Contemporary Authors

• So You Want to Talk about Race Seal Press (New York, NY), 2018

1. So you want to talk about race LCCN 2017041919 Type of material Book Personal name Oluo, Ijeoma, author. Main title So you want to talk about race / Ijeoma Oluo. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Seal Press, [2018] Description v, 248 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781580056779 (hardback) CALL NUMBER E184.A1 O454 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Ijeoma Oluo - http://www.ijeomaoluo.com/

  About Ijeoma: Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and Internet Yeller. She’s the author of the New York Times Best-Seller So You Want to Talk about Race, published in January by Seal Press. Named one of the The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017, one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, and winner of the of the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award by the American Humanist Society, Oluo’s work focuses primarily on issues of race and identity, feminism, social and mental health, social justice, the arts, and personal essay. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News, Elle Magazine, TIME, The Stranger, and the Guardian, among other outlets.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijeoma_Oluo

  Ijeoma Oluo
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Ijeoma Oluo
  Lovett Or Leave It - Ijeoma Oluo 1.jpg
  Born 1980 (age 37)[1][2]
  Denton, Texas[1][2]
  Nationality US
  Other names Ijeoma Jacobson[3]
  Education BA political science (2007)[4]
  Alma mater Western Washington University[5]
  Occupation Writer
  Spouse(s) Chad R. Jacobson (married 2001–05)[6][3]
  Children 2
  Relatives Ahamefule J. Oluo (brother)[7]
  Lindy West (sister in-law)[8]
  Ijeoma Oluo (born 1980) is an American writer who authored So You Want to Talk About Race and has written for several newspapers as well as online news platforms.[9] Oluo has written for The Guardian, Jezebel, The Stranger, Medium and The Establishment, where she is also an editor-at-large.[10][11][12][13][14]

  Born in Denton, Texas and based in Seattle, Washington, in 2015 Oluo was named one of the most influential people in Seattle,[15] and in 2018, she was named one of the 50 most influential women in Seattle.[16] Her writing covers misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting, feminism and social justice.[9][17]

  Many of her articles have gone viral, specifically because of the importance of her critiques of race and the invisibility of black women's voices in the United States, as exemplified in the coverage of her interview with Rachel Dolezal.[18][19][20]

  Contents
  1 Career
  1.1 Early career
  1.2 Journalism and commentary
  1.2.1 Temporary Facebook suspension
  1.3 Books
  1.3.1 The Badass Feminist Coloring Book
  1.3.2 So You Want to Talk About Race
  1.4 Other projects
  2 Accolades
  3 Personal life
  4 Works
  5 See also
  6 References
  7 External links
  Career
  Early career
  Ijeoma Oluo began her career in technology and digital marketing.[13] She turned to writing in her mid-30s[21] after the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, who was at the same age of her son at the time.[13] Fearful for her son as well as her younger brother, a musician then traveling on tour, Oluo began sharing long-held concerns via a blog she'd previously devoted to food writing.[21] She has described these initial forays as a significant influence on her writing style, as she hoped that sharing personal stories would be a way to connect to and activate her predominantly white community in Seattle.[21] Oluo has said she was disappointed by the response she initially received, and that many of her existing friends "fell away" instead of engaging in the issues she had begun raising; however, many black women she hadn't previously known reached out to express appreciation and Oluo's profile as a writer grew, with publications asking to reprint work from her blog and eventually commissioning new writing.[21]

  Journalism and commentary

  Recording the Lovett or Leave It podcast on January 27, 2018 at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. Hosted by Jon Lovett (left) and Akilah Hughes (second from left), with guests Lindy West (second from right) and Ijeoma Oluo (right).[22]
  Oluo's columns and news articles appeared in The Guardian and The Stranger newspapers from 2015 through 2017,[11] and she has also written for Jezebel, Medium and The Establishment, a publication based at Medium that Oluo helped launch;[23] she is an editor-at-large.[10][12][13][14] Her writing covers topics like misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting, feminism and social justice.[9][17]

  Many of her articles have gone viral, owing to the significance of her critiques of race and the erasure of black women's voices in the United States, as exemplified in Oluo's April 2017 interview of Rachel Dolezel.[18][19][20]

  Oluo stopped writing for The Stranger in July 2017; her reasons included the paper's decision to publish an article on detransitioning that Olou said was "written by a cis woman without the knowledge and language necessary to responsibly report on the subject in a way that would not feed into the narrative of anti-trans bigots. The piece quotes a doctor widely discredited for junk science, with a well-known anti-trans bias."[24] Though Oluo has taken strong stands on many social issues, she has also said fans should be comfortable criticizing and speaking honestly about errors such as expressions of sexism, racism, or classism by their favorite celebrities, without having to condemn or reject anyone as irredeemable, and that we ourselves generally share many of the same flaws we call out in others.[25] She wrote in 2015 that, "Being anti-racist doesn't mean that you are never racist, it means that you recognize and battle racism in yourself as hard as you battle it in others", and she expanded on this general theme of honest dialog about uncomfortable truths in her 2018 book, writing that, "This does not mean that you have to flog yourself for all eternity."[25][26]

  Oluo wrote on her blog in November 2017 that USA Today had asked her to write an op-ed, but only on the condition that Oluo's article argue against the need for due process with regard to sexual misconduct allegations such as the high-profile cases associated with the Me Too movement, specifically that the editors "want a piece that says that you don't believe in due process and that if a few innocent men lose their jobs it's worth it to protect women." Oluo was willing to rebut the USA Today editorial that the accused are at great risk of their rights to due process being violated, but said she would not play the role of "their strawman", since she did in fact believe in everyone's right to due process.[27] After Oluo wrote about the USA Today offer, The Washington Post responded with an editorial by Christine Emba that shared Oluo's position that the greatest violations of due process had been against the rights of harassment victims who had been denied justice for many years, and that such protestations over due process were, in Olouo's words, "attempt to re-center the concerns of men".[28] Oluo had said that such apparent concern for due process was intended to, "stop women from coming forward before too many men are held accountable for their actions".[27]

  Temporary Facebook suspension
  Oluo's Facebook account was temporarily suspended in 2017. She had made a joke on Twitter that she felt uncomfortable around "white folk in cowboy hats" the first time she went in a Cracker Barrel. In response, she received hundreds of threats and racist messages on Twitter and to her Facebook account.[29][30] Twitter took down tweets and banned users who were breaking its terms of service, but Oluo said Facebook did nothing for three days.[30] Her account was suspended after Oluo posted screenshots of the messages, saying Facebook was not doing anything to help. Facebook later apologized and reactivated her account, saying the suspension had been a mistake. Oluo said the Facebook accounts of several other black activists have been suspended after publicly posting screenshots of threatening messages they had received, and each time Facebook said it was a mistake.[30][31]

  Books
  The Badass Feminist Coloring Book
  In 2015, Oluo self-published The Badass Feminist Coloring Book using Amazon's CreateSpace.[32] The project began with Oluo sketching outlines of favorite feminists as a stress reliever; encouraged by friends, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a coloring book of 45 sketches and accompanying quotes.[33] Well before the deadline, the project raised more than double its goal.[34]

  Feminists depicted in The Badass Feminist Coloring Book include Lindy West (Oluo's sister-in-law),[33] comedian Hari Kondabolu,[34] writer Feminista Jones[34] and musician Kimya Dawson (of The Moldy Peaches).[35]

  So You Want to Talk About Race
  Oluo's book So You Want to Talk about Race was published on January 16, 2018 by the Seal Press imprint of Perseus Books Group's Da Capo.[36][37][38][39][26][40] In its "New & Noteworthy" column, The New York Times described the book as "tak[ing] on the thorniest questions surrounding race, from police brutality to who can use the 'N' word."[41] Oluo began the project at the suggestion of her agent, who proposed Oluo write a guidebook to discussing the topics she was writing about regularly. Oluo was initially reluctant, feeling she already spent more time dealing with race than she wanted — speaking to Bitch magazine, she said, "Think about how much time you want to spend, as a Black woman, talking about race, and then dedicating a whole book to talking about race. It's tough for me."[21] But as she considered the idea, she found many people reached out with topics, and ultimately she decided that a book might save her from having to answer the same questions over and over; in particular she hoped a book's tangible form might reach people in a different way than online work did.[21]

  Bustle named So You Want to Talk about Race to a list of 14 recommended debut books by women, praising Oluo's "no holds barred writing style",[42] as well as to a list of the 16 best non-fiction books of January 2018.[43] Harper's Bazaar also named it to a list of 10 best new books of 2018, saying "Oluo crafts a straightforward guidebook to the nuances of conversations surrounding race in America."[44]

  Other projects
  Oluo has also performed as a speaker, storyteller and standup comic.[45][46] Oluo was interviewed in the 2016 documentary short Oh, I Get It included in the Slamdance, Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and others, about her experiences as a queer stand-up comedian.[47][48]

  Accolades
  Seattle Met named Oluo one of the 50 most influential women in Seattle in 2018, and Seattle Magazine named her one the most influential people in Seattle in 2015, for her "incisive wit, remarkable humor and an appropriate magnitude of rage", and said she is "one of Seattle's strongest voices for social justice."[16][15] Bustle included Oluo among "13 Authors to Watch in 2018".[49]

  Personal life
  Ijeoma Oluo was born in Denton, Texas on December 30, 1980.[1][2] Her father, Samuel Lucky Onwuzip Oluo, is from Nigeria, and her mother, Susan Jane Hawley is from Kansas, and is white.[7] Oluo's younger brother is jazz musician Ahamefule J. Oluo, who is married to Seattle writer Lindy West.[8] Ijeoma Oluo was married to Chad R. Jacobson from 2001 to 2005, with whom the first of her two children was born.[6][3][50] She graduated from Western Washington University with a BA in political science in 2007.[4]

  Works
  Notable works by Ijeoma Oluo include:

