PDF Summary:So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo

We need to talk about racism. But, for white people and people of color alike, talking about it can feel like navigating through a minefield. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers a handbook on how to have intelligent, productive, empathetic conversations about race.

Our guide discusses and extends Oluo’s ideas for how to tackle these conversations, comparing and contrasting her ideas on race with those of her contemporaries. We also examine the research underlying Oluo’s arguments. You’ll learn about the school-to-prison pipeline, why touching someone’s hair can be a racist act, and what you can do to fight racial injustice through both conversations and practical actions.

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As Oluo demonstrates, in the present day, black people are more likely to be subject to unnecessary and humiliating disciplinary measures by police, and one in every three black men and one in every six Latino men go to jail at least once in their lives. (Shortform note: The figure for whites is one in 23.)

Blacks and Native Americans are three and a half to four times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Police even perceive children playing with toy guns as threatening: Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by Cleveland police in 2014 for holding a toy gun, and when his 14-year-old sister ran over to help him, police tackled her and put her in handcuffs. A police chief later described the boy as “menacing.” (Shortform note: Police officers have been shown to judge black children as less innocent and more culpable for their actions than white children, also overestimating the ages of black children aged ten to 17 by approximately three years.)

The History of Language

We also need to understand history if we’re to understand the power that some words have to do damage. For example, you may see black people using the word “nigger” amongst themselves and wonder why you aren’t allowed to use it too. The reason is that “nigger” is weighed down by centuries of slavery, dehumanization, oppression, abuse, and brutality. Every time a white person uses it, they invoke all of that history, whether they mean to or not.

A College-Level Course on the N-Word

Black university professor Neal Lester developed a whole college-level class at Arizona State University centered around the N-word. Lester notes that the point of having open discussions around the use of the N-word is not to forbid the word or make it taboo without explaining why. Instead, he says it’s to make us more sensitive and thoughtful about our language use.

The Present and the Future

We also need to connect the dots between the present and the future. As Oluo shows, today’s kids of color are still experiencing disadvantages and opportunity gaps that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

As well as being born into under-resourced families in areas with underfunded schools, children of color endure a number of systemic problems after they enter school. Many of these are related to discipline, overlapping with the systemic prejudices within law enforcement that we saw above. Preschool and elementary school teachers are more likely to look for aggressive behavior in black children, perceive black children as angrier, and suspend or expel black children for more trivial infractions than white children. (Shortform note: This study tracked the eye gazes of teachers who had been told to look for problem behaviors in a video clip of a mixed-race, mixed-gender play group. The teachers gazed longer at black boys. In reality there were no problem behaviors in the video clip.)

Teachers also pathologize children of color at higher rates, often diagnosing them with learning disabilities when they’re simply hard to discipline. (Shortform note: This claim is contested, with some findings indicating that when you control for socioeconomic status and test scores, black children are in fact less likely to be identified as needing special education.)

Around eighteen percent of the school population is black, but 31 percent of suspended students and 40 percent of expelled students are black. Black students are suspended at more than three times the rate of white students, and Native American students are more than twice as likely as white students to be suspended.

The Effect of Suspensions and Expulsions as Punishment

Punishing children (of any race) by denying them education has long-lasting effects. Suspensions have marked effects on school performance, with suspended students often having to repeat the school year. Many of them decide to drop out of school completely instead, which brings further risk.

This is the start of an effect dubbed the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Increasingly strict (and broadly interpreted) weapons policies and a rising police presence in schools have led to the outsourcing of normal school-based disciplinary responsibilities to formal law enforcement. Students who are arrested at school are more likely to be arrested again as adults.

Criminalizing Children of Color at School

Black parents’ fear for their children is completely rational: There are numerous cases of teachers being quick to involve the police. One school principal called the police on a black boy who was playing with a fluorescent green and orange toy gun. Another 12-year-old boy was suspended and formally written up for playing with a toy gun during a virtual class. The police also came to his house, terrifying him.

Even science projects aren’t immune. In 2013, black 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention center for fingerprinting after bringing a homemade volcano to school. In 2015, Muslim 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was handcuffed and arrested for bringing in his homemade clock that teachers assumed was a bomb.

The Small and the Systemic

As we saw earlier, racism is systemic: Blatant acts of racist aggression spring from the same underlying belief system as more subtle or unintentional ones. Let’s look at that more closely.

