Self-described “writer, speaker and internet yeller” Ijeoma Oluo worked for many years in the tech industry, where she was often the only black person in the room. She wrote So You Want to Talk About Race as a handbook for people who want to have productive conversations about race in the United States. So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) was Oluo’s first book, followed in 2020 by Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.
A skilled public speaker, Oluo has appeared on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and The Opposition With Jordan Klepper. She’s also given a number of talks, including a 2018 presentation at Google (which has been coming to terms with its own race problem) and a conversation with Roxane Gay in which they both talk about their work.
As Oluo notes, one of the main problems in talking about race is that people are afraid to do it. People of color are nervous about having their experiences minimized or dismissed. They’re wary of knee-jerk defensiveness and exhausted from dredging up their trauma to explain the same things over and over again. White people are often afraid of hurting or offending their conversation partner. They’re fearful of being called racist, and they’re unaccustomed to the feelings of discomfort that arise when they confront the ways in which their own privilege comes at the expense of others.
It’s good to be cautious when approaching this topic, but if we avoid talking about race entirely, we won’t get anywhere. If we fail to talk about the system by which millions of people are disenfranchised, hurt, locked up, and even killed every day, we’re complicit in that system. (Shortform note: Derald Wing Sue refers to this as “the conspiracy of silence.”)
Words can bring unconscious patterns out of the dark so that we can examine them, understand them, and disentangle them. With clearer definitions, we can be more precise in describing the problems, making it easier to find solutions.
Difficult Conversations: Why They’re Difficult
As Oluo notes, conversations about race are almost always difficult. In Difficult Conversations, Douglas Stone suggests that this is because any difficult conversation contains three main sub-conversations, more than one of which is usually active at any given time.
The What Happened Conversation, in which we’re focused on trying to work out who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s the victim, and whose fault the problem is.
The Feelings Conversation, in which we either over-focus on our own feelings or manage them badly.
The Identity Conversation, in which protecting our own self-image as competent, moral, and worthy of love becomes our top priority.
It can be challenging to juggle all three sub-conversations at once.
The first thing we need to do is get our terms straight. If we don’t do that, we risk talking at cross purposes and getting nowhere.
Is race even real? No. As Oluo notes, the concept of race has no scientific basis. (Shortform note: As discussed in this Scientific American article, genes can be used in a limited way to identify people’s place of geographical origins, but they don’t map well onto the physical characteristics we associate with race.)
But race is very much a social reality, in that our ideas about race have real social effects, and these social effects translate into material differences in how people in certain groups are allowed to live their lives. Even though race is a fiction, it’s a fiction that shapes many, many people’s realities. And it won’t magically go away if you suddenly decide you don’t believe in it.
(Shortform note: Consider national borders. They’re based on human invention, too—the land on one side of a border isn’t inherently different to the land on the other side. But, even so, the country you happen to be born in has a significant impact on how your life plays out. In this way, an imaginary line dictates the physical realities of our lives.)
When people talk about racism, they’re usually drawing on one of two definitions:
1. Racism is bias against a person or group based on their race.
2. Racism is bias against a person or group based on their race, in the context of power structures that support this bias.
(Shortform note: The Merriam-Webster dictionary makes the same distinction: It presents two definitions of the word “racism,” the first describing individual prejudices and the second describing systemic social oppression.)
If you’re working from the first definition, it makes sense to talk about “reverse racism” and prejudice against whites and to see affirmative action as unfair. If you’re working from the second definition, you understand that “reverse racism” can’t rationally exist and that affirmative action is designed to redress a historical imbalance. If you want to truly engage with issues of race and spark real progress, Oluo recommends that you use the second definition.
(Shortform note: Ibram X. Kendi, activist and author of How to Be an Antiracist, disagrees with the idea that reverse racism doesn’t exist. He argues that certain ideas expounded by black writers—such as the theory that whites were created by an evil black scientist or that whiteness comes from recessive genes—are definitely classifiable as racist.)
If something is systemic, it’s built into the underlying structure of a system. That system is White Supremacy, and it steeps us in racist messaging all our lives.
In our individualist culture, we don’t like to think about ourselves as part of a system. We like to think that everyone has complete independence. But these individualist tendencies obscure our view of the big picture. Individualist assumptions trick us into thinking that racist cops are just “bad apples” and that every black man who goes to prison deserves it. We need to battle these tendencies and focus on the patterns, even—especially—if this means taking a good hard look at ourselves. (Shortform note: In White Fragility, author Robin DiAngelo argues that the “myth of individualism” serves to protect the self-concept of most white people, and that black people experience the flip side of it: If they aren’t successful, it must be because as individuals they’re somehow less deserving.)
The good news is that seeing racism as a system gives us more entrance points if we want to dismantle it. (Shortform note: Vanderbilt University Professor Tim Vogel offers ten suggestions for people wondering where to start in dismantling the system, including deliberately opening your social networks to more diversity and cultivating concern and respect in the way you engage with people of color.)
Privilege is a situation in which one person or group has advantages that another doesn’t. These advantages are unfairly distributed to begin with. The White Supremacist system is built on privilege. (Shortform note: Scholar Peggy McIntosh likens this to an “invisible knapsack” of useful tools that privileged people carry through life.)