  "The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black", The Stranger, April 19, 2017
  So You Want to Talk About Race, Da Capo Press, 2018, ISBN 9781580056786, OCLC 986970684
  Article archive at The Stranger (2015–2017)
  Column archive at The Guardian (2015–2017)
  The badass feminist coloring book, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015, ISBN 9781517268657, OCLC 941812206
  See also
  Black feminism
  Black Twitter
  Roxane Gay
  Say Her Name
  Womanism
  References
  Oluo, Ijeoma (August 31, 2016), "How My White Mother Helped Me Find My Blackness", The Establishment
  Birth Index, 1903-1997; 1980 births, Texas Department of Health Bureau of Vital Statistics, p. 3437
  Department of Health, Divorce Index, 1969-2014 - Jacobson - Chad - R - Et Al., Olympia, Washington: Washington State Archives, archived from the original on 2018-02-05
  Gallagher, Mary (2017), "Class Notes", Window: The Magazine of Western Washington University, vol. 9 no. 2, p. 44, archived from the original on 2018-02-03
  WWU alumna Ijeoma Oluo to speak Feb. 23 on social change and politics, Western Washington University, February 15, 2017, archived from the original on February 3, 2018
  Department of Health, Marriage Index, 1969-2014 - Jacobson - Chad - R - Et Al., Olympia, Washington: Washington State Archives, archived from the original on 2018-02-05
  Oluo, Ahamefule J. (July 6, 2011), "My Father Is an African Immigrant and My Mother Is a White Girl from Kansas and I Am Not the President of the United States; Or, How to Disappoint Your Absent Father in 20 Words or Less", The Stranger, archived from the original on October 9, 2017
  West, Lindy (July 3, 2017), "Roxane Gay: 'If I was conventionally hot and had a slammin' body, I would be president'", The Guardian, archived from the original on February 3, 2018
  Dubenko, Anna (April 21, 2017). "Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldn't Miss". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 7, 2017.
  "Required reading: "So You Want to Talk About Race"". Salon. January 17, 2018. Archived from the original on February 2, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  "Ijeoma Oluo". the Guardian. Archived from the original on December 26, 2017. Retrieved January 12, 2018.
  Oluo, Ijeoma (April 19, 2017). "The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black". The Stranger.
  Sanders, Julia-Grace (May 18, 2016). "Ijeoma Oluo: The Making of One of Seattle's Most Influential Voices". The Seattle Lesbian. Archived from the original on September 9, 2017. Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  Botton, Sari (March 20, 2017). "'You Can Help in Ways That I Cannot': Ijeoma Oluo on Putting Your White Privilege to Work Against Racism". Longreads. Archived from the original on December 22, 2017.
  Lisa Wogan and Linda Morgan, "Seattle's Most Influential People of 2015" Archived 2017-09-09 at the Wayback Machine., Seattle Magazine, November 2015
  Norimine, Hayat; et al. (January 31, 2018). "The 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle". Seattle Metropolitan. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Enjeti, Anjali (January 12, 2018). "'I Might as Well Start a Fire': Author and 'Internet Yeller' Ijeoma Oluo on Talking About Race". Rewire. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  Hopper, Nate (April 20, 2017). "What Ijeoma Oluo's Interview With Rachel Dolezal Reveals About White Privilege". Time. Archived from the original on August 23, 2017. Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  Adeshina, Emmanuel (July 27, 2017). "Woman's Viral Tweets Calls Out White Liberal Women's Use of This Racially Coded Word". ATTN:. Archived from the original on September 11, 2017. Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  Radke, Bill; Al-Sadi, Amina. "Rachel Dolezal 'erases black women.' Ijeoma Oluo takes the conversation back". Archived from the original on October 2, 2017. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  Dionne, Evette (January 18, 2018). "Ijeoma Oluo Wants to Help You Talk About Race". Bitch. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Lovett, Jon (January 27, 2018), "The House Always Wynns", Crooked.com, archived from the original on February 8, 2018
  Williams, Allison (January 31, 2018). "Ijeoma Oluo: Seattle, You're Not Mad Enough". Seattle Metropolitan. Archived from the original on February 5, 2018. Retrieved February 4, 2018.
  Herzog, Katie (July 3, 2017), "A Response to the Uproar Over My Piece, "The Detransitioners"", The Stranger, archived from the original on August 8, 2017
  Oluo, Ijeoma (March 31, 2015), "Admit It: Your Fave Is Problematic; Trevor Noah is the latest on the rack for blundering comments. But it's how we deal with our flaws that really matters", Medium, archived from the original on February 5, 2018
  Beason, Tyrone (January 20, 2018). "Seattle author begins a crucial discussion in 'So You Want to Talk About Race'". The Seattle Times. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Olou, Ijeoma (November 30, 2017), "Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?", The Establishment, archived from the original on January 4, 2018
  Emba, Christine (December 1, 2017), "We're misunderstanding due process", The Washington Post, archived from the original on February 5, 2018
  Oluo, Ijeoma (August 2, 2017). "Facebook's Complicity in the Silencing of Black Women". Medium. Archived from the original on November 6, 2017. Retrieved January 11, 2018.
  Guynn, Jessica (August 3, 2017). "Facebook apologizes to black activist who was censored for calling out racism". USA Today. Archived from the original on January 12, 2018. Retrieved January 12, 2018.
  Coldewey, Devin (August 2, 2017). "Another black activist, Ijeoma Oluo, is suspended by Facebook for posting about racism". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on September 9, 2017.
  Groetzinger, Kate (August 14, 2015). "Never feel ashamed of coloring as an adult with this badass feminist coloring book". Quartz. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Frank, Priscilla (June 25, 2015). "A Badass Feminist Coloring Book For The Powerful Ladies In Your Life". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on October 23, 2017. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Mosthof, Mariella. "Three Words: Feminist Coloring Book". Bustle. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Badal, Kelly Phillips (July 8, 2015). "'Badass Feminist Coloring Book' Raises $16K on Kickstarter". Yahoo! News. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  "Nonfiction Book Review: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Seal, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-58005-677-9". Publishers Weekly. November 13, 2017. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Ferguson, Jenny (January 19, 2018). "So You Want to Talk About Race". Washington Independent Review of Books. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Harwood, John (January 14, 2018). "'So You Want To Talk About Race'". WBUR-FM. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Keane, Erin (January 17, 2018). "Required reading: "So You Want to Talk About Race"". Salon. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Bhatt, Jenny (February 1, 2018). "REVIEW: An Incisive Look at Race -- and How We Should Be Talking About It". The National Book Review. Archived from the original on February 7, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  "New & Noteworthy". The New York Times. January 18, 2018. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Miller, E. Ce. "14 Books By First-Time Women Authors To Look Out For In 2018". Bustle. Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Long, Stephanie Topacio. "The 16 Best Nonfiction Books Of January Will Prepare You To Fight Back". Bustle. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Hubbard, Lauren (November 30, 2017). "10 New Books to Add to Your Reading List in 2018". Harper's Bazaar. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved February 3, 2018.
  Constant, Paul (May 17, 2017). "Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from May 17th - May 23rd". The Seattle Review of Books. Archived from the original on February 7, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  City Arts Staff (July 10, 2017). "'Fun Home' at the 5th, an exhibition of inflatable art, West Seattle Summerfest, a punk-rock private eye movie and more". City Arts Magazine. Archived from the original on February 7, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  "Seattle directors Sara McCaslin and Danny Tayara will premiere Oh, I Get It, a documentary exposing the challenges facing queer comedians in the world of stand-up comedy.", The Seattle Lesbian, January 17, 2016, archived from the original on February 5, 2018
  Oh, I Get It 2016 documentary short film on IMDb
  Miller, E. Ce. "13 Authors That Have Big Things Coming In 2018". Bustle. Archived from the original on February 7, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  Oluo, Ijeoma (August 14, 2015), "My Parenting Advice: Don't Kill Them", KUOW-FM, archived from the original on July 2, 2017

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ijeoma-oluo

  Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle based writer and internet yeller. Her work on feminism and social justice has been featured in TIME, NY Magazine, Huffington Post, Jezebel, XOJane, SheKnows and many other places. You can find more of her work at ijeomaoluo.com

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/the-conversation-ive-been-dreading-ijeoma-oluo-talks-about-race-with-her-mom/

  VIA SEAL PRESS
  THE CONVERSATION I’VE BEEN DREADING: IJEOMA OLUO TALKS ABOUT RACE WITH HER MOM
  'AT THIS POINT I’M REGRETTING THE INVENTION OF THE TELEPHONE.'
  January 17, 2018 By Ijeoma Oluo Share:
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  When my white mother gave birth to me, and later my brother, in Denton, Texas, she became the subject of a lot of racial commentary in her conservative southern community. But surprisingly, my mother and I had our first really substantive conversation about race late in my life, when I was 34 years old. I was well into my career in writing about culture and social justice and my opinions and identity around race were pretty well documented by then. But the truth is, like many families, our conversations growing up mostly revolved around homework, TV shows, and chores.

  While I was growing up, my mother had given the obligatory speeches that all parents of black children must give: don’t challenge cops, don’t be surprised if you are followed at stores, some people will be mean to you because of your beautiful brown skin, no you can’t have the same hairstyle as your friends because your hair doesn’t do that. But those conversations were one-offs that ceased to be necessary once we were old enough to see the reality of race for ourselves.

  Having a white mother, my siblings and I likely had even fewer conversations about race than black children raised by black parents, because there was a lot about our lives that our mother’s whiteness made it hard for her to see. My mother loved our blackness as much as was possible for any nonblack person to do, she loved our brown skin, our kinky hair, our full lips, our culture, and our history. She thought we were beauty incarnate.

  Our mom never thought that our blackness would hold us back in life—she thought we could rule the world. But that optimism and starry-eyed love was, in fact, born from her whiteness. It was almost impossible for her to see all of the everyday hurdles we had to jump, the tiny cuts of racism that we endured throughout our lives. For our mom, we were black and beautiful and smart and talented and kind—and that’s all that mattered. And in the confines of our home, it was all that mattered. But as we left home, and our mom began to see us interact as adults with the real world, she began to suspect that there was more to being black in this world than she had previously thought. I could tell that this made my mom uncomfortable, to know that the babies that she had birthed from her own body had entire universes she couldn’t see, so the more that my world and my career became focused on race, the less my mom acknowledged it. She just really didn’t know what to say.

  It was in this context that I received a voicemail from her one evening in 2015. It had the same unnecessary enthusiasm that all my mom’s voicemails seem to have, but the topic was definitely new.

  “Ijeoma, call me. I’ve had an epiphany. About race. It’s important.”

  I talk about race for a living, which means I have had a lot of uncomfortable conversations on the topic. Quite often, well-meaning white people will attempt to show me how much they “get it” by launching into racial dialogues filled with assumptions, stereotypes, and microaggressions that they are completely unaware of. I have cringed my way through so many of these discussions that you’d think they would have less effect on me. And while that is in some ways true—these conversations have become a bit easier with time—I was in no way ready to have this conversation with my mom. This is not because my mom means any harm or is in any way a worse offender than those who approach me after speaking engagements or readings (she’s not), it’s just—she’s my mom and nobody likes to discuss race with their mom.

  Here’s the thing about my mom, my mom is the kindest, most generous person I’ve ever known. And she is a wonderful mother and grandmother, beloved by just about all who meet her. But she’s also exhausting. My mother does not think before she speaks, nor does she at least take the time to collate her subjects before shouting ten different conversations at you (she refused to get hearing aids for a very long time, so when I say “shouting” I mean shouting). My mom is at times a nonsensical tornado of emotion, enthusiasm, and whimsy. A conversation with her about grocery shopping (which will inevitably wander to a conversation on organic gardening, which will remind her of a joke about potatoes she heard but cannot remember the punchline for) can utilize all of my patience and conversational skills. I love my mom dearly, but I have been rolling my eyes at her for 36 years—I am forever a bratty teenager in her presence.

  I was trying to think of anything I’d like to do less than call my white mother to hear her epiphany about race, when she did what all mothers do—she immediately called back, and kept calling, until I picked up the phone.

  “Did you get my message?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I sighed, “You had an epiphany?”

  “OK,” she dove in before I could run away, “So I was telling a joke at work, and it had a black punchline—not like, a punchline about black people, but a punchline for black people . . . ”

  This is the part of the conversation where I start cringing. I need you to hear my mom’s chipper Kansas accent as she says this.

  “. . . and this coworker of mine, he’s black, says, ‘What do you know about being black?’”

  This is the part of the conversation where I’m inhaling sharply. I really don’t want to know what happens next because I cannot imagine any way that it is good.

  “Like, he was challenging me, you know? Probably thinking, ‘this white bitch.’”

  At this point I’m regretting the invention of the telephone.

  “And I was so mad, I was like, this man doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know what I went through, he doesn’t know that I have two black kids.”

  I’m at this point holding the phone a good six inches away from my ear in the hopes that it will make this conversation less painful. Please tell me she didn’t actually say these things to this man.

  “But then I realized . . .”

  Oh no.

  “. . . that he’s probably gone through so much racism in his life, he doesn’t know who the good white people are.”

  What is she saying? WHAT IS SHE SAYING? HAS SHE NOT READ ANY OF MY WORK? Please let the earth open up and swallow me so I can get out of this conversation.

  “And if I were black, I’d probably be really angry all the time, too.”

  Aaannnd we’ve now officially entered the worst conversation in the world. I’m talking with my white mom about race. Why can’t we be talking about, I don’t know—her sex life, or my sex life, or my period, or why I’m an atheist—anything but this.

  “So now I’m not angry at him anymore. I’m just going to go to him tomorrow and explain that I have two black kids and I understand where he’s coming from.”

  And here is where I shouted “NOOOOOO!” like in those movie scenes where your buddy is about to open a car door that will so obviously set off a bomb that will kill him. As uncomfortable as this conversation was, it needed to happen. The initial discussion led to a very long talk about race and identity and the differences between being a white mother who has loved and lived with black people, and being an actual black person who experiences the full force of a white supremacist society firsthand. She asked if she at least got black credit for doing my hair for all of those years. I said no. She asked why I didn’t identify as “part white” when my mother, her, was white. I explained that while I had definitely inherited light-skin privilege due to my mixed heritage I did not feel that whiteness was something that any person with brown skin and kinky hair could inherit, because race doesn’t care what your parents look like—just look at all the lightskinned slaves sold away from their black mothers by their white fathers. We talked about how to discuss race without placing undue burden on people of color to educate you. We talked about when to not discuss race (say, in the middle of the workday when your black coworker is just trying to get through a day surrounded by white people). We ended the conversation exhausted and emotional, but with a greater understanding of each other.

  After this conversation, the way in which my mom interacted with me changed in ways that I was not expecting. She still calls me to talk about work drama, but also this funny movie she saw, and also perhaps her dream of us all building a cabin in the woods together one day. I still roll my eyes like the thirty-something teenager that I am throughout most of our conversations. But my mom has become more fearless in her support of my work, now that she better understands the role she can play. My blackness is no longer a barrier between us, a symbol of my world that she does not have access to and therefore must avoid fully acknowledging. My mom has shifted her focus on race from proving to black people that she is “down” to pressuring fellow white people to do better.

