If you live in the United States, you know we have a problem with race.
If you don’t live here, you’re probably still aware that the world’s most famous ‘melting pot’ spends a lot of time fighting itself - all too often in tragic, literal ways - over whether people who don’t look like its Founding Fathers should be entitled to the same expectations of just treatment and equal opportunity as those who do.
It’s an issue that’s recently gained a lot of attention, thanks in part to George Floyd - an unarmed Black man whose death in police custody was recorded and shared to the shock, horror and outrage of people across the country and the world.
Since the last days of May, when news of Floyd’s death first broke, through June and into July, protests, riots, anger and grief have engulfed the United States from sea to shining sea, and in some cases have crossed those seas as observers across the world have taken up their own calls for justice.
Monuments have been toppled, murals have been painted, reform has been demanded, and streets have been filled with people marching and chanting for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others whose names are too horrifyingly many for us to know. Meanwhile those same murals have been defaced, curfews have been imposed, and those protesters have been tear gassed, arrested, pulled into unmarked vans, bruised and even killed in the face of opposition from local police, federal agents and even their neighbors.
Just as all of this pain, anger, fear and frustration has forced a reckoning of this country with its failures, and with its commitment to securing safety and justice for all of its children; so too has this public, unstoppable, unavoidable presentation of injustices too long ignored driven many Americans previously insulated by their privilege to examine their own duties, their own shortcomings, and their own complicity in the context of systemic racial injustice in the United States.
I am one of those Americans. While technically a person of color, thanks to the bubble I’ve grown up in (the population of my high school is over 50% Asian) I have never been a victim of significant racial injustice or prejudice, nor have I witnessed it in my direct community to any significant extent.
And while I’ve always been proud to consider myself pretty socially progressive, politically engaged and morally principled, I’ve recently become more aware than ever of the extent to which my enormous privilege has blinded me to and implicated me in the perpetuation of a long and brutal history of unaddressed racial injustice in this country. And as others around me have had the same long overdue awakening, I - like many other Americans - have been impelled by conscience and by circumstance into new, scary, confusing, difficult and painful conversations about race in America.
Such is the context within which I picked up a copy of Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race.
So You Want to Talk About Race is Oluo’s guidebook to understanding some of the main issues on the scene of racial injustice; having better informed, more productive and less painful/harmful conversations about race; and identifying where and how you can do your part in fighting systemic racism.
The book is as much for people of color who (like me) want to be able to better voice and explain their concerns to others as it is for people of privilege who (also like me) want to learn how to cause less harm, how to accept more of our implicit responsibility, and how to do our part in relieving some of the burden borne by people of color by understanding their experiences, speaking up with and for them, and taking action to turn the tide of racial oppression.
Through 18 illuminating chapters, Oluo helps all of us achieve all of those goals. Every chapter opens with a story from Oluo’s own life, grounding the chapter’s discussion in a sense of authenticity, urgency and palpability. The chapter titles are all questions, framing their subjects in a relatable and accessible way that almost feels like Oluo is gently giving us permission to approach these difficult, complex, painful topics. And in each chapter, the honest, conversational, and compassionate yet firm way in which Oluo writes furnishes us with the clarity and trust to do just that, pushing ourselves to understand and apply the critical lessons we find.
So You Want to Talk About Race is not just a conversational guide, it’s a conversational partner in the essential dialogue that is the process of understanding race. And it’s not just a partner in this conversation, it’s the perfect partner. It doesn’t mind if you ask it all your questions about race and look to it for the answers. It doesn’t mind if you keep coming back to re-examine a particular topic. It doesn’t expect you to have already informed and educated yourself; it knows that in coming to it you are trying to. It doesn’t get tired of the conversation, and it doesn’t have bad days.* And while it’s patient and nonjudgmental, as books are, it does hold you to a high standard and expects you to take what you learn and use it to act, to work for real change.
*(None of these listed virtues are meant to contrast with faults in human partners; on the contrary, they’re advantages based on the fact that we can ask and expect things of books that we can’t reasonably expect from people and that those people definitely don’t owe to us.)