Privilege and disadvantage are two sides of the same coin. We’re all privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. When we look at how privileges and disadvantages combine (and in particular the effects of being in two or more disadvantaged categories, such as female and black), this is called intersectionality. The term “intersectionality” was first used by race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. (Shortform note: Crenshaw first used the term in this academic article about how the legal system treats women of color. The term has since migrated from its original legal context into the social sciences more broadly, and from there into mainstream discourse.)
The model minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans are a “model” minority group: an example that all other racial and ethnic minority groups should aspire to. Asian Americans are stereotyped as hardworking, talented in math and science, strict parents, socially docile, and conformist.
As Oluo and other authors have noted, even though this myth seems positive, it does damage. For instance, it fails to capture the pervasive challenges that Asian Americans experience in the workplace: Their careers often start promisingly but then stagnate as the white people around them are promoted to leadership positions. (Shortform note: Author Jane Hyun calls this the “bamboo ceiling.”) Very few political representatives are Asian American. (Shortform note: In 2021, there were two senators and 15 representatives, alongside the historic election of half-black, half-Indian American Kamala Harris as vice president.)
Furthermore, the stereotype of submissiveness means that Asian American women are twice as likely as the national average to suffer physical or sexual abuse at the hands of their partners. (Shortform note: Intimate partner violence toward Asian Americans increased even further during the Covid-19 pandemic.)
To more deeply understand the mechanisms behind racism, we need to connect the dots—between the past and the present, between the present and the future, and between the small and the systemic.
As Oluo explains, we can trace the White Supremacist system back to its origins in slavery and genocide. The country’s recorded history begins with the theft of Native American land and the murder of the original inhabitants. Then, black bodies were brought to the United States to be possessed and exploited. To rationalize the theft, mass murder, and social and economic subjugation, there needed to be a widely held belief that people of color were subhuman.
(Shortform note: This view that black people are subhuman, rooted in a long history of scientific racism, hasn’t gone away. For example, a letter entitled “Are Negroes Closer to Apes Than to Humans?”, sent in 2012 to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, argues that black people should be classified as a different species.)
The economic disadvantage of today is built on the economic exploitation of the past. Today, this pattern persists in the form of serious disparities in the economic opportunities available to black and white Americans. The net worth of an average white American, for example, is nine times more than that of an average black American. (Shortform note: The net worth gap has increased, rather than decreased, over time.)
For different historical reasons, Hispanic Americans are also economically disadvantaged today. Their net worth is on average ten times less than that of white Americans, and Hispanic men make 69 cents for every white man’s dollar and Hispanic women 58 cents. (Shortform note: In practice, this means that Hispanic women need to work for over 20 months to bring home the same amount of money that white men make in 12 months.)
Oluo also traces the systemic racism within today’s police forces back to the racist origins of our law enforcement agencies. Contemporary US police forces began as slave patrols and Night Watches. Right from the start, their roles were to control Native American and black populations and hunt escaped slaves, and officers participated in Ku Klux Klan activities while off duty. Though the vast majority of police officers today no longer consciously see their job as disciplining and controlling populations of color, old racist structures still show through as a pattern of attitudes and practices toward people of color. (Shortform note: As late as the early 1990s, Californian police officers used the acronym NHI (“No Humans Involved”) to talk about cases relating to black men.)
As Oluo demonstrates, in the present day, black people are more likely to be subject to unnecessary and humiliating disciplinary measures by police, and one in every three black men and one in every six Latino men go to jail at least once in their lives. (Shortform note: The figure for whites is one in 23.)
Blacks and Native Americans are three and a half to four times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Police even perceive children playing with toy guns as threatening: Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by Cleveland police in 2014 for holding a toy gun, and when his 14-year-old sister ran over to help him, police tackled her and put her in handcuffs. A police chief later described the boy as “menacing.” (Shortform note: Police officers have been shown to judge black children as less innocent and more culpable for their actions than white children, also overestimating the ages of black children aged ten to 17 by approximately three years.)
We also need to understand history if we’re to understand the power that some words have to do damage. For example, you may see black people using the word “nigger” amongst themselves and wonder why you aren’t allowed to use it too. The reason is that “nigger” is weighed down by centuries of slavery, dehumanization, oppression, abuse, and brutality. Every time a white person uses it, they invoke all of that history, whether they mean to or not.
A College-Level Course on the N-Word
Black university professor Neal Lester developed a whole college-level class at Arizona State University centered around the N-word. Lester notes that the point of having open discussions around the use of the N-word is not to forbid the word or make it taboo without explaining why. Instead, he says it’s to make us more sensitive and thoughtful about our language use.
We also need to connect the dots between the present and the future. As Oluo shows, today’s kids of color are still experiencing disadvantages and opportunity gaps that will follow them for the rest of their lives.
As well as being born into under-resourced families in areas with underfunded schools, children of color endure a number of systemic problems after they enter school. Many of these are related to discipline, overlapping with the systemic prejudices within law enforcement that we saw above. Preschool and elementary school teachers are more likely to look for aggressive behavior in black children, perceive black children as angrier, and suspend or expel black children for more trivial infractions than white children. (Shortform note: This study tracked the eye gazes of teachers who had been told to look for problem behaviors in a video clip of a mixed-race, mixed-gender play group. The teachers gazed longer at black boys. In reality there were no problem behaviors in the video clip.)