  My mom is now an outspoken advocate for racial equality in her union. And now that the awkwardness has passed, and now that my mom and I have a better understanding of each other, I can talk with her more freely about my life and my work. And while one conversation did not do all of that on its own, it opened up a new way of seeing each other and how we can truly come together as a black daughter and her white mother. So for all its awkwardness, the outcome of that conversation makes me so glad we talked. I’m also glad we talked because I’m pretty sure our conversation stopped my mom from leaving her next conversation with her coworker in tears or being dragged into HR.

  *

  Not all of us are lucky enough to have conversations on race with white people willing to take the emotional risk of investigating the role they play in upholding racism. Not all of us are lucky enough to leave an office discussion on race with no worse than a snide comment and a slightly bruised ego. These conversations, when done wrong, can do real damage. Friendships can be lost, holidays ruined, jobs placed in jeopardy. For this reason, many people avoid the topic of race altogether and recoil when it’s brought into conversation.

  But you are reading this because you realize that we have to talk about race. Race is everywhere and racial tension and animosity and pain is in almost everything we see and touch. Ignoring it does not make it go away. There is no shoving the four hundred years’ racial oppression and violence toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube.

  In fact, it’s our desire to ignore race that increases the necessity of its discussion. Because our desire to not talk about race also causes us to ignore race in areas where lack of racial consideration can have real detrimental effects on the lives of others—say, in school boards, community programs, and local government. And while it may seem that people of color always need to “put race in everything,” it’s the neglect of the specific needs of people of color, which exist whether you acknowledge them or not, that necessitate it in the first place.

  As a black woman, I’d love to not have to talk about race ever again. I do not enjoy it. It is not fun. I dream of writing mystery novels one day. But I have to talk about race, because it is made an issue in the ways in which race is addressed or, more accurately, not addressed. When my employer enforces hairstyles in their dress code that ignore the very specific hairstyle needs of black women (see military restrictions against small braids, for example), then my employer is making race an issue in their attempts to ignore it. When my son’s school only has parent-teacher conferences during school hours, they are making race an issue by ignoring the fact that black and Latinx parents are more likely to work the type of hourly jobs that would cause them to lose much-needed pay, or even risk losing their employment altogether, in order to stay involved in their child’s education. When I take my kids to movies and none of the characters they see look like them, it’s the studio that is making it about race when they decide to make up entire universes in which no brown or black people exist. I just want to go to work, educate my kids, and enjoy a movie.

  The truth is, we live in a society where the color of your skin still says a lot about your prognosis for success in life. This is the reality right now, and ignoring race will not change that. We have a real problem of racial inequity and injustice in our society, and we cannot wish it away. We have to tackle this problem with real action, and we will not know what needs to be done if we are not willing to talk about it.

  So let’s all get a little uncomfortable. If my mom and I can do it, so can you.

  __________________________________

  From So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Copyright © 2018. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

• KUOW - http://kuow.org/post/ijeoma-oluo-i-am-drowning-whiteness

  Ijeoma Oluo: 'I am drowning in whiteness'
  By IJEOMA OLUO • OCT 1, 2017
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  Seattle writer Ijeoma Oluo
  Seattle writer Ijeoma Oluo
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  Hi, I am Ijeoma Oluo, and I am a mixed race black woman who was raised by a white mother in this very white city.

  I have a Ph.D. in whiteness, and I was raised in "Seattle nice." I was steeped in the good intentions of this city and I hate it.

  I love this city. I love you guys. Also, I hate it. I really do.

  Listen Listening...10:25 Listen to Ijeoma Oluo's speech from the "Interrupting Whiteness" event, co-hosted by KUOW and the Seattle Public Library.
  And I'm going to talk a little bit about why. I write about race, and I'm regularly reached out to by really well-meaning white people who want to explain to me what my work is like to them as a white person and the white perspective that I'm missing.

  And the only part of the white perspective I'm missing is the ability to be unaware of the white perspective.

  That may sound a little arrogant, but if you are a person of color who grew up in an area like this, you understand that every decision you make, you're going, "What will white people think about this?" You have to. You find out around kindergarten, usually, that you've misjudged something and there were disastrous consequences. Maybe at a friend's house you're no longer allowed to go to, or a letter home from your teacher.

  But you know really quickly that if you don't know what white people want – what they're doing and why; what's going to make them mad; what's going to make them scared; what's going to make them happy – you will not be able to go anywhere.

  Not only are you hyper aware of your blackness or your identity of color because there is a spotlight on you 24/7, especially in a city like this where there are five of you, you have to be hyper aware of whiteness as well. And what I've noticed is that nothing really threatens the Seattle identity of liberal utopia more than asking white people to acknowledge what whiteness is and where it is in their lives.

  People tell me to stop making things about race all of the time. But when you are not making things about race, you're making them about whiteness all of the time.

  Every decision that you make with ease is made with whiteness. Every door that opens for you is opened by whiteness. And I know this sounds like I am taking away all of your achievements, and I'm not. But I need you to understand that from the Constitution to our education system to our pop culture – everything that we do is steeped in whiteness.

  And when you do not acknowledge that, you make it about race. Because then I have to navigate what you won't see. I am tripping over the roadblocks that you don't even know that you're placing in front of me.

  I am drowning in the whiteness, and you can't help me if you can't see it.

  Now, it's uncomfortable – it is uncomfortable to realize how much easier you may have had things. It is uncomfortable to realize that a lot of the benefits that you may have came at the expense of other people. That makes you feel bad; it makes you feel guilty. And I do not have a solution for that because it should make you feel bad and it should make you feel guilty. That is not my goal. (I mean sometimes it makes me smile.)

  I have bigger things to worry about. But I will say this: It will not kill you. But if you don't see it, it will kill me, or it will kill my brother, or it will kill my son. You have to get used to this.

  We are drowning in it and the least you can do is be uncomfortable. Be uncomfortable a lot. And if you are comfortable, take that as a sign that you need to make things more uncomfortable.

  Do not wait until you are ready to sit down and address race to address race. Because I do not get to decide when to address race. I don't get to say, "I feel safe, I feel comfortable; I'm going to look at racism now," because racism hits me in the doctor's office. It hits me when I'm driving down the street. It hits me when I'm taking my kids to a movie.

  Get used to being uncomfortable. Be the person that nobody wants to invite to dinner party. You are going to get pushback. And I think we've seen a lot of pushback to the change in national discussion around race. And a lot of what I hear from people is, "See, this is what happens. You push too hard. You're going with these identity politics."

  Of course there's going to be pushback. To investigate whiteness is a threat to identity, to comfort, to privilege, to status.

  But what is the alternative? Is the alternative then to back off? People are dying.

  You just keep pushing. You keep going. People push back when they are threatened. And I would love to say that this is not a threat. I would love to say that it is a win-win to address whiteness, but it's not.

  Some of what you have, you don't deserve. But when you can see your identity clearly as it is, the good and the bad; when you can see where your whiteness is more than your heritage, more than just culture, but also a system of oppression, you then have the power to do the work to redefine it to something that you can be proud of.

  You can't fake it. You cannot just pick up the positive and say that that's all that there is. This will be uncomfortable and it will be painful.

  But if you continue to do the work, you will have a sense of authenticity in yourself that you have never known. You will stop having to steal all of our stuff. You will have your own stuff!

  And that's really what I need you to do. I don't need someone standing right next to me doing what I'm doing. If black people could end racism, we would have ended racism. We have died trying to end systemic racism. I need you to do the work in your community. And it starts with looking at the day-to-day things.

  What will kill me may not be a cop. It will be my lack of access to quality medical care. It will be my lack of access to quality education. It will be the loans that I am denied. It will be all of the thousands of cuts that people of color endure every single day in white supremacist society. And that is where your life intersects with it.

  Every time you go through something, and it's easy for you, look around and say, "Who is it not easy for? And what can I do to dismantle that system?" But in order to do that, you have to be willing to look at it and see it as a part of the system of whiteness because that's what it is.

  And then eventually you will not be so tense. You will not be so defensive, because you will know that even if you aren't there, you are actually doing concrete things to make whiteness something that helps instead of hurts. And I know you can do that. I've seen what white people can do when they put their minds to things.

  I love you, Seattle, and I hope that we can start looking at kindness, which is honest and built with love, over niceness, which prioritizes comfort over safety. We can do this. But first you have to start with yourselves, and then you'll find your place every single day. You can make a measurable impact on not only the lives of people of color but your own life as well.

  Thank you.

  Ijeoma Oluo, writer and speaker, is editor-at-large of The Establishment, a media platform run and funded by women. She is a frequent guest on KUOW's Week in Review. She shared her thoughts at “Interrupting Whiteness,” an event held on June 1 at the Central Library, co-hosted by KUOW Public Radio. This is a transcript of her speech.

• The Stranger - https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/02/07/25790491/the-price-ijeoma-oluo-paid-for-speaking-up-about-race-in-her-new-book-her-white-friends-stopped-thinking-of-her-as-fun

  QUOTED: "Oluo’s book is one of the few guiding lights to emerge in our post-election landscape, a primer whose goal isn’t to call out the 'bad' white people and console the 'good' ones, but to raise the bar for all of us committed to equality and justice."
  "In an era when the public sphere can so quickly explode into anger, even violence, the way we talk matters. People’s life chances hang in the balance of our political discourse, and Oluo’s book shows us how we might swing that balance toward justice—one conversation at a time."

  SLOG
  BOOKS • RACE
  The Price Ijeoma Oluo Paid for Speaking Up About Race in Her New Book: Her White Friends Stopped Thinking of Her as "Fun"
  by Deepa Bhandaru • Feb 7, 2018 at 11:25 am
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  SEAL PRESS

  For over a year now we’ve been hearing a lot about the infamous Trump voter, who was most likely white and male and angry that he had to endure eight years with a black man at the helm of government. White anger flared last summer in Charlottesville, when emboldened white supremacists staged a torch-lit rally, their racist chants echoing well beyond the University of Virginia campus. In this newly ignited context of anger and intimidation, many of us have resorted to hand-wringing or sheet-caking, unsure of how to have productive conversations about race.
  Enter Ijeoma Oluo, the Seattle-based writer, speaker, and emerging social media icon whose breakout book, So You Want to Talk About Race, offers a fresh, compassionate, often witty approach to helping us navigate these turbulent times. Drawing from a well of personal experience as a black woman with deep and intimate ties to the white world, Oluo distinguishes herself as a relatable yet nuanced commentator on a subject that so many others have tried less successfully to take on. It’s evident that she knows her theory, but she doesn’t get mired in the academic debates, instead offering vivid anecdotes from life on the front lines as well as practical advice that both longtime students of race in America as well as newcomers to the field will find useful.

  But Oluo wasn’t always comfortable talking about race. For much of her life, she just wanted to get by—in college and the workforce, as a mother of two sons. “I tried to make the best of it,” she says in the book. “I told myself that it would all be worth it one day, that being a successful black woman was revolution enough.”

  This was back when she was one among a handful of people of color in her corporate job, before her days as an Internet truth-teller. In the book she describes an incident when her white boss started a team meeting by calling out to her from across the table. “Is that your real hair?” he asked.

  After years of suffering slights like these, Oluo could no longer remain silent. But speaking up was risky. She lost the majority of her white friends because they stopped thinking of her as “fun,” an experience many people of color can relate to. When we refuse to assimilate, when we reject the confining roles created for us—as tokens, as entertainers, as the help—and we insist on our full and complicated humanity, it doesn’t always go over well with the white people in our lives.

  In Oluo’s case, it wasn’t just her white friends she had to worry about. There was also her white mother, who raised Oluo and her siblings as a single parent. “Our mom never thought that our blackness would hold us back in life,” Oluo writes. “[S]he thought we could rule the world. But that optimism and starry-eyed love was, in fact, born from her whiteness.”

  Oluo, too, was born from her mother’s whiteness, and perhaps it’s this proximity that endows her work with an uncanny sensitivity to whiteness’s invisible machinery. Her mother is the first person Oluo thanks in the book’s acknowledgments, and it’s clear they have a close relationship. Yet Oluo doesn’t presume white innocence—not even with her mother. When her mother called her one evening in 2015 and gushed that she’d had an epiphany about race after she found herself in a muddle with a black coworker, Oluo didn’t congratulate her. She was glad her mother was beginning to understand how racism takes effect through systems of power and how fighting it means putting pressure on institutions and individuals upholding whiteness as a privilege (as opposed to a phenotype). But she wasn’t going to give her mother credit as the good white person who’s “down” with black people.

