishes on social justice movements, you are trying to remake that movement in your image, which is exactly what social justice movements are fighting against.

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.

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.

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.

There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to end a conversation with someone about race, because instead of listening and engaging they were trying to deny my experiences as a woman of color and bully me into agreeing with them, only to have them reach out later that day to ask me to join them for coffee in order to “talk some more” about the subject. After a few times of agreeing to “talk some more” and once again finding myself “talked over” I realized that “talk” was all they wanted to get out of it.

But it won’t make them take action. They want to feel better, but they don’t want to do better.