As part of a class that I'm taking, we were required to read and then write a review of So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. It's clear, easy to read, and a rudimentary introduction to race in the United States, but it doesn't have any new information that you couldn't get from reading ONE James Baldwin book (I know, I'm obsessed. There's a reason for it!). There is a reason why it was at the top of everyone's anti-racist book lists this summer: it is easy to read and walks white readers through systemic racism without feeling accused or implicated.
P.S. would like an update from all of you who promised to read books this summer, please. ;)
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| An image of books on a bookshelf from "About That Wave of Anti-Racist Best Sellers Over the Summer..." by Katherine Morgan |
Ijeoma Oluo situates her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, amongst many other anti-racist books that are consistently out of stock at major retailers and local sellers. Many writers that have come before have analytically written about race and its creation, impact, and long-term consequences, but Oluo’s book serves as a “how-to” guide to do what the title implies: talk about race. Anti-racist book lists are filled with writers like Oluo, simultaneously dulling the definition of racism as it broadens, but also sharpening its definition as it is applied in new contexts and identified in situations that feel less nebulous and vague. Throughout her book, Oluo addresses the root causes of racial inequality and inequity, the flawed logic when addressing issues around race, and she redirects the reader’s attention to the specific effects that they have overlooked (if they are white), and shines an empathetic light on common experiences that the reader can nod along to (if they are not white).
The book begins by contextualizing the need to guide people through the process of talking about race. It starts broad and becomes much more specific as the chapters progress, building on previously established ideas. Oluo begins by outlining the way that video footage of police brutality has urged “racism in American to the forefront of all of our consciousness. Race is not something people can choose to ignore anymore. Some of us have been speaking all along, and have not been heard. Others are trying out their voices for the first time” (5).
Oluo claims that race cannot be ignored anymore, but she also argues that it has never been ignored by the systems we operate in. She acknowledges race’s role in justifying capitalism in the United States: “Race has also become alive. Race was not only created to justify racially exploitative economic system, it was invented to lock people of color into the bottom of it” (Oluo 12). This move Oluo’s understanding of racism as an epistemological one. It is built into the systems that we operate in and they are upheld every day by individual actions and ignorance. She questions the (white) reader along the way to consider their lived experience and ways that it can be challenged. A white reader should think twice when telling a non-white person that what they experienced wasn't about race. She pushes white people to consider this line of questioning: “Are your situations you’ve lived through real? Are your interpretations of those situations valid? Chances are, if you are using them to decide whether or not other situations and opinions are valid, you think they are. So if your lived experience and your interpretation of that lived experience are valid, why wouldn’t the lived experience of people of color be just as valid?” (Oluo 22). Oluo argues that what makes white lives and experiences true could also cause others to suffer. She wants them and other readers to question the conditions that have crafted their existence, what they know, and who has taught them. She wants to reader to go inward to understand that race is ever-present even though people may claim that it is not.
The book’s structure does double-duty. Each chapter’s title is a question posed. When reading the question, I could not help but read them thinking that they were asked from a white perspective: “Is it really about race?” “What if I talk about race wrong?” “Why am I always being told to check my privilege?” “Why can’t I say the N-Word” as a small sample. This simultaneously anticipates the questions that are often asked by white people (which engenders frustration on behalf of the BIPOC person on the other end). Oluo walks the reader through the implicit racist root of many of these questions, and then also guides the reader through an explanation to bring a better understanding of why the question is racist, proactively anticipating many of the responses and pushback that any person who has engaged in serious or casual conversations about race has encountered.
Oluo starts each chapter with an anecdote from her life. The anecdotes that she provides humanizes her advice by exemplifying the difficulty of these conversations in everyday life. Most often, her anecdotes include a mistake or a misstep, written with the subtext that although her advice may seem simple and straightforward, the nuance of our everyday lives creates complexity and difficulty in being able to approach and confront these issues with a balanced sense of challenge and care. She walks the reader through a Facebook argument around welfare, the first time she was called the N-word and did not have the ability to process it with anyone, tension at work around a promotion, and discussions with her white mom’s “white progressive” mentality (This is also the only chapter where she really urges white people to quit proving “wokeness” to non-white people and start to teach white people about ways to dismantle white supremacy).