Teachers also pathologize children of color at higher rates, often diagnosing them with learning disabilities when they’re simply hard to discipline. (Shortform note: This claim is contested, with some findings indicating that when you control for socioeconomic status and test scores, black children are in fact less likely to be identified as needing special education.)
Around eighteen percent of the school population is black, but 31 percent of suspended students and 40 percent of expelled students are black. Black students are suspended at more than three times the rate of white students, and Native American students are more than twice as likely as white students to be suspended.
The Effect of Suspensions and Expulsions as Punishment
Punishing children (of any race) by denying them education has long-lasting effects. Suspensions have marked effects on school performance, with suspended students often having to repeat the school year. Many of them decide to drop out of school completely instead, which brings further risk.
This is the start of an effect dubbed the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Increasingly strict (and broadly interpreted) weapons policies and a rising police presence in schools have led to the outsourcing of normal school-based disciplinary responsibilities to formal law enforcement. Students who are arrested at school are more likely to be arrested again as adults.
Criminalizing Children of Color at School
Black parents’ fear for their children is completely rational: There are numerous cases of teachers being quick to involve the police. One school principal called the police on a black boy who was playing with a fluorescent green and orange toy gun. Another 12-year-old boy was suspended and formally written up for playing with a toy gun during a virtual class. The police also came to his house, terrifying him.
Even science projects aren’t immune. In 2013, black 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention center for fingerprinting after bringing a homemade volcano to school. In 2015, Muslim 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was handcuffed and arrested for bringing in his homemade clock that teachers assumed was a bomb.
As we saw earlier, racism is systemic: Blatant acts of racist aggression spring from the same underlying belief system as more subtle or unintentional ones. Let’s look at that more closely.
Microaggressions are subtle acts of psychological violence against a person because they’re a member of a marginalized group. These can be verbal (racist jokes, comments, insults, backhanded compliments, minimizations) or nonverbal (hair touching, purse clutching, following someone around a store, airport security checks, taxis that don’t stop). They can be expressed as compliments (“Wow, your English is perfect!”) or as questions backed by genuine curiosity (“So where are you from?”). (Shortform note: As linguist Robin Lakoff notes, this makes these comments particularly difficult to parse: The surface layer seems to be positive, but the underlying assumption is negative.)
Microaggressive actions may seem innocuous. But they’re all manifestations of deeply rooted belief systems that have genuinely damaging effects. For example, touching a black woman’s hair without their permission is not only rude, it also invokes the legacy of slavery: your right to touch and manipulate her body however you want, regardless of her wishes. Small actions can be imbued with symbolic meaning, and the gradual accrual of microaggressions over a long period has serious mental health impacts. (Shortform note: Microaggressions have been shown to affect the mental and physical health of people of color, including Latino Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.)
Cultural appropriation is another example of how seemingly small actions can have powerful symbolic effects. This occurs when members of a dominant culture adopt selected aspects of another culture without respect, background knowledge, or proper attribution.
Oluo gives the example of someone wearing a Native American war bonnet to a music festival. By doing this, he’s stripping it of its traditional symbolic meaning and using it for ego gratification. (Shortform note: Music festivals are slowly beginning to ban war bonnets after extended campaigns from Native American scholars and activists. Cherokee nation scholar Adrienne Keene has published a series of blog posts about this issue, arguing that war bonnet trends stereotype, homogenize, and disrespect indigenous cultures. Keene notes in an interview for this Guardian article that many white people believe that they’re “respecting” or “honoring” Native American culture in these situations. She suggests this cartoon as a pithy summary of that argument.)
If something has been practiced for years in a minority community but only achieves legitimacy when it’s covered in a veneer of whiteness, that’s cultural appropriation. If a white person can gain kudos for doing something that people of color are still being discriminated against for doing, that’s cultural appropriation. (Shortform note: in a short 2015 video titled “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows,” actor Amandla Stenberg discusses the phenomenon of white people wearing black hairstyles such as cornrows and asks: “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture?”)
Oluo weaves advice for talking about race throughout the book. We’ve pulled out and elaborated on the main threads to create a practical how-to guide for having these conversations. Here are the practical nuts and bolts.
Before the conversation starts, do your homework. If you’re going to be talking about economic disadvantage, learn some facts. Remember that the other person isn’t your own personal racial encyclopedia, and respect their time.
Check your privilege. Being aware of your privilege in the area you’re going to talk about will help you to avoid ignorant statements and microaggressions.
Seek out different perspectives on the issue. Keep intersectionality in mind. If you’ve already talked to an Asian American man, seek out someone with a different background.
Check that the person wants to talk. Conversations about race are exhausting and emotionally risky for people of color. If the other person doesn’t want to talk, or doesn’t want to talk right now, respect that. Do everything you can to make the other person feel comfortable.
1) Clarify and share your intentions. This will help the other person decide whether they want to participate. It’ll also keep you focused on the goal of the conversation, decreasing the chance you’ll get distracted.
2) Listen more than you talk. Monitor how often you’re saying “I” and “me.” Decenter your own perspective and seek to broaden it, not explain it.