  It’s precisely this yearning for credit and goodness that Oluo’s book challenges indirectly. White people’s need to be comforted and acknowledged by people of color is just another symptom of white supremacy, an insidious way that attention and resources get diverted from those who need it most.

  Take the case of Rachel Dolezal, who Oluo wrote about last year. Dolezal’s desire to be recognized as black extended beyond her appearance. It pushed her to lie about her racial identity in order to acquire a leadership position in the NAACP, an organization that advocates for African Americans. While whites played a prominent role during the NAACP’s founding, their visibility receded as the organization grew during the Civil Rights era. Until Dolezal came along. Of all the spaces available to her in our white-dominated society, she chose one devoted to centering black people. She seized a platform built by black leaders—W.E.B. DuBois, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Ella Baker, and many others who battled racism and economic exploitation to secure an institution for voices like theirs to rise. The problem with Dolezal isn’t her perm or her tan, but how she concealed her whiteness to appropriate a platform that black people established through centuries of struggle. The absurdity of it is painful: a white woman who loves blackness to the point that she felt compelled to assume the role of a powerful black woman rather than allowing a genuinely powerful black woman to step up and lead the way.

  When Oluo talks about race, she’s talking about the pain and absurdity that have resulted from centuries of white supremacy but are too frequently elided in our discussions of hot-button issues like cultural appropriation, police brutality, and immigration. Oluo’s book is one of the few guiding lights to emerge in our post-election landscape, a primer whose goal isn’t to call out the “bad” white people and console the “good” ones, but to raise the bar for all of us committed to equality and justice.

  Especially on the Internet.

  In an era when the public sphere can so quickly explode into anger, even violence, the way we talk matters. People’s life chances hang in the balance of our political discourse, and Oluo’s book shows us how we might swing that balance toward justice—one conversation at a time.

• Pacific Standard - https://psmag.com/social-justice/a-conversation-with-ijeoma-oluo

  'BLACK WOMEN NEED TO BE RECOGNIZED FOR THE WORK THEY DO': A CONVERSATION WITH IJEOMA OLUO
  The writer discusses her new book, and what all of us can do to combat racism
  CHINELO NKECHI IKEMFEB 22, 2018
  1.5K
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  Ijeoma Oluo.
  Ijeoma Oluo.

  (Photo: Ijeoma Oluo)

  Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race is an unapologetically honest read about race in the United States. Those who follow Oluo's work have come to expect this sort of realness, whether in her essays on race and identity for Elle and the Washington Post, or in her work at The Establishment, a media outlet created by women that prioritizes marginalized voices, where she is editor at large. Now, in her breakout book, Oluo aims to shift the public discourse toward a more intelligent and proactive way of discussing race.

  To help guide better conversations about race, Oluo dedicates each chapter to a specific concept integral to social justice movements. For instance, in chapter eight, titled "What Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?" Oluo breaks down how K-12 school policies encourage the harsh treatment of black and brown children, and eventually contribute to mass incarceration. In chapter 10, Oluo takes on cultural appropriation and its detrimental effects on how people of color are allowed to celebrate themselves and their traditions. With each chapter, Oluo takes points well examined by activists and critical race theory scholars, and makes them simple enough to be understood broadly, in the hope that these conversations can become widely transformative.

  To make her points as accessible as possible, Oluo often starts a chapter with a story about herself. She is up-front about the privileges she enjoys (a college education, light skin, an able body) and those she does not (class, race, body type), and uses that frankness about herself as an opening into larger issues. Through a combination of illuminating anecdotes, tips for talking about race, personal reflections, hard statistics, and trenchant commentary on the best tactics for achieving social justice, Oluo argues that the most important goal in any discussion of race is to create a strong, inclusive movement to dismantle racism. Advice goes both ways in this book. In one section, to people of color, Olou writes: "Nobody has authority over your right for racial justice. Those who tone-police you are trying to manipulate you into thinking their validation is required to legitimize your desire for racial justice." To white readers, she explains directly, "You are not owned gratitude or friendship from people of color for your efforts."

  section-break

  One line that really stood out to me in your book is when you write: "As a black woman, I'd love to not have to talk about race ever again. I do not enjoy it. It is not fun." I think it's pretty common to hear refrains like, "Oh, black people love complaining," or "She's playing the race card." What motivates you to continue talking and writing about race, even though it is not fun to do?

  It's really funny because there's this weird myth that black people absolutely love it. But it's like people forget that we have to live it and then talk about it in order to fix it. It's not as if we are just observing racism and then talking about it, which is how many white people come into these conversations. They don't have to live it. They aren't commenting on their lived experience. But for people of color, not only are you bringing up trauma and things that have happened to you, and talking about real pains and experience, but you are also risking that pain being used against you and that pain causing even more pain.

  When I asked a lot of people about what they feared entering into conversations about race, it was striking to me the differences in fear. A lot of white people were like, "Oh, I'm afraid I am going to look stupid" or "I'll look racist" or "I'm afraid that someone will yell at me." And then people of color were like, "Well, I've been fired from jobs for talking about race so I'm afraid that's going to happen again," or "I've been physically hurt for talking about race and I don't want that to happen again." When people of color talk about these things, I wish [white] people understood the pain and risk that comes along. We do it because we have to. Our lives are just as whole as anyone else's. There's plenty of other things that we would all love to be talking about.

  So You Want to Talk About Race?
  So You Want to Talk About Race?

  (Photo: Seal Press)

  Chapter 14, which focuses on the harmful effects of the model-minority myth, talks about the importance of including the AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) community in movements for people of color. How do we do that, and whose responsibility is it to make that happen?

  There are a lot of young Asian Americans who are not only marching for Black Lives, but trying to figure out where they belong in this movement as well. I think it's important for us to remember that this entire thing is manufactured by white supremacy. It doesn't mean that black people have the responsibility to be, like, "Let's go find all the Asian Americans and make sure they know that they are welcome and they are here." But I think it is important, when we talk about issues of people of color, that we remember that Asian Americans are also people of color. This is a system that harms everyone. Nobody, except for white people, can be a part of it and come out positively. And what looks like benefit on the surface—because the model minority is often used against us, black people, indigenous people, and Latinx people—is a different type of trap for Asian Americans.

  You also talk about not using one bigotry to combat another—so, not using rhetoric steeped in fatphobia or classism to combat someone who has been racist. We see it in the way people use body-shaming tactics to attack people in government on all sides. Why is it so hard, for even the best of progressives, not to regress into this tactic?

  I think when we are stung by a bigotry, we want to hit back. And the easy way out is to hit back with another bigotry and say, "Now you'll know what it feels like." But that's without realizing, of course, this is never a direct hit. You know, if someone comes to me and gives me a racist slur and I hit them with an ableist slur, I'm not just hitting them. I'm hitting everyone with a disability. Just like they aren't just hitting me, they are hitting every person of color.

  When I neglect that, when I think that what hits me is more important, I'm basically saying that my humanity is more important than the humanity of this group that I am using as a weapon. But we have to pause then and think about it. It's a real lazy way out. It's an easy instinct. And you think that's justice. But it's not because you are just perpetrating more bigotry. Because of intersectionality, you can't defend black people by insulting women because black women exist, you know? You can't defend black people by insulting disabled people because disabled black people exist.

  Do you see yourself entering the realm of black public intellectuals with this book? There's been some debate over whether black women are even welcome in that intellectual space, kind of in response to the whole Ta-Nehisi Coates versus Cornel West thing.

  I mean, I never wanna catch myself in some embarrassing public spat the way that Cornel West is in right now. Like, that's not my end goal. I never wanted to be a public intellectual—I never wanted to be a public anything, at all. Even with a political science degree, my goal was never to run for politics. It more along the lines of, I'm going to be at a think tank, in an office, researching (laughs). You know, that was my goal, that would have been the sexiest job for me back then.

  I think that black women need to be recognized for the work they do. There are plenty of black women who inspire me every single day, and I do think they deserve so much more credit than they have. I think the fact that we get into these discussions of whether or not it's this one black versus this one black man who is the vanguard of the movement says a lot about how many black people are allowed to be center-stage at once, how uncreative white America can be in who they are willing to learn from. It's a really kinda gross thing.

  There are multitudes of us, and we are contributing to solving a problem that is so huge and so vast that, so long as we are not doing harm to the space, it is OK for people to pick up different parts of it and to try different methods and contribute different things. Black women should have their due because when they aren't supported, when they aren't funded, when they aren't listened to, we are missing the perspective necessary in making progress on these issues. We can't act as if black women will be able to do their best work forever without funding and without support and without seeing other black women before them as role models.

  Everyone who has been obsessed with whether or not you are Camp West or Camp Coates is highly unimaginative. And I think they need to step back and question what they are really saying about the capabilities of black people to be thought leaders and how many there are and can be. We don't say, "Who is the great white thought leader?" We don't have those debates. The fact that it has to be these two black dudes says a lot about how flat [white gatekeepers] think the black experience is, how flat they think black creativity and the influence of black people is, that there can only be two. It's important black people don't get caught in this. Everyone should be outraged, including West and Coates, that this debate is even happening. Because it's another symptom of white supremacy, that [Coates and West] are even feeling compelled to defend their space, when there should be hundreds of thousands of spaces, and they shouldn't have to defend that at all.

  Is it possible for white people to be truly anti-racist? Or in a general sense, is it possible for anyone with a privilege to be against the system that allows for that privilege?

  Yeah, I think it's possible [for whites] to be anti-racist. I think there's a difference between being anti-racist and being racism-free. Like, I can have cancer and be anti-cancer. In fact, I'm very likely to be anti-cancer, and I'm gonna fight it. But it doesn't mean that because I'm against it, I'm free of it. White people need to remember that if they are anti-racist, they means they need to be even more vigilant in fighting white supremacy.

  There's this notion of white guilt, and I wonder if you think there's a balance for white people who are reading your book: being proactive about race without falling into the "I'm so guilty; I'm so sorry" hole.

  So often, this discussion on white guilt once again centers white feelings and white experience. It's important to realize that guilt is a natural emotion after figuring out that you have been part of causing pain or oppression to someone. But you also have to realize that it is completely irrelevant to solving racism.

  So you feel it, you recognize that's a valid emotion. But feeling [guilt], in itself, does not help people of color; it's not an achievement. It is just a natural part of the process, but it is a byproduct that has nothing to do with helping. A lot of people think that if they just feel guilty enough, that's magically going to help. Or they think that if they can avoid feeling guilty, it is going to help.

  There's a lot of these weird conversations about whether or not white people are being overly shamed or being made to feel too bad. I think it's important to realize that in no way should white guilt enter the equation of solving racial oppression because it does not do anything. I think if you don't feel guilty, that says a lot about you and how much you are learning. But whether or not you do, if you don't do anything afterwards, it's pointless. And so I think people need to realize it's not going to kill you to feel bad for a little bit, but it's also not going to help anyone if that's the most you get out of it. And you need to find a way to get used to that feeling and then move past it and forward into something more productive.

• Rewire News - https://rewire.news/article/2018/01/12/might-well-start-fire-author-internet-yeller-ijeoma-oluo-talking-race/

  CULTURE & CONVERSATION MEDIA

  ‘I Might as Well Start a Fire’: Author and ‘Internet Yeller’ Ijeoma Oluo on Talking About Race
  Jan 12, 2018, 4:36pm Anjali Enjeti

  A Seattle-based writer and speaker, Oluo releases her highly anticipated debut book, So You Want to Talk About Race, this month.

  521
  91

  Oluo’s mind runs 24-hours-a-day and though she has yet to figure out a healthy work-life balance, creating art replenishes her mental and emotional reserves.
  Ijeoma Oluo
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  I first came across Ijeoma Oluo’s writing four years ago, when I read a brief piece about her in New York magazine, which quoted her profound tweets about the myriad ways in which police officers have killed unarmed Black people. A quick Google search on Oluo introduced me to her other lucid and trenchant writing about oppression and social justice. I became an instant fan, and when I heard about the release of her first book, So You Want to Talk About Race, I jumped at the chance to speak with her.

  While Oluo might be best known for her writing about race and social justice, she pens equally stirring pieces on mental health and abuse against women. An essay about depression, as well as one about the popular Netflix series “13 Reasons Why,” poignantly relate her struggles with having depression while raising children and the dangers of suicide ideation. She’s been called upon to voice her opinion on the #MeToo movement, and recently wrote about why she turned down a request by USA Today to write against due process for accused sexual offenders, a piece she believed would have unfairly centered the needs of accused sexual offenders over the women they’d harmed. “Each position doesn’t have to be equally countered,” she said. “I’m not going to write recklessly.”