The advice that she offers throughout is specific and changes based on the topic. After her anecdote in each chapter, she includes lists of Dos and Don’ts, a list of racist arguments followed with thorough counterarguments, issues and policies to pay attention to in school and communities, and what to be mindful of when toeing the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation.
The arguments are sound, but they are just a starting point. They initiate. The chapters are clean. They avoid the messiness of what happens when these day-to-day discussions spillover or are demanded in the public setting of a workplace or a school, in a classroom, or amongst staff. Often times, in a one-on-one conversation, it is easy to feel a sense of humanity and empathize with the other. When in a larger group setting, the intimacy that built the trust and understanding is removed. White people, especially, when together, can avoid, dodge, and get defensive in a group. This defensiveness is actually part of white culture in America, as Resmaa Menakem argues in his book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Menakem’s path to healing includes rebuilding white culture, one that is not centered on its supremacy and moves beyond strategy. Menakem cites Sara Kolstad Axtell’s essay “The Role of European Americans in a Decolonization Process” to support his argument. Axtell writes, “We, as European Americans, need to help our people see themselves as having a culture. This is a powerful way to disrupt whiteness, not just to rid ourselves of something that is destructive, but to reclaim/reconstruct something that is positive, that fills a void, that has the potential to create health and harmony” (Menakem 272). This culture building will redefine whiteness as it will allow all white people to feel a sense of belonging without guilt or shame. What Menakem gets to that Oluo does not is the restructuring of cultural norms. If we only try to make shifts within the same contexts, we will most likely achieve the same or similar outcomes. A change to the culture is a change to the context inevitably resulting in different, hopefully, more equal outcomes.
When reading Oluo’s book, one might also feel frustrated that the information in the book has been written many times over before. Might one just scratch the surface of Black American literature and this information would be revealed. Oluo claims that her book is for all readers, but as I read, I felt like the chapter titles that were posed as questions were imagined as questions coming from a white person. Toni Morrison made mainstream the idea of writing without the “white gaze,” a lense now used to examine art and creations by non-white creatives as the phrase has taken root in the lexicon of anyone doing “anti-racist” work. Musicians, actors, and other celebrities are often accused of sacrificing their authenticity for the acceptance and accessibility of white people. Oluo writes for the white audience, explaining her intimate experiences in a distant, yet evoking manner that is intended to draw the intrigue of a white audience while also making them squirm without feeling attacked. Oluo must feel simultaneous joy and tribulation at the success of her book. Joy because she is selling copies and making money, and tribulation because American readers are showing their ignorance if they assume that this book is the first of its kind, gobbling up her book and reading her life like a text to be analyzed instead of a life lived.
The title of the book is a bit misleading. Oluo is half-Black, so much of her evidence and analysis is focused on the Black experience in the United States. She does offer a chapter to “The Myth of the Model Minority,” but beyond that, she blankets any discussion about race as a discussion of the anti-Blackness in the United States. If I were to give this to a colleague to read, I would qualify it with its lack of depth, but that its focus on the most historically marginalized racial group (beside Indigenous groups) in the United States, reading about the Black experience and having them in mind when making decisions in school will actually serve most other minority groups in the process, but not completely. Conquering anti-Blackness in the United States and in schools will make us more inclusive in the long run.
In her memoir, Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong writes about the exhausting experience of explaining racism to white people, something that Oluo most likely has felt, but has covered with her decorum and pedantic tone throughout her book. Hong writes, “Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist” (Hong 18). Maybe So You Want to Talk About Race can start some conversations about race, but the course of American history suggests that white Americans, the people who need to participate in the conversations the most, are comfortable avoiding them.
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