Microaggressions are subtle acts of psychological violence against a person because they’re a member of a marginalized group. These can be verbal (racist jokes, comments, insults, backhanded compliments, minimizations) or nonverbal (hair touching, purse clutching, following someone around a store, airport security checks, taxis that don’t stop). They can be expressed as compliments (“Wow, your English is perfect!”) or as questions backed by genuine curiosity (“So where are you from?”). (Shortform note: As linguist Robin Lakoff notes, this makes these comments particularly difficult to parse: The surface layer seems to be positive, but the underlying assumption is negative.)

Microaggressive actions may seem innocuous. But they’re all manifestations of deeply rooted belief systems that have genuinely damaging effects. For example, touching a black woman’s hair without their permission is not only rude, it also invokes the legacy of slavery: your right to touch and manipulate her body however you want, regardless of her wishes. Small actions can be imbued with symbolic meaning, and the gradual accrual of microaggressions over a long period has serious mental health impacts. (Shortform note: Microaggressions have been shown to affect the mental and physical health of people of color, including Latino Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.)

Cultural appropriation is another example of how seemingly small actions can have powerful symbolic effects. This occurs when members of a dominant culture adopt selected aspects of another culture without respect, background knowledge, or proper attribution.

Oluo gives the example of someone wearing a Native American war bonnet to a music festival. By doing this, he’s stripping it of its traditional symbolic meaning and using it for ego gratification. (Shortform note: Music festivals are slowly beginning to ban war bonnets after extended campaigns from Native American scholars and activists. Cherokee nation scholar Adrienne Keene has published a series of blog posts about this issue, arguing that war bonnet trends stereotype, homogenize, and disrespect indigenous cultures. Keene notes in an interview for this Guardian article that many white people believe that they’re “respecting” or “honoring” Native American culture in these situations. She suggests this cartoon as a pithy summary of that argument.)

If something has been practiced for years in a minority community but only achieves legitimacy when it’s covered in a veneer of whiteness, that’s cultural appropriation. If a white person can gain kudos for doing something that people of color are still being discriminated against for doing, that’s cultural appropriation. (Shortform note: in a short 2015 video titled “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows,” actor Amandla Stenberg discusses the phenomenon of white people wearing black hairstyles such as cornrows and asks: “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture?”)

Having the Conversation

Oluo weaves advice for talking about race throughout the book. We’ve pulled out and elaborated on the main threads to create a practical how-to guide for having these conversations. Here are the practical nuts and bolts.

Before the Conversation

Before the conversation starts, do your homework. If you’re going to be talking about economic disadvantage, learn some facts. Remember that the other person isn’t your own personal racial encyclopedia, and respect their time.

Check your privilege. Being aware of your privilege in the area you’re going to talk about will help you to avoid ignorant statements and microaggressions.

Seek out different perspectives on the issue. Keep intersectionality in mind. If you’ve already talked to an Asian American man, seek out someone with a different background.

Check that the person wants to talk. Conversations about race are exhausting and emotionally risky for people of color. If the other person doesn’t want to talk, or doesn’t want to talk right now, respect that. Do everything you can to make the other person feel comfortable.

During the Conversation

1) Clarify and share your intentions. This will help the other person decide whether they want to participate. It’ll also keep you focused on the goal of the conversation, decreasing the chance you’ll get distracted.

2) Listen more than you talk. Monitor how often you’re saying “I” and “me.” Decenter your own perspective and seek to broaden it, not explain it.

3) Don’t tone police. Tone policing is shifting the topic of conversation from what’s being said to the way it’s being said. Examples of tone policing are statements like “Well, nobody will listen to you if you use such inflammatory language,” or “Calm down,” or “Anger won’t get us anywhere.” Tone policing can feel like you’re just keeping the conversation on an even keel, when in fact you’re claiming the right to tell someone how to feel about their oppression.

4) Keep your priorities straight. If something you say or do gets called racist, don’t indulge in knee-jerk defensiveness. It’s your behavior or your words that are being criticized, not your very soul. Remember that enduring a lifetime of racism is worse than being called racist.

5) Be willing to feel uncomfortable. If you’re doing the conversation right, it’ll make you feel upset. It may make you feel ashamed, guilty, angry, or shocked. Stay with these feelings and see where they lead you.

6) If you make a mistake, apologize. Try to figure out what went wrong so you don’t do it again. Know when to leave it alone—if the person doesn’t want to engage again, that’s their choice. But don’t castigate yourself for all eternity. Reflect, learn from the mistake, and try again with someone else.