  Thirty-seven year-old Oluo and her younger brother, Ahamefule, were born in Denton, Texas, and raised by their single mother, a Kansas native, in the northern Seattle suburb of Lynnwood, Washington. (Another sibling, Jacqueline, was born when Oluo was 12 years old.) They were poor. Sometimes the electricity was cut off and meals came from local soup kitchens. Oluo’s father returned to Nigeria when Ahamefule was one month old, and aside from two phone calls and two letters, Oluo never heard from him before his death in 1997.

  “Having a white mother, my siblings and I likely had even fewer conversations about race than black children raised by black parents, because there was a lot about our lives that our mother’s whiteness made hard for her to see,” she explains in her new book. During their childhood, Oluo’s mother remained optimistic that her children would have the same opportunities as everyone else did and failed to notice the “tiny cuts of racism” they endured until they reached adulthood.

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  As a child, Oluo always loved writing, but as a single mother with two sons of her own (now ages 16 and 10) she needed a stable job to be able to pay her mortgage. After graduating with a political science degree from Western Washington University, she entered the tech world in Seattle, starting as a business analyst and moving into network coding, digital marketing, and advertising. She started a food blog to fulfill her more creative side.

  Over time, something inside Oluo began to shift. Writing about food didn’t satiate her need to discuss issues happening around the world. Oluo could no longer laugh off the racist jokes of her friends and colleagues. She didn’t feel comfortable bringing up Black Lives Matter at the watercooler with co-workers who were mainly older white men. “There’s never a right time to start talking about race,” she told me over the phone. “I might as well start a fire. Having kids was a huge part of this [need to speak out]. It wasn’t just about me anymore.”

  She began to repurpose her blog and utilize social media to talk about social justice. Outlets like xoJane and Jezebel began republishing her blog posts, and her pieces soon appeared in the Stranger, the Seattle Globalist, the Guardian, New York magazine, and the Huffington Post.

  For the most part, her co-workers were unaware Oluo had developed such a large online presence speaking out about social justice. “I’d write marketing material at my desk and run out to the car to do an interview with MSNBC,” she said. But this dual life began to take a toll on her, and she became increasingly unhappy in her corporate job. “Once you start talking about the honest truth, it becomes really hard to be silent,” Oluo noted. She quit three years ago, surprising even herself. “It was shocking for me to quit. I’m not the type of person who does things like this,” she said. She’s been a freelance writer ever since and has been a contributing editor at The Establishment, an online feminist publication, since its 2015 launch.

  Part of Oluo’s success stems from her ability to harness and build communities on social media. Her viral Facebook posts and tweets are as eloquent, forthright, and authentic as her longer essays. Her observations cut to the heart of any issue in a way that’s easy to digest. In a recent tweet responding to the outcry surrounding Democratic Sen. Al Franken’s resignation, which some progressives believed was too high a price to pay for his alleged sexual harassment and assault of some eight women, Oluo homed in on the salient issue: “Saying that we need to go softer on our values so that we can win elections and THEN live up to them later is like saying we can bake a cake with poisoned ingredients but then we’ll frost it with nice, sweet icing later & we’ll be able to eat it without getting sick.”

  Oluo’s pièce de résistance may very well be her April 2017 profile in the Stranger of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who claimed to be Black, served as head for the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, and taught Africana studies at Eastern Washington University before she was exposed in 2015 by investigative journalist Jeff Selle at Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Press. Oluo’s viral interview—which went live a few weeks after Dolezal published her book, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, and changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo—“damn near broke the Stranger website.”

  Oluo wasn’t thrilled about the assignment. “I still wanted to say no when [my editor] called me and asked me [to do it]. I was so disgusted with this topic and didn’t know if I could pull it off until I did,” she explained to me during the interview.

  While working on the piece, she was filled with anxiety. “I cried legit tears. I was tortured by my obsession with my moral responsibility as a writer, especially to marginalized communities,” she said. “This was a piece that could have done a lot of harm.”

  What made the profile resonate so much with readers? It didn’t fall into the same trap other media organizations do when they portray Trump supporters and white nationalists as friendly, salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing citizens who register for wedding gifts at Target. Rather than centering Dolezal, Oluo focused her piece on how Dolezal’s con harmed Black communities. It’s been praised as a model for reporting on extremism and named one of Bustle’s Best Stories By Women in 2017.

  So You Want to Talk About Race, Oluo’s highly anticipated debut book is a culmination of her body of work. It’s not a book for Black people, nor is it a book for indigenous or other people of color who feel frustrated when their attempts to talk about oppression are met with either aggression or blank stares. Rather, it’s a manual for the white people who, after the presidential election, suddenly came to realize they’ve been benefiting from white supremacy their entire lives—and are now ready to do something about it. It’s a wakeup call for those who once proclaimed “this is not us” while white nationalists stormed through Charlottesville, Virginia, (where Heather Heyer was brutally killed) but who now understand that this has always been us. It’s for well-meaning progressives who once believed racism primarily consisted of slurs and segregation and now see its widespread systemic and institutional reach. Writes Oluo: “As a black woman, race has always been a prominent part of my life. I have never been able to escape the fact that I am a black woman in a white supremacist country.”

  Although Oluo can be critical when people of all races demand that Black people educate them about racism, she explains in the introduction that she wrote the book because she still “deeply appreciates” the readers who write to her with questions because they are trying to understand racism.

  The titles of the 17 chapters in So You Want to Talk About Race pose common questions for potential allies. “What if I talk about race wrong?” “Is police brutality really about race?” “What are microaggressions?” “I just got called racist, what do I do now?” Named one of Seattle’s most influential people in 2015 by Seattle Magazine, Oluo reminds readers “you don’t have to ‘be racist’ to be a part of the racist system.” She provides clear and concise answers for questions that demand the emotionally draining (and harmful) labor of Black, indigenous and other people of color. Given the acutely hostile sociopolitical climate in the United States, the book couldn’t have come at a better time.

  Why is talking about race something so many people still have great difficulty with? “I think we forget what the history of debate is, and where it came from,” Oluo said. “These were privileged white men who got together to discuss the fates of the lower halves. [Debate is] the favorite sport for white dudes. Black people didn’t get to argue the point of slavery,” she said. “We still expect gay people to have the best argument as to why they should get to marry. Conversations should be about what is morally right, what helps, and what harms people.” Oluo partially credits her degree in political science—where she learned how to interpret data and think critically—for her ability to challenge long-held assumptions and “default positions,” about power and oppression. Perhaps this is also the reason she’s able to so seamlessly chronicle her experiences of racism while simultaneously acknowledging her own light skin privilege.

  Oluo’s mind runs 24 hours a day and though she has yet to figure out a healthy work-life balance, creating art replenishes her mental and emotional reserves. A former paper quiller (a craft that involves rolling thin strips of paper into designs), Oluo, who has ADD and found quilling too messy and too time-consuming, has since turned to makeup. “I came to makeup from a meditation and self-care standpoint,” she said. “It’s a huge stress relief.” She records makeup application videos and posts them to Facebook and YouTube, where they have been viewed thousands of times.

  Cosmetics and social justice may inhabit opposite realms, but the way Oluo describes how to properly apply eye shadow to “hooded eyes,” reflects, to some degree, how she approaches addressing systems of oppression. “I have to look at form differently, look at light differently, and navigate shadow and light. For me, it’s a problem to solve.”

• Bitch Media - https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/bitch-interview/ijeoma-oluo

  QUOTED: "I really wanted to set aside some of the roadblocks that society has put in place in that conversation. Sometimes, we think we’re bad at talking about race because there’s something wrong with us or there’s something wrong with the topic of race. But the truth is that society has deliberately placed these fallacies and roadblocks in these conversations to make them more difficult."
  "There’s a reason why when we think of racists, we only think about KKK men on horses who are burning crosses. That’s because real, genuine conversations about race change systems, and people are invested in those systems."
  "It’s important that people realize that they haven’t been given the dialogue [to talk about race.] It has been deliberately kept from them, so they don’t have a full understanding of what we’re talking about and how to approach it. I really wanted to update this conversation and take it out of the realm of Good Person vs. Bad Person. Nothing will teach you more about good people and bad people not really existing than taking a hard look at how race functions in society."

  WRITING FOR BLACK WOMEN
  IJEOMA OLUO IS STILL SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
  by Evette Dionne
  Published on January 18, 2018 at 12:39pm
  Ijeoma Oluo
  Ijeoma Oluo (Photo credit: Ijeoma Oluo)

  Ijeoma Oluo made me cry. I’m sure she didn’t mean to. It’s just rare to encounter a fellow Black woman writer who speaks truth to power and is explicitly committed to working in service of Black women. Oluo, a Seattle-based writer and speaker, has built her ever-ascending career on exploring how race, in particular, is misunderstood, and exploring the structures that exist to create this confusion. Whether she’s chiding media organizations for their cliché examinations of Trump supporters or tweeting a haunting list of activities Black people should avoid to keep from being gunned down by cops, Oluo’s distinctive perspective and clear voice has been a beacon of light for so many Black writers—myself included.

  With her debut book, So You Want To Talk About Race, Oluo continues to foster a cultural conversation about how to confront privilege and work toward dismantling white supremacy. I spoke with her about the importance of confronting racism, how she creates personal boundaries in her life, and, of course, her famous Rachel Dolezal profile.

  So You Want To Talk About Race is a guide for those who are newly invigorated and want to have conversations about racism and white supremacy. What prompted you to turn your thoughts about race into this specific book?

  My agent suggested it to me. I didn’t really want to write it, but my agent, who contacted me before anybody was really paying me any attention, recognized my unique gift for offering explanations about how race works. So she said, “You should write a guidebook that answers the questions you’re answering every day in your essays and the questions you get on social media.” I really didn’t want to do that. [Laughs.] Think about how much time you want to spend, as a Black woman, talking about race, and then dedicating a whole book to talking about race. It’s tough for me. My agent said I should think about it because it’s a really unique space for me and it could make a big difference.

  I thought about it for a while. In the meantime, I found myself continuing to answer similar questions over and over. I started asking people, What issues do you have when talking about race? And a surprising number of people of color reached out. That’s when I realized I could write this book, and maybe I wouldn’t have to [keep answering] those same questions. I could give people something they could hold in their hands. There’s a difference between reading an article in an online magazine and holding a book in your hand.

  Early in the book, you write that you reached a point where trying to make your voice quieter in meetings no longer worked, and you felt compelled to speak about race. Was there a specific incident that moved you from silence to action?

  I wouldn’t say that race was something I was always silent about. Part of my problem has always been that I don’t necessarily have the ability to not say anything. I got a degree in political science because I was always seeing patterns in the world and I wanted to speak about them. That was the struggle I always had. As a Black woman, I knew very early on that having a strong opinion at work would be viewed as overly aggressive. I always had to bend over backwards to let people know that I wasn’t aggressive; I was just excited and I had good ideas. That was really hard for me. There would be little things that happened at work around race, and I would set [them] aside to get through my day.

  Ijeoma Oluo and So You Want To Talk About Race
  From left to right: Ijeoma Oluo and So You Want To Talk About Race (Photo credit: Ijeoma Oluo)

  I found that it became even more difficult to address these race issues because it was expected that once I got a promotion I would be completely satisfied. I found myself alone. I was the only Black person in my department. Of course, there were things happening around the country, like the death of Trayvon Martin, which hit me intimately. I have a teenage son, and I just found myself in personal crisis. At the time, I was working [at a job] where I had to travel all the time, so I was completely away from my community and my family.

  My brother, sister, and I are incredibly close. My brother and I are 18 months apart, and he was on tour, going to areas of the country where he’d never been before. He was touring with a band that wasn’t his band; it was a popular, white band, and he was playing trumpet with them. So he was the only Black person in this group, and finding himself in areas he’d never been as a 6’6” Black man. [He’s] always thought of as a threat when he’s around white people who don’t know him just because of his size and his skin color. I was worrying about him, and I wasn’t able to reach anyone or talk to my community. I was devastated, of course, for Trayvon Martin, thinking about a future for my children, and worrying about my brother and so many people that I love.

  I would go online to see what my friends were saying. [But] my local community in Seattle, which is a predominantly white city, was just silent. I started to realize that this community I’d spent so much time building with my coworkers, who said they loved, wouldn’t stand up to say anything about something that meant so much to me, my life, and my family. I woke up in my mid-30s and realized that I really didn’t have a community. No one really had my back or my family’s back.