3) Don’t tone police. Tone policing is shifting the topic of conversation from what’s being said to the way it’s being said. Examples of tone policing are statements like “Well, nobody will listen to you if you use such inflammatory language,” or “Calm down,” or “Anger won’t get us anywhere.” Tone policing can feel like you’re just keeping the conversation on an even keel, when in fact you’re claiming the right to tell someone how to feel about their oppression.
4) Keep your priorities straight. If something you say or do gets called racist, don’t indulge in knee-jerk defensiveness. It’s your behavior or your words that are being criticized, not your very soul. Remember that enduring a lifetime of racism is worse than being called racist.
5) Be willing to feel uncomfortable. If you’re doing the conversation right, it’ll make you feel upset. It may make you feel ashamed, guilty, angry, or shocked. Stay with these feelings and see where they lead you.
6) If you make a mistake, apologize. Try to figure out what went wrong so you don’t do it again. Know when to leave it alone—if the person doesn’t want to engage again, that’s their choice. But don’t castigate yourself for all eternity. Reflect, learn from the mistake, and try again with someone else.
Approaching Conversations With the Right Mindset
If you’re a white person entering these conversations, at some point you’ll probably feel torn between two conflicting goals—You want to learn more, but you also want to protect your ego and preserve aspects of your current way of thinking. As Carol Dweck argues in Mindset, you can approach tasks with either a fixed mindset (in which you believe that you and others are incapable of meaningful change) or a growth mindset (in which you believe that you and others are growing, learning, and improving all the time). A growth mindset prompts you to seek out challenges and means that you don’t feel threatened by failure. Looking again at the seven suggestions above, you can see that suggestions 1, 2, 4, and 5 above are smart ways to trigger a growth mindset.
Productive conversations are a good start, but they’re just a start. It’s easy to get hooked on the good feeling that comes with saying the right things and having the right conversations, but ultimately it’s what we do after the conversations that matters. Here are some concrete things you can do to fight racial injustice, grouped into the spheres in which you can apply them: political, economic, educational, workplace, and personal.
Vote. And not just in big elections: Vote for school boards, in local elections, and so on. Local politics is often where you can spark real, tangible change. Support candidates of color and racially inclusive policies.
Vocally support increasing the minimum wage. Proportionately more people of color work in minimum-wage jobs, so increasing the minimum wage will benefit a large number of people of color.
Support affirmative action. People who criticize affirmative action as unfair simply don’t know the facts. There have never been “quotas,” and the goal percentages are often far below actual representational parity. Affirmative action targets exist to redress a systemic opportunity gap. They’re not back doors or easy ways to get hired.
Approach mayors and local governments about police reform. Ask about policies regarding officer training, body cams, and complaints procedures. Demand reform wherever necessary. Keep applying pressure until something changes. Insist on justice for police shootings.
(Shortform note: For Ibram X. Kendi, political action (in the form of fighting racist policies) should be the main goal of antiracist efforts. Kendi advocates a framework that includes public education that highlights the racist effects of policies and introduces possible alternatives, and ultimately the implementation and evaluation of antiracist policies.)
Harness the power of your wallet. Wherever possible, support businesses owned by people of color. Boycott businesses that take advantage of people of color: Steer clear of banks that employ racist lending practices and avoid companies that rely on low-wage labor from people of color. Donate to grassroots organizations that are working for change. (Shortform note: When people of color suffer economically, white people don’t benefit, because the economy as a whole suffers. A 2020 study by Citigroup, for example, found that racist practices have cost the US economy a total of $16 trillion (almost the same amount as the current annual GDP).)
Engage with schools. Ask about the opportunity gap in your school district. Find out about the history curriculum. Are there any curricula and textbooks that erase people of color or teach a whitewashed version of history? Contact teachers and educational leaders to tell them that racial issues are a priority.
If you’re at college, will soon be applying for college, or have a child in either of those situations, contact colleges to find out their policies and track record on diversity and representation.
(Shortform note: While we can’t expect teachers to bear full responsibility for antiracist education, they do have a crucial role. Expert teachers suggest integrating educational material on racism into the curriculum. A number of resources for teachers are available online.)
Become active in your unions. A racially aware union can do a lot for people of color. If you speak up enough in your union over time, people will eventually start listening.
Call out tokenism. If management tries to implement perfunctory, superficial measures that look good but don’t run deep, let them know. (Shortform note: In a 2020 article in the Harvard Business Review, Robert Livingston suggests other company-level actions to tackle racism, including addressing the systems and structures that are to blame and listening to people of color’s stories of workplace racism.)
Diversify the art and music you engage with. Most mainstream television, film, music, and literature is white by default. Seek out work by people of color, films in which the majority of actors are not white, and books by people of diverse backgrounds. Watching films and reading books is also a great way to listen to people of color without demanding personalized emotional labor. (Shortform note: If you’d like to start reading more books by people of color, this Buzzfeed list has a broad range of recommended titles.)
103 More Things You Can Do to Fight for Social Justice
In addition to Oluo’s suggestions above, this Medium article suggests a range of ways that white people can contribute to the struggle for racial justice. Possibilities include contacting federal and state legislators on specific issues related to criminal justice, moving your money to a black-owned bank, and attending local political meet-and-greets to ask questions about racial justice.
