My Privilege Wakeup Call With Ijeoma Oluo, Author of “So You Want To Talk About Race”
Just because you’re a feminist doesn’t mean you’re immune to biases.
I’ve always considered myself a champion of equality. I’ve been marching for women’s rights since I could walk. I have pictures of my little-girl self holding up a sign demanding the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment, standing next to my mother and her fellow women’s libbers.
But throughout my life as a feminist, I’ve also had a blind spot to the realities of racism. Although I prided myself in my progressiveness and desire to help others overcome injustice, I lived under the assumption that our country was further along in our journey toward racial understanding than, say, the Jim Crow era.
I saw room for improvement, yes, and certainly sympathized with the struggles people of color face in our country. But I wasn’t part of the problem. I wasn’t racist. Was I?
And then 2016 happened.
For many white liberals, the election of Donald Trump and the implicit approval of overtly racist, xenophobic policies like the border wall and the Muslim ban was a traumatic but much-needed wake-up call. The curtains on darkened windows were thrown open, revealing just how pervasive racism remains in a country built on stealing land and stealing people.
But even after the curtains are thrown open, some people choose to hide under the blankets and go back to sleep.
“You can’t just go around calling anything racist. Save that word for the big stuff. You know, for Nazis and cross burnings and lynchings. You’re just going to turn people off if you use such inflammatory language,”
That’s what author Ijeoma Oluo’s white friend told her when she dared to complain about a racist exchange online.
“It seemed far more important to him that the white people who were spreading and upholding racism be spared the effects of being called racist, than sparing his black friend the effects of that racism,” Ijeoma recalls in her new book, So You Want To Talk About Race.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of us white folks who can’t go back to sleep. We want to help. We want to spare our black friends from the effects of racism, but have no idea of how to go about the work of fixing a system that we have benefitted from.
Many of us feel afraid to ask questions — anxious that we’ll offend or inadvertently perpetuate racist attitudes. Many of us aren’t sure who we should even talk with about race, since we don’t want to further burden people of color with coming up with answers while they are in the midst of their own struggles. We don’t want to make our black friends — if we have black friends — uncomfortable.
For those of us willing to confront the reality of just how toxic our culture has been for people of color — and what we can do to change it — So You Want To Talk About Race is just the book to guide us through the truly uncomfortable period of adjustment between sleeping through white supremacy and being woke.
As someone who grew up Black in white working class Seattle, Ijeoma Oluo demonstrates compassion, understanding and gratitude to her readers while also offering hard truths about race in America.
“These are very scary times for a lot of people who are just now realizing that America is not, and has never been, the melting-pot utopia that their parents and teachers told them it was,” Oluo remarks in her introduction.
The book defies easy classification. On the one hand, it feels like a memoir: Ijeoma Oluo tells us stories of the everyday racism she encountered as a Black girl growing up in white suburbia and the microaggressions she experiences as a Black woman working in corporate America. She gives us first-hand accounts of the terror of being pulled over when driving while Black. She offers us glimpses into her heartbreak when she realizes the chasm of understanding that exists between herself and her white friends.
On the other hand, So You Want To Talk About Race reads like a primer on how to navigate difficult but necessary conversations on confronting the most insidious system built into our society: white supremacy.
Just the term “white supremacy” can throw up red flags. It brings to mind burning crosses, lynchings, and angry young men in polo shirts with tiki torches.
But as Oluo points out, these are symbols that reflect the militant extremes in a culture where the experience of whiteness is assumed to be the default. Angry white men with tiki torches pose much less of an existential threat to people of color than the more subtle and pervasive patterns of racism that end in the school-to-prison pipeline.
When Ijeoma was in elementary school, she witnessed how patterns of oppression can crush a spirit and set a course of struggle for a lifetime. It happened to her younger brother when a teacher created a reward system for his second grade class, centered around money.
“You got fake money for turning in homework or helping a classmate or things like that.” Ijeoma told me in our conversation for Inflection Point. “And then at the end of the week you were able to cash it in for little treats and buy a piece of candy or things like that. And it was to teach kids responsibility and you know a good way to keep them behaving. But you would lose money if you were late with homework or if you had a messy desk or you know you were distracted. Things like that.”
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Rewards for good behavior, penalties for not sticking to the rules. Fair enough.