  How did you make the decision to move from having this internal dialogue to putting your work about race in the world? How did you find the courage and confidence to write publicly about race?

  It was really desperation, more than anything else. For a while, I felt like I was almost losing my mind, especially during that time when my brother was on tour. The only time he’d ever been handcuffed was when he was on tour, so I was very worried about him. He was devastated by what was happening around the country, and he wasn’t answering the phone because he was stressed on tour, and I was looking at my community, hoping and begging that someone would say something. I would go online and say, “I need someone say something about police brutality in this country. I really need someone to say something about Trayvon Martin.” There would just be silence.

  Ijeoma Oluo speaking out about police brutality on Twitter
  Ijeoma Oluo speaking out about police brutality on Twitter (Photo credit: Facebook/Ijeoma Oluo)

  I was really questioning reality and my place in the world. It was desperation at first, [and] I think that’s part of the reason my writing style is so personal. I started writing with people in mind: Okay, if I write about myself and my family, maybe these coworkers or these friends from high school will understand or will start asking our local politicians about these issues. I was traveling for work, so I couldn’t sit down face-to-face to have these conversations. I used the food blog I was writing at the time as a place to write in the hopes of reaching people. It was a really painful process of realizing that my community wasn’t going to stand up. I lost 85 to 90 percent of my friends—they didn’t want to have these conversations, and they fell away. But then there was another community that started stepping up. A few people who were feeling the same way would share my Facebook posts.

  Suddenly, Black women from Seattle were saying, “Thanks so much. This is exactly how I’m feeling.” It was really organic. Before I knew it, people were coming to me and asking my opinion about these things. I was getting the community I needed. Then publishers started asking if they could republish posts from my blog, and then people started asking me to write essays for their publications. I was taking a risk because I worked in a pretty conservative area in a very white-dominated field as a digital-marketing manager. The only advantage I had was [that I was] the only person there who knew how the internet worked. [Laughs.]

  It took a while before someone [at work] said, “I saw you on TV talking about race.” I thought, Oh, this is going to get really, really hairy. I had this double life where I was working in an environment that was, at times, pretty harmful, and in the evenings and on my lunch break, trying to write about the world and what was happening.

  Race is often a non-starter for conversations between people of color and white people, or it immediately devolves into a defensive conversation. How does your book work to create an effective framework for dialogue?

  I really wanted to set aside some of the roadblocks that society has put in place in that conversation. Sometimes, we think we’re bad at talking about race because there’s something wrong with us or there’s something wrong with the topic of race. But the truth is that society has deliberately placed these fallacies and roadblocks in these conversations to make them more difficult. There’s a reason why when we think of racists, we only think about KKK men on horses who are burning crosses. That’s because real, genuine conversations about race change systems, and people are invested in those systems.

  It’s important that people realize that they haven’t been given the dialogue [to talk about race.] It has been deliberately kept from them, so they don’t have a full understanding of what we’re talking about and how to approach it. I really wanted to update this conversation and take it out of the realm of Good Person vs. Bad Person. Nothing will teach you more about good people and bad people not really existing than taking a hard look at how race functions in society. When you look at it as a system, you realize that your intentions mean very little when it comes to whether or not you uphold racism. Getting people to set that aside and come to [those conversations] knowing that you’re talking about a system that’s harming people, and figuring out how you interact with that system, can help temper some of the emotions that arise. Whether or not someone is “good” or “bad” is beside the point.

  It’s important that we start making more agreements as to what goals we’re trying to reach when we talk. A lot of times we enter these conversations about race with two completely separate intentions: white people’s intention is to make sure that everybody knows that they’re not racist; and people of color just want white people to see how they may be harming them. If the intentions aren’t stated outright, the conversation is never going to go anywhere. After an entire lifetime of seeing where this communication breaks down, I really wanted to pull that apart, and let people see where the stumbling blocks are, what’s really being said, and—if you are generally interested in progressing these conversations—how to bring [them] back to the core issues.

  The moment the word “racist” is used, the conversation derails and becomes more about the accusation itself rather than racism as a system. How can white people ward off a gut response and really reflect on their relationship to the system?

  No matter what, when you’re made aware of a privilege that comes at the expense of others or that you may have been actively harming someone through actions and words, it’s very easy to feel really defensive. We want to think of ourselves as good people who don’t harm [others]. It’s this weird, aggressive output of being people who don’t want to hurt people. If you’re someone who doesn’t care, you won’t care about harm, so it’s weird that we because we care so much about people, we often end up doing more harm when we’re confronted with our wrongdoing.

  Ijeoma Oluo's Badass Feminist Coloring Book
  Ijeoma Oluo’s Badass Feminist Coloring Book (Photo credit: Kickstarter)

  It’s important to get used to confronting these things on your own. Build up strength for it. Then realize you’re still here. That’s part of the reason why there’s an exercise [in the book] about looking at your own privilege and doing it often. You have to get used to that hit, realize you’re still alive, and then try and find the lesson learned. Find the opportunities this is [offering] you in order to do good work. If you ignore the harm you’ve done, you’re still doing the harm. That’s not going to go away—you’re just placing the entire burden of that harm on the person you’re harming. Yes, it does suck to find out you’ve hurt someone, but then, you have the opportunity to lift some of that burden and make better choices. You have to decide what’s more important—feeling like you’re a good person while you’re doing harm, or knowing that you’re actually working to become a better person. When you’re engaging with race, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be

  Your Rachel Dolezal profile in The Stranger was the interview so many Black women, myself included, were waiting to read. Was that something you initially wanted to do? How did you approach that profile and rise to the challenge?

  Oh, I absolutely did not want to do that profile. [Laughs.] I was actually really surprised that I said yes. If any other person other than my editor, Charles Mudede, had asked me, I would’ve said no—and I don’t think it would’ve been the same essay if I hadn’t worked with him on it. Charles is an incomparably talented editor, and he’s a Black man. He’s someone who knows my work more instinctively than probably any other editor I’ve worked with. He approached me on the day that Rachel Dolezal changed her name. She happened to pick my sister’s name. I was already angry because my sister lives day-to-day in a country that’s been ravaged by colonialism, and to find that [Dolezal] stole my sister’s name made me livid. I just wanted her to go away. Charles called me that day when it hit him that he could make this happen. I was recording an appearance for a podcast at the time, and I saw the phone ringing and said to myself, “I bet that asshole is going to ask me to do something about Rachel Dolezal, and I am not going to do it. [Laughs.]”

  Charles left an amazing voicemail in his African-British accent saying he had a brilliant idea. I said no, and he called me the next day, and said that it would be brilliant and [that] I could put an end to this entire [Dolezal phenomenon.] thing. [So] I said okay, and I was really shocked that I did. I spent the next three weeks, as I was prepping to fly to Spokane, Washington, and spend the day with her, regretting the decision so much. I was having these dreams, like, What if I broke my leg? What if I fell and couldn’t go to Spokane? [Laughs.] It didn’t sound like my idea of a fun time, but I also feel very keenly about taking responsibility for what I’m adding to the national dialogue.

  So much of the dialogue around Dolezal had been so hurtful. I felt the same frustration as everyone else that the questions asked to her up until that point were incredibly weak, and that she was often describing what it means to be Black. I thought that writing anything at all would cause more harm by keeping her name in the spotlight and keeping her as the focus of Black female identity. And I worried that I would go to Spokane and speak to her and find nothing of value to add. I was also scared that even if I thought I was right, what if I was wrong? Every day, no matter what I write, I’m still writing for Black women more than anyone else, and I really take that seriously. I was surprised that [Dolezal] showed her ass so blatantly throughout that whole day. I was really surprised. [Laughs.] I think a lot of it was contempt: She didn’t think very highly of Black women and I don’t think she thought very highly of me or thought that I knew what I was talking about. There were a few times when I turned to the photographer to say, “You’re here, right? You’re seeing this. I’m not imagining that it’s happening the way it’s happening.” He’s like, “Yeah, I saw that.” I had assumed that she would put out a better effort out to seem genuine. You know what it’s like to live in a white supremacist society where you can really walk around with that much open disdain for Black women.

  I came back with 22 pages of transcript, and I had to turn that all into a 4,500-word piece. My first draft was 12,000 words, and Charles really helped me get to the core of what I wanted to say. I’m a Black woman who usually ends up writing for white editors, and I often have to fight to keep my pieces as hard and direct as they are, to push back and say, “No, it has to stay the way that I wrote it, or I’m going to have pull the piece.” [But] Charles was like, “You know what? I changed that word around because I thought you were trying to be too soft here. [Laughs.]” Being a Black man, he got where my frustration was. He fought for that piece, and he made sure my goals stayed true. In the end, I was focusing on showing, through [Dolezal’s] actions and her own words, how society had taken one woman with a lot of issues and a lot of anti-Blackness and used her [against] Black women. I’m glad I was able to show that. It’s a victory I share with Charles, and I’m glad he talked me into it. I never want to do it again, because it was the most stressful thing I’ve done in my career. [Laughs.]

  How do you create boundaries around what you share online and what you keep close to your chest?

  I’ve always had really firm boundaries. They’re just way out there compared to other people’s. A lot of my boundaries lie in, Would I be really upset if someone looked up something I said and quoted it to my kids? It’s not just about swear words or sex; I live in the real world, so I’m not worried about that. It’s talking about what’s happening in our personal life. How would that make me feel? If I’m not comfortable with the response, I wouldn’t put it out. I try to keep access to my being private. Have I processed what I’m saying? Am I comfortable with it being something people will talk about before I put it out there? Because I talk a lot about different things, including personal things, online. If I’m thinking “I would love to get something off my chest, but I’m embarrassed to or I’m afraid to,” then I have to post it because if I’m scared or embarrassed, there are many other people who are too.

  That also means there’s a whole other set of things that people don’t need to know. There’s a whole aspect of my life that people don’t realize they don’t know. People don’t know what my house is like. They don’t know much about my dating life, because there’s not much that I can put out that will help other people. I like to keep it close, and people don’t see me out a lot in public. I’m a homebody, and I become even more so the more I put online. I love having this space where my kids come home and I’m home because I’m always home. I know that my work does well when I’m putting personal stuff out there, so it really does help to have this private space just for me and my family.

• Elle - https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a15063942/ijeoma-oluo-women-and-rage-2018/

  Does This Year Make Me Look Angry?

  BY IJEOMA OLUO
  JAN 11, 2018
  GETTY IMAGESGETTY + DESIGN BY MIA FEITEL
  Much of the socio-political discussion of 2016 and 2017 was dedicated to white male rage. Why are white men so angry? What could we have done to make the most powerful socioeconomic group in this country so mad? Why are they punishing us all with Trump? But as a black woman, I’ve always seen white male rage. I’ve had to. It has dictated a lot of my life: my job prospects, my security and safety. And at the root of that kind of anger, I’ve always seen fear.

  Fear of my rage.

  Fear of the rage behind Black Lives Matter. The rage at seeing loved ones—babies, brothers, sisters—shot in the street like dogs by the state. The rage at 400 years of oppression and degradation.

  Fear of the rage behind the Women’s March. The rage of countless women and girls taking to the streets to voice their anger at the men (and yes, quite a few white women) in their lives who chose to elevate a white supremacist, a blatant misogynist, a bully, an abuser to our highest office. The anger and dismay that this society would think so little of women (and even less of people of color, trans people, disabled people, and immigrants) that the majority of white women voters would vote against their own interests to preserve—even further entrench—their place of subordination to white men, preferring to harm themselves and those with less power than them than dare to chance dismantling a hierarchy of oppression and land someplace unknown.

  Fear of the rage caused by centuries of abuse at the hands of men. Fear of the rage that would empower us to risk living without men, and the social and financial hardship that might follow, in order to be free from their need to build their worlds out of our bodies.

  YOU THINK WE MIGHT BE ANGRY? YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW ANGRY WE ARE.
  But as 2018 begins, national discussion has swung to the rage of women, as they stand up to share their stories of abuse and discrimination; as they band together to not only support each other, but to demand accountability from others. As rich and powerful men are seeing their lifelong careers crumble to dust at the feet of angry women, men around the country are struggling to find a way to contain and deflect this new female rage. Where will it end? How far can it reach? How many men can the rage of women destroy?

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  To the men scratching their heads in concern and confusion: The rage you see right now, the rage bringing down previously invulnerable men today, barely scratches the surface. You think we might be angry? You have no idea how angry we are.
  ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

  Our rage is not born of fear for our positions. It is not born of fear of losing the power we’ve always had, or dismay at having to share the status we’ve always known.