Thank you for joining this conversation. Though it may be deeply challenging at times, know that you’re working to create a better future for all of us. (Shortform note: As James Baldwin famously observed: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”)
So You Want to Talk About Race is a handbook for people who want to have productive conversations about race in the United States. Author Ijeoma Oluo weaves together three conceptual strands: first, the important background information that people should know before embarking on a conversation about race; second, Oluo’s own experiences with the issues she describes; and third, practical advice about what to do in certain situations (for example, if the other person doesn’t want to talk, if you accidentally say something offensive, or if you get called racist).
The book is for anyone who wants to improve how they talk about race and includes advice for people of color as well as for white people.
Self-described “writer, speaker and internet yeller” Ijeoma Oluo is a Nigerian-American writer with a background in political science. She was born in the United States to a white mother and a Nigerian father. She married early and had two children, completed her college degree as a working single mother, and worked her way up the ladder in the white-dominated Seattle tech industry.
After some time writing for online magazines, she decided to write a book combining and extending her ideas about race and giving useful, no-nonsense advice based on the questions that people had been asking her on social media. That book was So You Want to Talk About Race. Oluo has also written a series of shorter articles on race, including a widely shared interview with “transracial” woman Rachel Dolezal in 2017 that explored Oluo’s reaction to this case of a white woman who had spent her life trying to pass as black.
A skilled public speaker, Oluo has appeared on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and The Opposition With Jordan Klepper. She’s also given a number of talks, including a 2018 presentation at Google (which has been coming to terms with its own race problem) and a conversation with Roxane Gay in which they both talk about their work.
Oluo was honored for her writing, editing, and activism in the Root 100 list of influential African Americans in 2017 and 2018. In 2021 she was featured on the Time100 Next List, a list that showcases future leaders across a range of fields.
Connect with Ijeoma Oluo:
Publisher: Seal Press
So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) was Oluo’s first book, followed in 2020 by Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Mediocre expands on the themes in So You Want to Talk About Race, discussing the negative effects of structural racism and sexism on everyone—including white men.
So You Want to Talk About Race was first published in January 2018, then republished in 2019 with a new foreword by the author. (This guide is based on the 2019 publication.)
In 2018 and 2019, around the time of So You Want to Talk About Race’s publication, police shootings of black people were coming under increasing scrutiny. However, the situation hadn’t yet come to a head in the mass Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 that followed the death of George Floyd. Oluo wrote the book because she recognized that more and more people wanted to join the national conversation about race but didn’t know where to start.
So You Want to Talk About Race was part of a wave of works on race published at around the same time, including:
As a combination of personal stories and historical information to contextualize these stories, So You Want to Talk About Race is similar in style to How to Be an Antiracist, but is written from a queer black woman’s perspective rather than a straight black man’s. This enables Oluo to go into detail about her personal experiences of intersectionality.
In terms of the book’s content, there’s some overlap with White Fragility, especially in terms of the motivations of white people for various psychological defenses. However, the author of White Fragility is a white woman (a fact which has caused controversy, especially in relation to the money DiAngelo makes from speaking engagements, which some view as exploitation). This means that White Fragility lacks the personal, experiential component of So You Want to Talk About Race.
The personal approach in So You Want to Talk About Race is complemented by the more objective, science-based approach of Biased, the global historical context provided in Caste, and the in-depth economic scholarship of The Color of Law.
So You Want to Talk About Race became a bestseller in its genre, though its peak success came several years after the initial publication. When it was first published in 2018, So You Want to Talk About Race featured on the New York Times bestseller list for one week. It re-entered the bestseller list in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, reaching #2 on June 21 and staying on the list for three months.
The book was well received, with critics noting that Oluo’s direct writing style was a breath of fresh air. Bustle called it “a must-read primer on the politics of American racism” and Kirkus praised it as “feisty,” “sharp,” and “no-nonsense.” The National Book Review called it a book “for anyone—white or black or any color in between,” praising Oluo for offering solutions as well as raising problems, though also commenting that the book has less of an edge than the author’s previous online writings.
The book did receive some criticism. Some readers felt that Oluo’s brief discussion of her sexuality didn’t belong in a book about race, while a few others found the tone condescending.
Oluo’s writing has made her a target for people with racist grievances. She regularly receives death threats (and suicide threats, predominantly from white men). In 2019, white supremacists “swatted” her house (a type of hoax in which the perpetrators report gunfire and call for a SWAT team to the victim’s address, in the hope that the team will enter the house and cause property damage or bodily harm).
Oluo writes in a direct, personal, often humorous style, aiming to engage the reader as a friend and peer who’s straight talking to you about your flaws so you can change them.
The historical background that the book provides is specifically targeted to each of the sub-topics as they’re addressed. Readers looking for a more comprehensive history of racism in the United States may want to supplement their knowledge with other books, such as Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name or Pero Gaglo Dagbovie’s African American History Reconsidered.
There are a number of gaps and inconsistencies in the content, many of which are acknowledged by Oluo herself in the preface to the 2019 version. First, because the book is written from the perspective of a black woman, it largely discusses the experiences of African Americans in the United States, though there are occasional statistics about Native Americans and Asian Americans. The terminology Oluo uses for indigenous peoples is occasionally inconsistent, and the section on Asian Americans isn’t integrated well into the rest of the book. Oluo also comments in the preface that she should have included more on the specifics of mixed-race experiences, especially as she herself falls into this category.