Approaching Conversations With the Right Mindset

If you’re a white person entering these conversations, at some point you’ll probably feel torn between two conflicting goals—You want to learn more, but you also want to protect your ego and preserve aspects of your current way of thinking. As Carol Dweck argues in Mindset, you can approach tasks with either a fixed mindset (in which you believe that you and others are incapable of meaningful change) or a growth mindset (in which you believe that you and others are growing, learning, and improving all the time). A growth mindset prompts you to seek out challenges and means that you don’t feel threatened by failure. Looking again at the seven suggestions above, you can see that suggestions 1, 2, 4, and 5 above are smart ways to trigger a growth mindset.

Beyond the Conversation

Productive conversations are a good start, but they’re just a start. It’s easy to get hooked on the good feeling that comes with saying the right things and having the right conversations, but ultimately it’s what we do after the conversations that matters. Here are some concrete things you can do to fight racial injustice, grouped into the spheres in which you can apply them: political, economic, educational, workplace, and personal.

Political Actions

Vote. And not just in big elections: Vote for school boards, in local elections, and so on. Local politics is often where you can spark real, tangible change. Support candidates of color and racially inclusive policies.

Vocally support increasing the minimum wage. Proportionately more people of color work in minimum-wage jobs, so increasing the minimum wage will benefit a large number of people of color.

Support affirmative action. People who criticize affirmative action as unfair simply don’t know the facts. There have never been “quotas,” and the goal percentages are often far below actual representational parity. Affirmative action targets exist to redress a systemic opportunity gap. They’re not back doors or easy ways to get hired.

Approach mayors and local governments about police reform. Ask about policies regarding officer training, body cams, and complaints procedures. Demand reform wherever necessary. Keep applying pressure until something changes. Insist on justice for police shootings.

(Shortform note: For Ibram X. Kendi, political action (in the form of fighting racist policies) should be the main goal of antiracist efforts. Kendi advocates a framework that includes public education that highlights the racist effects of policies and introduces possible alternatives, and ultimately the implementation and evaluation of antiracist policies.)

Economic Actions

Harness the power of your wallet. Wherever possible, support businesses owned by people of color. Boycott businesses that take advantage of people of color: Steer clear of banks that employ racist lending practices and avoid companies that rely on low-wage labor from people of color. Donate to grassroots organizations that are working for change. (Shortform note: When people of color suffer economically, white people don’t benefit, because the economy as a whole suffers. A 2020 study by Citigroup, for example, found that racist practices have cost the US economy a total of $16 trillion (almost the same amount as the current annual GDP).)

Educational Actions

Engage with schools. Ask about the opportunity gap in your school district. Find out about the history curriculum. Are there any curricula and textbooks that erase people of color or teach a whitewashed version of history? Contact teachers and educational leaders to tell them that racial issues are a priority.

If you’re at college, will soon be applying for college, or have a child in either of those situations, contact colleges to find out their policies and track record on diversity and representation.

(Shortform note: While we can’t expect teachers to bear full responsibility for antiracist education, they do have a crucial role. Expert teachers suggest integrating educational material on racism into the curriculum. A number of resources for teachers are available online.)

Workplace Actions

Become active in your unions. A racially aware union can do a lot for people of color. If you speak up enough in your union over time, people will eventually start listening.

Call out tokenism. If management tries to implement perfunctory, superficial measures that look good but don’t run deep, let them know. (Shortform note: In a 2020 article in the Harvard Business Review, Robert Livingston suggests other company-level actions to tackle racism, including addressing the systems and structures that are to blame and listening to people of color’s stories of workplace racism.)

Personal Actions

Diversify the art and music you engage with. Most mainstream television, film, music, and literature is white by default. Seek out work by people of color, films in which the majority of actors are not white, and books by people of diverse backgrounds. Watching films and reading books is also a great way to listen to people of color without demanding personalized emotional labor. (Shortform note: If you’d like to start reading more books by people of color, this Buzzfeed list has a broad range of recommended titles.)

103 More Things You Can Do to Fight for Social Justice

In addition to Oluo’s suggestions above, this Medium article suggests a range of ways that white people can contribute to the struggle for racial justice. Possibilities include contacting federal and state legislators on specific issues related to criminal justice, moving your money to a black-owned bank, and attending local political meet-and-greets to ask questions about racial justice.

Final Words

Thank you for joining this conversation. Though it may be deeply challenging at times, know that you’re working to create a better future for all of us. (Shortform note: As James Baldwin famously observed: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”)