  I am a black woman. Every day of my life I was told to place my care in others. To place my dreams in others. Every day, I was told to redirect my frustrations at the limitations placed on my education, my career, and my social standing into the selfless love I was expected to show for my family and my community. All as we battled to make ends meet while making 67 cents on a white man’s dollar. While we cared for our children, who were being stolen by the school-to-prison pipeline. While we feared for the safety of our husbands and sons and brothers at every traffic stop, we stored our rage away. The rage of what we could have been. The rage at what we could have done. We placed it deep so that our hands could stay soft to hug our children, so that our words could be gentle to reassure our bosses, so that the smile strangers demanded of us on the street wouldn’t look like a sneer.

  And what do we have to show for it? What do we have for our struggle and sacrifice? We have our babies in prison. We have Trump staffing the White House with blatant white supremacists and incompetents. We have Jeff Sessions placed in charge of our already racist justice system. We have Betsy DeVos working to remove any chance at protecting our daughters from rape on college campuses. We are losing health insurance for our families and ourselves. We have careers derailed by decades of sexual harassment and discrimination—careers that, even if they had flourished, would have brought us far less pay and security than the white men whose unwanted comments and touches and leers we had to endure to get there.

  IF YOU WANTED TO AVOID OUR RAGE, PERHAPS YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE LEFT US WITH SO LITTLE TO LOSE.
  The rage of seeing all that we love, all that we’ve been able to hope for, all that we’ve been told to sacrifice for the “greater good” burned to the ground by white men in a toddler tantrum because for eight years the president didn’t look like them, and because the next president threatened to look even less like them—that is not a rage that consumes, that immolates. It’s a rage that fuels, that arms. We are starting to taste the collective power of our rage. We are starting to see the possibilities of a reckoning and revolution. And, as scary as it is, we have no choice but to risk it.

  If you wanted to avoid our rage, perhaps you shouldn’t have left us with so little to lose.

  If you think that what you are seeing now, after a few high-profile men have lost their jobs, is the peak of this fury, then hold tight. Because within me, and countless other women across this country, there is a lifetime of righteous rage so deep that the entire white supremacist patriarchy could drown in it. And if there is any justice in this world, it will.

  Ijeoma Oluo is the author of So You Want to Talk About Race, out in January 2018.

• The Humanist - https://thehumanist.com/features/profiles/humanist-profile-ijeoma-oluo

  Humanist Profile: Ijeoma Oluo
  BY JENNIFER BARDI • 5 FEBRUARY 2018
  355

  February is Black History Month in the United States and Canada. In commemoration we bring you a four-part series highlighting fascinating and influential black humanists. Following the lead of AHA Social Justice Coordinator Sincere Kirabo, who notes that Black History Month must go beyond the past and examine the present and future, we begin with writer, activist, and 2018 Feminist Humanist Award recipient Ijeoma Oluo.

  “The same confidence that many of my friends have in the belief that Jesus walks with them is the confidence that I have that nobody walks with me.”
  —Ijeoma Oluo, writing for The Guardian, October 24, 2015

  Writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo was born in 1980 to a white mother, Susan Jane Hawley from Wichita, Kansas, and a black Nigerian father, Samuel Oluo. When she was two years old her father, a political scientist, returned to his village in Nigeria. He was expected to return to the United States and kept in contact for a few months, but then communication stopped. Hawley raised Ijeoma and her younger brother Ahamefule in a suburb outside Seattle, Washington, working two jobs as a single mother.

  Describing her brother and herself as “black nerds raised by a white woman in a poor white neighborhood,” Oluo attended Lynnwood High School in Bothell, Washington. She later graduated from Western Washington University with a degree in political science. In a 2016 essay for Literary Hub in which she describes reconciling her Nigerian-American identity, Oluo writes:

  My first memory of needing to understand the way in which socio-political power works was when I came across a newspaper headline about the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in 1986, when I was five. This obsession was often viewed as morbid, or at the least, very boring, by the rest of my family. When I became a teenager and learned that I could make a career out of studying how political systems work, I was extremely excited. When I realized that my father had made a career out of the very same work, I felt like maybe I hadn’t just dropped out of the sky as a baby and landed in the wrong nest.

  Oluo entered a career in tech and digital marketing, married, had two boys, and later got divorced. It was after Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in 2012 that Oluo began her career as a professional writer. Her older son was the same age as Martin at the time he was killed, and Oluo was taken aback by how silent by some in her community were in the face of such injustice. She started publishing articles and personal essays at Jezebel, The Stranger, and the Guardian. Today she continues to write on feminism, racism, social justice, and gender and economic issues for those publications as well as TIME, New York magazine, Medium, and the Huffington Post. She also serves as editor-at-large for the online, female-run multimedia publication The Establishment.

  On her decision to work as a freelance writer and publish largely online, Olou said in a profile at Seattle Lesbian: “Especially as a Black woman it’s really important because you have to amass enough power in your own name to be able to say ‘no.’ Otherwise, your work is continuously shaped by other people.”

  Oluo was named by Seattle Magazine as one of the city’s Most Influential People of 2015 for getting “her message across with incisive wit, remarkable humor, and an appropriate magnitude of rage.” That same year she published The Badass Feminist Coloring Book. In April of 2017 The Stranger published her highly praised, in-depth interview with Rachel Dolezal (the white woman from Spokane who for years lied about being African American) in which Oluo challenged Dolezal to say how her racial fluidity was “anything more than a function of her privilege as a white person.” Oluo’s book, So You Want to Talk About Race, was published in January 2018, and in May she’ll accept the American Humanist Association’s Feminist Humanist Award at the annual conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  Speaking about her atheism in a 2015 opinion piece for the Guardian, Oluo acknowledged that she encounters just as much racism from atheists as anyone else and cautioned against generalizing about the religious.

  It’s easy to look at acts of terror committed in the names of different gods, debates about the role of women in various churches, unfamiliar and elaborate religious rules and rituals and think, look at these foolish religious folk…. Faith is not the enemy, and words in a book are not responsible for the atrocities we commit as human beings. We need to constantly examine and expose our nature as pack animals who are constantly trying to define the other in order to feel safe through all of the systems we build in society. Only then will we be as free from dogma as we atheists claim to be.

  Tags: Black History Month

• City Arts - http://www.cityartsmagazine.com/the-honest-truth-qa-with-ijeoma-oluo/

  QUOTED: "So many people reached out to me because they were struggling with talking about race. The recurring theme was that you can get deep in these discussions without really knowing what you are talking about, like affirmative action or police brutality. With this book, I created a safe space where I explain these topics and how to talk about them without being coddling. I’m hoping that people will use it as a toolbox with very concrete tips."

  Q&A
  The Honest Truth: Q&A with Ijeoma Oluo
  by MARGO VANSYNGHEL December 28, 2017

  Illustration by Kathryn Rathke
  Mystery novels. Maybe some terrible fiction. Ijeoma Oluo doesn’t have to think twice about what she’d write in an ideal world. But America is still racist, so the Seattle author keeps to her day job: Writing about race and social justice for national and international media, including The Establishment, where she serves as editor at large. With more than 100,000 fans on social media, Oluo is beloved (and sometimes attacked) for her astute assessments of current events, endearing stories about her kids’ antics and elaborate makeup tutorials. Her first book, So You Want to Talk About Race, comes out this month. Like Oluo, it’s straightforward, funny and smart. When we meet in a bustling coffee shop in North Seattle to talk about her work, she matter-of-factly says, 
“I didn’t want to write it at first.”

  What made you take the leap?
  I got tired of writing the same essay over and over again. So many people reached out to me because they were struggling with talking about race. The recurring theme was that you can get deep in these discussions without really knowing what you are talking about, like affirmative action or police brutality. With this book, I created a safe space where I explain these topics and how to talk about them without being coddling. I’m hoping that people will use it as a toolbox with very concrete tips that they can go back to.

  You combine advice with statistics, as well as very personal experiences, something you also do on your Facebook page with more than 50,000 followers. How do you handle the fact that so many people feel like they know you?
  This sort of work and the attention it requires, even if it’s all online, is draining. The tough part is when people have personal expectations about who you are as a person. Suddenly what you write becomes fodder for people’s personal stuff. It can feel exploitative. That is of course part of writing online: A novelist won’t get that as much. I’m sure people are not mailing Jonathan Franzen that many letters.

  It’s probably not filled with the same sexist and racist garbage.
  Exactly. I think it’s hard for people to understand it’s never been my intention to garner any kind of following, I just want people to read my work. You can go back to my page five years in time and you’ll see the same commentary. I’ve never had the ability to know how to not say something. I don’t know how to be a different person than I’ve always been. I don’t know how to be the person who splits in two.

  What are some things you do to create your private bubble?
  Putting on copious amounts of makeup. I can’t think about writing while I’m doing it. Same goes for audiobooks: I listen to tons of British murder mysteries. My kids hate it! They mock me all the time. I consider myself lucky as a 
single mom with two kids. I’m not a race-car driver, so what I do for work or how many followers I have means nothing to them. That helps.

  From harassment to death threats, you’ve seen the worst of unfiltered humanity online. Do you still believe in the good in people?
  I believe in people’s potential. We like to think in good versus evil, but nothing will prove more that this dichotomy doesn’t exist than writing about racism in America. So much of this is systems and circumstances. Who you are as a person is irrelevant to the role you play in the system. You can be a really horrible person, but if you don’t participate in the system of white supremacy, you’re benefiting people far more than someone who donates to charity every week but votes for stop-and-frisk. Intention means little.

  Are you hopeful for the future?
  It’s easy to get despondent when you look back at 400 years of oppression. But you can be upset and at the same time marvel at the fact that there’s a place that we’ll get to that we haven’t even imagined yet. That keeps me going. We have a huge burden to overcome, and the process will be heartbreaking and devastating. But it’ll be so much more authentic than if we act like things are better than they are. Even if it means we’ll only get a little part of the way there, it’s still a story with a lot of hope. Every step is still a victory.

  So You Want to Talk About Race (Seal Press) comes out Jan. 16.

QUOTED: "feisty"
"a clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation."

Print Marked Items
Oluo, Ijeoma: SO YOU WANT TO TALK
ABOUT RACE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Oluo, Ijeoma SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE Seal Press (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 1, 16 ISBN:
978-1-58005-677-9
Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism.
In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes
from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a "white supremacist
country." The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as "one of
the most defining forces" in her life. Throughout the book, Oluo responds to questions that she has often
been asked, and others that she wishes were asked, about racism "in our workplace, our government, our
homes, and ourselves." "Is it really about race?" she is asked by whites who insist that class is a greater
source of oppression. "Is police brutality really about race?" "What is cultural appropriation?" and "What is
the model minority myth?" Her sharp, no-nonsense answers include talking points for both blacks and
whites. She explains, for example, "when somebody asks you to 'check your privilege' they are asking you
to pause and consider how the advantages you've had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions,
and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles
others are facing." She unpacks the complicated term "intersectionality": the idea that social justice must
consider "a myriad of identities--our gender, class, race, sexuality, and so much more--that inform our
experiences in life." She asks whites to realize that when people of color talk about systemic racism, "they
are opening up all of that pain and fear and anger to you" and are asking that they be heard. After devoting
most of the book to talking, Oluo finishes with a chapter on action and its urgency. Action includes pressing
for reform in schools, unions, and local governments; boycotting businesses that exploit people of color;
contributing money to social justice organizations; and, most of all, voting for candidates who make
"diversity, inclusion and racial justice a priority."
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Oluo, Ijeoma: SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028617/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=02f6accb. Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512028617

QUOTED: "She's insightful and [trenchant] but not preachy, and her advice is valid."

So You Want to Talk About Race
Publishers Weekly.
264.46 (Nov. 13, 2017): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
So You Want to Talk About Race
Ijeoma Oluo. Seal, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-58005-677-9
Oluo, an editor at large at the Establishment, assesses the racial landscape of contemporary America in
thoughtful essays geared toward facilitating difficult conversations about race. Drawing on her perspective
as a black woman raised by a white mother, she shows how race is so interwoven into America's social,
political, and economic systems that it is hard for most people, even Oluo's well-intentioned mother, to see
when they are being oblivious to racism. Oluo gives readers general advice for better dialogue, such as not
getting defensive, stating their intentions, and staying on topic. She addresses a range of tough issues--police
brutality, the n word, affirmative action, microaggressions--and offers ways to discuss them while
acknowledging that they're a problem. For example, Oluo writes that the common phrase "check your
privilege" is an ineffective weapon for winning an argument, as few people really understand the concept of
privilege, which is integral to many of the issues of race in America. She concludes by urging people of all
colors to fear unexamined racism, instead of fearing the person "who bring[s] that oppression to light." She's
insightful and trenchanc but not preachy, and her advice is valid. For some it may be eye-opening. It's a
topical book in a time when racial tensions are on the rise. (Jan.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"So You Want to Talk About Race." Publishers Weekly, 13 Nov. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515326038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2c45bdd9.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515326038

QUOTED: "a timely and engaging book that offers an entry point and a hopeful approach."