One issue that Oluo doesn’t discuss in the book is racial inequalities in healthcare and health outcomes. For example, people of color are prescribed less pain medication than white people, have less trust in doctors and in the health care system in general, and have worse health outcomes, even after controlling for socioeconomic status. These inequalities have become particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. An account of racial disparities in US health care that’s similar in style to So You Want to Talk About Race is Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine.
So You Want to Talk About Race has 17 chapters. Each of the chapters addresses one of 17 FAQs that people have in conversations on race, for example: “What if I talk about race wrong?”, “Why can’t I touch your hair?”, and “Is police brutality really about race?”
This organization provides bite-sized, targeted parcels of advice, but the content isn’t arranged thematically and it can therefore be difficult to pull out the book’s main ideas. The structure also means that there’s some repetition of material across chapters, with some issues (e.g. economic disparities and crime statistics) being revisited multiple times to highlight different points.
This guide reorganizes the book’s content thematically, beginning with basic principles and ending with the verbal and practical actions that we can take to fight for racial justice in concrete ways.
We’ll cover the material in three broad stages:
As Oluo notes, if you’ve picked up her book, it’s because you want to learn how to have more productive, more empathetic, more useful conversations about race. You believe in the power of words to change things. But you may feel hesitant about having the conversation.
According to Oluo, one of the main problems in talking about race is that people are afraid to do it. It’s good to be cautious when approaching this topic. But, Oluo argues, if we avoid talking about race entirely, we won’t get anywhere. If we fail to talk about the system by which millions of people are disenfranchised, hurt, locked up, and killed every day, we are complicit in that system. (Shortform note: Psychology professor Derald Wing Sue refers to this avoidance as “the conspiracy of silence.”)
Conversations are powerful. Words can bring unconscious patterns out of the dark so that we can examine them, understand them, and disentangle them. Talking about things helps us to see them more clearly. And the more clearly we can see the problems, the easier it is to find solutions.
Oluo argues that because issues of race have been papered over for so long—because talking about race has always been something best avoided in a polite conversation—people who want to start talking are finding that they don’t know how to have the conversation.
People of color are often nervous about having their experiences minimized or dismissed. They’re wary of knee-jerk defensiveness, and they’re exhausted from dredging up their trauma to explain the same things over and over again.
Meanwhile, white people, Oluo notes, are often afraid of hurting or offending their conversation partner. They’re fearful of being called racist, and they’re unaccustomed to the feelings of discomfort that arise when they confront the ways in which their own privilege comes at the expense of others.
These conversations are usually upsetting for everyone involved. But, as Oluo reminds us, the conversations are upsetting because racism is upsetting, not because we’re suddenly talking about it. We can’t let our fear win. Having these discussions is the beginning of profound, permanent social change. Welcome to the conversation.
Difficult Conversations: Why They’re Difficult and How to Tackle Them
As Oluo notes, conversations about race are almost always difficult. But what makes these conversations so difficult—and how do we even define “difficult” in the context of conversation?
For Douglas Stone, author of Difficult Conversations, “difficult conversations” are conversations that make you feel uncomfortable or nervous. He says that underlying any difficult conversation are three main sub-conversations. More than one of these sub-conversations is usually active at any given time, and especially thorny conversations typically involve all three:
The What Happened Conversation, in which we’re focused on trying to work out who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s the victim, and whose fault the problem is.
The Feelings Conversation, in which we either over-focus on our own feelings or manage them badly (for example, by being unaware of our true feelings on an issue and letting these feelings affect us unconsciously).
The Identity Conversation, in which protecting our own self-image as competent, moral, and worthy of love becomes the priority. This comes at the expense of attention to the issue that’s actually the topic of conversation.
Race-related conversations activate all three conversation types and at a high intensity. This is what makes them so challenging to approach and sustain for all parties involved.
Stone proposes the following remedies for these unproductive approaches. In the What Happened Conversation, try to focus on the ways that both people have contributed to creating the problem and make sure to take responsibility for your part. In the Feelings Conversation, make sure you’ve taken the time to understand your own feelings on the issue and where they come from. And in the Identity Conversation, acknowledge that your identity is complex by taking the “and” stance. For example, realize that you can be a good person and say something insensitive, and that both of these things can be true simultaneously.
To avoid misunderstandings, the first order of business is to make sure that we’re all talking about the same thing.
Sometimes we can reach an impasse just because people are using the same word in different ways. For example, what happens if you and the other person mean different things when you say the word “racism”? Or if someone doesn’t know the meaning of a word, such as “intersectionality,” and that gets in the way of their understanding of key issues? If we start without a good understanding of important terms, we’ll end up talking at cross purposes and getting frustrated.
(Shortform note: In How to Be An Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi adds that definitions are important not only to get everyone on the same page, but also because slippery definitions can be easily manipulated to make oneself appear virtuous or to silence conversational partners.)