But that wasn’t the entire system. Apparently, this teacher had a point to prove about the causes of poverty.
“The catch that made this thing much more insidious, much more kind of evil, was that you had to pay rent on your desk.” Ijeoma told me. “And if you didn’t have money for rent, you lost your desk and you had to sit on the floor.”
Ijeoma’s family moved around a lot because their poverty forced them to seek more affordable housing every time rent increased. She and her siblings were in the constant position of being the new kids, and were usually the only Black children in their school. While Ijeoma was treated by her white teachers ‘like a unicorn’ because her quiet love of books contradicted with their assumptions about Black girls, her younger brother’s energy and passion and distractibility was interpreted as aggression and lack of intelligence.
“My brother quickly found himself ‘homeless.’ And that’s what they called him: ‘the homeless kid.’ And as he got made fun of more and more for it, he would act out more. And what turned into a day or two stretched into weeks. And it really just crushed him and destroyed any chance of a social life and really gave him a ton of anxiety. It was very traumatic.”
What kills me about this story is that it’s possible the teacher may have been well-meaning. She sought to teach children a lesson on how money worked, or was trying to get creative with classroom discipline. Yet her own misguided, simplistic notions on why people lose their homes and live in poverty, coupled with her misinterpretation of a young Black boy’s behavior as disruptive, taught a lesson in cruelty and power.
“I think this was probably the most gutting chapter for me to write because I didn’t realize how angry I still was,” Ijeoma told me. “Especially I think now as a parent of two young boys. You know I didn’t realize how upset I still was about this and the toll it took on my brother. And looking now of course as a parent I’m outraged because my goodness, this was the worst idea even if you take everything else aside, it was just a horrible idea.”
The thing about inequality is that the oppressor doesn’t see themselves as an oppressor. They see their behavior as “helping.” An abusive father doesn’t think he’s hurting his child, he thinks he’s disciplining her. An emotionally abusive spouse doesn’t think he’s manipulating his partner, he thinks he’s getting her to listen to him so they’ll get along better. And a police officer doesn’t see himself as brutalizing a black teenager, he sees himself as protecting his neighborhood from a “thug.”
But the uncomfortable truth is, we’re trapped in an abusive relationship in our society. And if you’re white and you aren’t doing anything to stop the abuse, you’re enabling it.
“Often, being a person of color in white-dominated society is like being in an abusive relationship with the world.” Ijeoma Oluo writes. “Every day is a new little hurt, a new little dehumanization. We walk around flinching, still in pain from the last hurt and dreading the next. But when we say ‘this is hurting us,’ a spotlight is shown on the freshest hurt, the bruise just forming: ‘Look at how small it is, and I’m sure there is a good reason for it. Why are you making such a big deal about it? Everyone gets hurt from time to time’ — while the world ignores that the rest of our bodies are covered in scars.”
So what does all this have to do with women rising up? After all, aren’t all feminists on the same team? Well…Ijeoma has another hard truth to offer:
“If you call yourself a feminist, it’s important to remember that it’s not an immunization against other bigotries and other biases. You still have to do just as much work there, and that can seem exhausting, but it’s the only way to make sure that your movement doesn’t become an oppressor in its own right.”
So: let’s do the work together. Listen to my conversation with Ijeoma Oluo. Her book is So You Want To Talk About Race.
And when you’re done, come on over to The Inflection Point Society, our Facebook Group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small, daily actions.
Together, we can make this work a little less exhausting — because we all know we can’t go back to sleep.
An excerpt from this piece originally appeared in Salon.
Resources mentioned in the episode:
The Implicit Bias Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/index.jsp
Take this test to see how unconscious bias may be influencing how you interact with the world. When you see where your biases lie, you can begin the work of examining where they come from and how to overcome them.
Meet Your DA: https://meetyourda.org/
District Attorneys have the power to determine who gets charges filed against them, the severity of charges, and if the charges get filed at all. These elected officials have the power to send people to prison for life. DAs can funnel people into the prison system, trapping them in the revolving door of mass incarceration. OR they can give them a 2nd chance. They’re supposed to represent our voice but often their actions don’t represent what they believe. Get to know who your district attorney is and how they’re carrying out the wishes of your community. And if they’re actions reflect the wishes of for-profit prisons over those of your community, get in touch. This website will tell you how.