Celebrate black women all yearlong with
these ten noteworthy books: Voices To Be
Heard
Library Journal.
142.20 (Dec. 1, 2017): p111+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing. 37 Ink: Atria. Jan.
2018. 272p. ed. by Stephanie Stokes Oliver. ISBN 9781501154287. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501154300.
COMM
This collection brings together excerpts, essays, and interviews by 25 black authors, including legends in the
canon and newer writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Roxane Gay, Colson
Whitehead, and Marlon James. Written between 1845 and 2017, the works range from memoirs on the
power of reading during slavery and emancipation to narratives of how certain books and authors shaped
these writers' lives and straightforward advice on composition; all address the centrality of literacy to black
liberation, both personally and politically. Many of these pieces, such as those by Maya Angelou, Frederick
Douglass, and Malcolm X, will be familiar to those steeped in black history and literature. In an effort to be
a tight and fast-moving read, some samples feel disjointed excerpted from their original books, and the very
brief introductions to each piece are at times lacking in necessary historical context. But taken as a whole,
this survey of what it means to be a black reader and writer is an important and long overdue project.
VERDICT An essential collection for readers and students of black history and literature.--Kate Stewart,
Arizona Historical Soc, Tucson
* Cooper, Brittney. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. St. Martin's. Feb. 2018.
288p. ISBN 9781250112576. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9781250112897. MEMOIR
American history and pop culture are put under a keen lens in this astute memoir. Cooper, cofounder of the
Crunk Feminist Collective, traces her relationship with the concept of feminism, from a young skeptic to an
outspoken advocate. This journey is not easy; the scholar documents her rural Louisiana upbringing in
which the vibrancy of black womanhood at home jockeyed with the experiences of racism, sexism, and
classism in school, with friends, and at church; the misogynist leanings of mainstream Christianity are a
steady undercurrent through her grapplings with feminism. Deftly blending the conversational tone of a
memoir with pointed critique, Cooper offers a comprehensive and accessible analysis of topics from the
Bible to pop music to U.S. politics past and present. Searing insights regarding toxic neoliberal connotations
of "empowerment" and the complicity of white feminism in oppression fall alongside vulnerable discussions
of sexuality, growing up around domestic abuse, and increasing anxiety over black motherhood.
Throughout, rage serves as a motif of black women; though often ignored, dismissed, or violently quelled,
rage in its nuanced forms can act as a means of survival and a basis for change. VERDICT An ambitious,
electrifying memoir. Recommended for readers seeking contemporary social commentary that's unrelenting
yet humorous.--Ashleigh Williams, School Library Journal
* Eddo-Lodge, Reni. Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Bloomsbury Circus. Nov.
2017. 272p. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781408870556. $27; ebk. ISBN 9781408870570. soc sci
Eddo-Loge's powerful debut is based on a 2014 blog post of the same title about the frustrations of talking
about race and racism. The post went viral and sparked deeper conversations further detailed in this book.
Using research, personal experience, and firsthand interviews, the author details what it means to be black in
Britain, especially in a theoretical postracial society. She clearly outlines the history of oppression in her
country by examining systemic racism, white privilege, feminism, immigration, race and class, social
justice, and more. Of note is the review of intersectionality in feminism and the difficulties of understanding
feminism without considering class and race as part of the struggle. This informative work challenges
readers to study the patterns of racism and how it has unwittingly upheld societies. Although frustrated with
having frequent discussions about race, Eddo-Loge comes to terms with the necessity of continuing the
conversation and the implications of remaining silent. VERDICT A provocative read for anyone interested
in race, politics, social history, and the lives of people of color; a must-read that expertly reflects the
challenges of addressing structural racism.--Tiffeni Fontno, Boston Coll.
Haddish, Tiffany. The Last Black Unicorn. Gallery: S. & S.Dec. 2017.288p. ISBN 9781501181825. $26;
ebk. ISBN 9781501181849. MEMOIR
Comedian Haddish was not born to a life of laughs. After an accident her stepfather later confessed to
staging, her mother experienced severe brain damage and wild mood swings. Placed in the foster care
system as a teen, and struggling to read at a basic level in ninth grade, Haddish found that humor and jokes
helped her endure. When offered a choice between the Laugh Factory comedy camp or counseling to help
recover from issues within the foster system, she chose the former and found her calling. In her first book,
Haddish recounts her early life straight through to her powerhouse success both on the comedy circuit and
in Hollywood with the 2017 film Girls Trip. She spares nothing in this no-holds-barred account, from
laughable accounts of failed pimps for boyfriends and taking Will and Jada Pinkett Smith on a swamp tour
to graphic descriptions of a memorable one-weekend stand to unfiltered honesty on her struggle as a
domestic abuse survivor. With an informal and conversational style, Haddish directly addresses readers,
dares to be herself, and says, "You can't fake funny." VERDICT A bawdy, laugh-out-loud tell-all with a
liberal dose of heart.--Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
*How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket. Dec. 2017. 200p. ed.
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. ISBN 9781608468553. pap. $15.95; ebk. ISBN 9781608468683. soc sci
Published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) Statement,
Taylor {From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation) interviews five prominent black feminist leaders
about the impacts this radical movement has had on American society from the time of the group's
formation in the 1970s to the present day. Taylor conducts lively interviews with founding members of the
CRC such as Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier as well as Alicia Garza, cofounder of the
Black Lives Matters movement. With closing statements from historian and longtime activist Barbara
Ransby, this powerful examination of the origins of radical black feminism emphasizes the need of bringing
the CRC's forward-thinking vision to the present day. While modern feminism has just begun to include
discussions of intersectionality in its framework, the women of the Combahee River Collective were already
discussing this more than 40 years ago. Clearly, the collective has influenced modern culture even when it
hasn't been given credit for doing so. Includes a beneficial index. VERDICT An essential book for any
feminist library.--Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY
Jerkins, Morgan. This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in
(White) America. HarperCollins. Jan. 2018.272p. notes. ISBN 9780062666154. pap. $15.99; ebk. ISBN
9780062666161. soc sci
Jerkins provides a critical view of American culture, similar to Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer
Talking to White People About Race, which is about the intersection of race and feminism in British culture.
Here, the pop culture essayist examines her life as a feminist woman of color while sharing insight on her
faith as it relates to contemporary culture. Weaving personal narratives with historical, social, and cultural
anecdotes, Jerkins discusses such topics as body image, race identification, fitting in, dating, sexuality, faith,
disability, and the Black Girl Magic movement. Each chapter provides insightful, personal, and frank
analysis of how several identities can and do overlap with one another; especially being a black women of
faith in white America. Jerkins provides awareness into her own complexities--college-educated, black,
female, Millennial, feminist--in an attempt to figure out where she fits in and in an effort to uncover the
intricacies of her multilayered identity. VERDICT For those interested in a younger perspective on black
studies and feminism.--Tiffeni Fontno, Boston Coll.
* Khan-Cullors, Patrisse & Asha Bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.
St. Martin's. Jan. 2018.272p. ISBN 9781250171085. $24.99; ebk. ISBN 9781250171092. MEMOIR
A foreword by Angela Davis opens this powerful memoir by Khan-Cullors, one of the three founding
women of the Black Lives Matter movement. Part 1 describes her childhood in L.A. during the height of the
late 1980s/early 1990s war on drugs, when police rained constant surveillance and harassment upon her
poor, predominantly black neighborhood. Khan-Cullors describes, in wrenching detail, the severe
exacerbation of her brother Monte's schizoaffective disorder through multiple violent arrests and torturous
incarceration, alongside the effects of criminalization upon friends, father figures, and her younger self. Part
2 centers the galvanization of her community organizing experience into Black Lives Matter, a Facebook
comment-turned-collective action sparked by the murder of Trayvon Martin and fanned by subsequent acts
of police brutality. Khan-Cullors's prose is dynamic; a rhythmic call to action that deftly illustrates the
impact of living in a place that systematically demeans black personhood through neglect and aggressively
racist state policy. The text also serves as an informal resource guide, with notable activists and artists cited
in chapter headings and referenced throughout. VERDICT This searing, timely look into a contemporary
movement from one of its crucial leading voices belongs in all collections.--Ashleigh Williams, School
Library Journal
Lewis, Jenifer. The Mother of Black Hollywood. Amistad: HarperCollins. Nov. 2017. 336p. ISBN
9780062410405. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062410429. MEMOIR
Currently known for her role as matriarch Ruby Johnson on the hit TV show Blackish, Lewis has risen from
modest beginnings in small town Missouri to become a self-described "entertainer's entertainer." Lewis
lived for the high of performing on stage in cabaret productions and the imminent applause afterward.
Finding that her moods would often become dangerously low upon returning home, she sought to prolong
the pleasure by taking men home with her. This frank debut charts her upward career trajectory on
Broadway, as a back-up singer for Bette Midler, and in films such as The Preacher's Wife, while also
divulging details about her struggles with bipolar disorder and sex addiction. After a long search during her
30s to find a psychologist she trusted, Lewis realized she had the support and direction to work through
deeply ingrained pain from her childhood. This newfound confidence led to further success, often playing
the role of mother, as evidenced by the title of this book. VERDICT An insightful memoir of Lewis's road to
success and eventual path to self-healing, told with honesty and hubris that will appeal to her wide fan base.-
-Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
*Oluo, Ijeoma. So You Want To Talk About Race. Seal. Jan. 2018. 256p. notes. ISBN 9781580056779. $27;
ebk. ISBN 9781580056786. socsci
In her first book, writer and activist Oluo offers direct advice on how to have a conversation about race. She
analyzes topics that may lead to contentious conversations, such as cultural appropriation, affirmative
action, police brutality, the N-word, microaggressions, and the model minority myth. In doing so, Oluo
provides background information on each topic and talking points to allow for having more constructive
conversations. With a clever approach that uses anecdotes, facts, and a little humor, the author challenges all
readers to assess their own beliefs and perceptions while clearly looking at polarizing issues. She
encourages us to overcome the idea of debating someone else without the ability to listen to other
perspectives. Most relevant is a sobering and enlightening chapter on checking and recognizing one's
privilege. VERDICT A timely and engaging book that offers an entry point and a hopeful approach toward
more productive dialog around tough topics. Highly recommended for those interested in race, ethnicity, and
social commentary, and anyone wishing to have more insightful conversations.--Tiffeni Fontno, Boston
Coll.
*Union, Gabrielle. We're Going To Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True. Dey
Street: HarperCollins. Oct. 2017. 272p. ISBN 9780062693983. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062694003.
MEMOIR
Union's raw and unflinching portrayal makes you feel like you're getting to know a new friend, or
reacquainting yourself with an old one. Each essay brings readers closer into the fold and forces us to
question our own truths. We learn about Union's struggle to lead a "double life"--retreating from her
blackness to fit in at a mostly white school in California while trying to embrace it among skeptical black
friends in Omaha, her internal mean-derings over hair and makeup that carry specific cultural weight
(Natural hair or weave? Narrow the nose, or...?), and the unequal expectations carried by people of color as
they navigate professions that make them an "other." Union also details her experience as a rape survivor
and includes these telling lines: "I am grateful I was raped in an affluent neighborhood with an underworked
police department (and) overly trained doctors and nurses. The fact that one can be grateful for such things
is... ridiculous." Considering that the narrative of sexual violence in the United States largely focuses on
white women, Union's voice as a survivor holds unique importance and poignancy. That said, she is much
more than this single experience, as her book boldly shows. VERDICT Union invites readers into her world
with honesty, grit, and grace. A much-needed addition to the endless catalog of celebrity memoirs.--Erin
Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Celebrate black women all yearlong with these ten noteworthy books: Voices To Be Heard." Library
Journal, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 111+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518284650/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=364b749f.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518284650

"Oluo, Ijeoma: SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028617/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Mar. 2018. "So You Want to Talk About Race." Publishers Weekly, 13 Nov. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515326038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Mar. 2018. "Celebrate black women all yearlong with these ten noteworthy books: Voices To Be Heard." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 111+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518284650/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.

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