So in this chapter, we’ll look more closely at the meaning of “racism” and “systemic racism.” In the next chapter, we’ll clarify the meanings of some other important terms you’ll need when talking about race: “privilege,” “intersectionality,” and the “model minority myth.”
No. The concept of race has no scientific basis. (Shortform note: As discussed in this Scientific American article, genes can be used in a limited way to identify people’s place of geographical origins, but they don’t map well onto the physical characteristics we associate with race.)
However, as Oluo notes, race is very much a social reality, in that our ideas about race have real social effects, and these social effects translate into material differences in how people in certain groups are allowed to live their lives. Even though race is a fiction, it’s a fiction that shapes many, many people’s realities. So when the word “race” appears throughout this guide, understand that it doesn’t refer to any objective physical or genetic reality, but rather to a social fiction that we create and sustain through our words and actions.
(Shortform note: Consider national borders. They’re based on human invention, too—the land on one side of a border isn’t inherently different to the land on the other side. But, even so, the country you happen to be born in has a significant impact on how your life plays out. In this way, an imaginary line dictates the physical realities of our lives.)
When you use the word “racism,” what do you mean? As Oluo comments, chances are you’ll be referring to one of two different (but superficially similar) definitions:
(Shortform note: The Merriam-Webster dictionary makes the same distinction: It presents two definitions of the word “racism,” the first describing individual prejudices and the second describing systemic social oppression.)
If you’re working from the first definition, racism is located in the minds of individuals. Working from this definition, it makes sense to talk about “reverse racism” and prejudice against whites, get horribly offended if someone calls you “white trash,” and see affirmative action as unfair. In this framework, the goal of reducing racism is more atomized: All we need to do is change the minds of individual people and we’re set.
If you’re working from the second definition, racism is located in social power structures as well as individual minds. Working from this definition, there’s no such thing as “reverse racism,” being called “white trash” may be unpleasant but it has little impact on your life, and affirmative action is redressing a historical imbalance. Using the second definition, you can see that the goal of reducing racism is structural. Changing individual people’s minds isn’t enough. We also have to dismantle the power structures that feed these individual opinions.
Throughout this guide we use the second definition. If you want to make real progress in your conversations about race, you should too.
(Shortform note: In White Fragility, author Robin DiAngelo also argues that reverse racism cannot exist because the control of powerful institutions—control historically held by white rather than black people—is an integral part of true racism. However, Ibram X. Kendi has a different opinion: He calls the idea that black people can’t be racist because they lack power the “powerless defense.” Kendi argues that black people do have power, and that certain ideas expounded by black writers—such as the theory that whites were created by an evil black scientist or that whiteness comes from recessive genes—are definitely classifiable as racist.)
Should We Be Talking About Caste Instead of Race?
If race is a fiction, does that mean we should be searching for alternative terminology to replace words like “racist” and “racism”? According to author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, we should. In Caste (2020), Wilkerson makes a distinction between “race” (the visible differences between people that we use to group them, plus the meaning that we give to those differences) and “caste” (the system of social organization that springs from this bundle of differences and meanings). The link between race and caste is a particular set of beliefs, which is triggered by physical characteristics and then translated into systems of hierarchy and division.
Wilkerson argues that the systemic social inequalities between black and white people in the US are better described as a “casteist” system than a racist system. She also provides cross-cultural examples of similar phenomena. In India, for example, the caste system is complex and pervasive (though it’s currently undergoing significant change). The system divides Hindus into four main castes, from the Brahmins (priests) at the top to the Shudras (manual workers) at the bottom, as well as the Dalits (“Untouchables”). There are strict sanctions for intermarriage between castes. Though discrimination based on caste has technically been illegal since 1948, it continues today in various forms.
What’s the threshold for something or someone to be called racist? For example, is it okay to call someone’s sweet elderly great-auntie racist? How can calling someone’s hair “wild” or complimenting someone’s English be racist?
As Oluo observes, many white people have a knee-jerk response to the word “racist” (more on this in Chapter 3). Almost everybody is willing to admit that lynchings, cross burnings, and Nazis were racist. But we tend to minimize anything less blatant. If you call it racist, you risk accusations that you’re alienating people with your “inflammatory language” or “identity politics.”
This makes it very difficult to talk about race-based economic disadvantage, for example, or actions that are racist in more subtle ways. Those are easy to explain away as “nothing to do with race” or “all in your head.” It’s this kind of gaslighting—whether it’s intentional or unintentional—that turns conversations about race into minefields for people of color.
(Shortform note: Racial gaslighting is subtle by definition. Political science professor Angela Davis offers three ways to figure out whether you’re being racially gaslighted: You feel that something’s not quite right; the person is blaming the victim; and the person is tone policing. For more on tone policing, see Chapter 6.)
Most conversations about race stall before they’ve really begun, caught up in arguments about whether or not race is actually the issue. People might ask, “but isn’t it about class, not race?” or defend someone with “But he didn’t mean any harm!” Getting stuck on defining conversational boundaries is a wasted opportunity to make actual progress. (Shortform note: This is why British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge explained, first in a 2014 blog post and then in a 2017 book, why she was no longer talking to white people about race: She could no longer put herself through the “denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics” that characterized white people’s attempts to redirect the conversations.)
So let’s look at this more closely. Oluo offers three criteria to help you decide whether or not a conversation is about race.