I learned so much from So You Want to Talk About Race. From things that I already thought about a lot - like privilege, affirmative action, microaggressions and the model minority myth - to things that were new to me - like intersectionality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and tone policing - this book opened my eyes to so many new truths, nuances, experiences and perspectives.
The book took my understanding of privilege, which was previously grounded in the abstractions of John Green’s analysis of Mario Kart and John Rawls’ argument from moral arbitrariness, and gave it clarity, specificity, and concrete applications in the real world.
It showed me how recognizing your privilege enables you not only to identify areas where you can stop accepting/benefiting from it and therefore stop legitimizing/perpetuating oppression, but also to identify where you have the power to call for change on behalf of those without privilege and therefore without (as much) power.
In a somewhat poetic turn of events, the chapter on privilege also explained how recognizing your privilege allows you to identify how privilege has affected your experience and understanding of the world and work to remedy that gap by seeking out work by those without that privilege - the exact circumstance, in fact, which had led me to purchase and read the book in the first place.
In discussing affirmative action, a topic that I’ve debated with my more conservative friends, studied for a school project, and reported on for my school newspaper, Oluo provided a wealth of hard evidence, sharp counterexamples, and insightful questions and powerful rebuttals to common objections, and in doing so gave me the tools to be more effective in my future conversations.
This provision of resources, specifically data and examples, was something that occurred and that I appreciated throughout the book in chapters about topics including class vs. race, intersectionality, police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, cultural appropriation and the model minority myth.
A key concept that helped me understand topics throughout the book was Oluo’s explanation that the individual incidents that may spark reactions or draw widespread scrutiny are not as important as the fact that they fit into a broader pattern of harm that demonstrably affects people of color in a disproportionate way. This helped me understand why it can sometimes be difficult to address individual, isolated cases of police brutality or microaggressions and to explain our anger at them to “those who demand the smoking gun” of irrefutable proof of racism in each individual case.
Oluo’s firsthand description of the experience of being Black in America - from not enjoying driving thanks to the constant fear of police violence; to having the joy of childhood robbed by an educational system that constantly scrutinizes children of color and views them as violent, disruptive and threatening; to being extremely careful not to reach for anything in front of a police offer without first warning them - helped me realize just how truly inescapable and destructive race is in the lives of those it is used to oppress. It enlightened me to my extraordinary privilege in not having to think about race on a daily basis, and to Black and brown Americans’ lack of that luxury.
Not only did So You Want to Talk About Race help me better understand Black Americans’ experience in the context of racial injustice, it also helped me better view my own. The chapter on the model minority myth opened my eyes to the ways in which common perception of Asian Americans essentially makes invisible the subset of that vast group that is not affluent, highly skilled & educated, or from China, Japan or Korea - (all things which apply to me, the son of two college-educated immigrant physicians from Taiwan and Japan).
It helped me understand that I, by not making conscious efforts to shed light on the experiences of Asian Americans with far different circumstances from my own privileged story, am complicit in the persistence of a myth that flattens an enormous and diverse group of people into a single stereotype; hides the extreme economic and educational disparities within the label “Asian American”; leads to the provision of fewer academic and mental health resources for Asian Americans; minimizes the hate crimes, discrimination, lack of political power, & ceiling to professional success that Asian Americans face; and “serves to redirect struggle against oppressive White Supremacy to competition between Asian Americans and other people of color.”
Most importantly, So You Want to Talk About Race impelled me to act. I no longer have the excuse of ignorance (not that ignorance is ever a justification for inaction, an understanding that prompted me to turn to this book). And I realize that, as Oluo writes in the final chapter:
We cannot talk our way out of a racially oppressive system. We can talk our way into understanding, and we can then use that understanding to act.”
So You Want to Talk About Race talked me into understanding. It’s up to me to use it.
I highly recommend So You Want to Talk About Race to anyone who (like me) is horrified by the implications of their own privilege and ignorance and wants to do something about it, but doesn’t know where to start. Instructive, insightful and important, this book is perfect for those who, indeed, want to talk about race.
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