Race is relevant if:
1. A person of color says race is relevant.
2. The magnitude of its effect on people of color is different.
3. The issue is part of a larger pattern that implicates race.
Systemic racism is also called “institutional racism” or “structural racism.” If something is systemic, it’s built into the underlying structure of a system. It’s an integral part of how the system operates. We can visualize each instance of racist behavior as a thread in a vast fabric—so vast that we’re completely caught up in it and can’t see its boundaries or overall shape. Similarly, we’re surrounded by racist messaging, but much of this operates unconsciously.
(Shortform note: Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt goes into more detail about the mechanisms of these unconscious processes. Eberhardt shows that implicit racial bias is ubiquitous in the United States, and that this bias can have particularly devastating consequences in police encounters.)
Though it may seem controversial, Oluo characterizes this system as a White Supremacist system. Why?
In a White Supremacist system, whiteness is both (1) the default and (2) the superior position. The system was built for the benefit of white people and at the expense of people of color (more on the history of racism in the US in Chapter 3). This dynamic is still playing out in both obvious and subtle ways. Here’s how it works.
1) Whiteness as the default. This is where whiteness serves as the reference point for “normal.” The White Supremacist system normalizes its perspective as the default. This makes anyone who doesn’t match the default invisible.
Whiteness as the Default: The “Flesh-Colored” Band-Aid
A clear example of white skin as the default is the story of the “flesh-colored” band-aid. This product, which first came onto the market in a pink color in 1920 and was advertised as being “almost invisible” in 1955, has been tailored to white skin for nearly 100 years. (There was a brief attempt to introduce new shades in 2005, but they didn’t sell, probably because many shopkeepers put them on shelves of “things for black people,” far away from the rest of the first aid supplies.)
In June 2020, Johnson & Johnson announced a new range of band-aids in different shades in support of the Black Lives Matter protests. A tweet in which 45-year-old black man Dominique Apollon shares his emotions on using a Tru-Colour bandage for the first time shows how meaningful this kind of product can be. (Medical anthropologist Duana Fullwiley notes that the fact that this attempt at racial equality is happening with a band-aid product is ironic, given the depth of the wounds that protesters are trying to heal. She suggests that a higher-impact response would be to manufacture only the dark-skinned version for the next 100 years.)
2) Whiteness as holding a superior position. Superior and inferior are always relative. If one person or group has a superior position, by definition there has to be another person or group that’s beneath them. And, as Oluo writes, this is the seduction of White Supremacy—it whispers: “You will get more because they exist to get less.” Wherever there’s a finite amount of power or resources, the social function of people of color in a White Supremacist system is to get a relatively smaller piece of the pie. Even if they don’t realize this consciously, people may feel that this is the natural order of things.
Oluo suggests that this is why the election of Barack Obama increased, rather than decreased, expressions of White Supremacy. Obama’s election to the most powerful office in the country disrupted this unconscious assumption. If a black person, whose entire purpose is to be “less than,” can assume the presidency, this feels fundamentally wrong to someone who’s been raised on a diet of White Supremacist beliefs—often in ways in which they can’t put into words.
Obama felt like a threat, because he was. But he wasn’t a threat to the country; he was a threat to the very structure of White Supremacist beliefs. After Obama was elected, many people were left feeling alienated from a country that they thought they understood. This alienation became the foundation of political movements that are still in force today. (Shortform note: In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the election of Obama caused many progressive white voters to switch their allegiances along caste lines to the Republican party, which presented itself as the party that would preserve racialized structures.)
The United States has a very strong individualist culture, and in individualist cultures we don’t like to think about ourselves as part of a system. We like to think that everyone has complete independence. But these individualist tendencies obscure our view of the big picture.
Individualist assumptions trick us into thinking that racist cops are just “bad apples” and that every black man who goes to prison deserves it. We need to battle these tendencies and focus on the patterns, even—especially—if this means taking a good hard look at ourselves.
(Shortform note: In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo discusses individualism extensively. She argues that while the “myth of individualism” serves to protect the self-concept of most white people, black people experience the flip side of it. If they aren’t successful, it must be because as individuals they’re somehow less deserving.)
The good news is that seeing racism as a system gives us many more ways to dismantle it. Because different parts of the system are propping each other up, if we pull out enough of the foundations, the whole ugly thing will collapse.
Attacking the Foundations of Structural Racism
There are a few different ways we can go about dismantling the foundations of the White Supremacist system. Vanderbilt University Professor Tim Vogel offers ten suggestions for people wondering where to start, grouped into cognitive, interpersonal, and organizational approaches. You can start with whichever of these seems most accessible.
Cognitive approaches include shifting from a fixed mindset (“I can’t change or grow”) to a growth mindset (“I can change and grow”) in how you think about your own limitations when it comes to race. (Shortform note: We explore applying a growth mindset to these conversations more in Chapter 7 of this guide.) You can also deliberately open your social networks to more diversity and cultivate concern and respect in the way you engage with people of color. Interpersonal approaches include using your privilege wisely to address racism as you see it and monitoring your work meetings more closely for racial bias. Organizational approaches include increasing transparency in pay structures, revising central processes (such as how applicants are interviewed for a vacant role), and openly committing to diversity and representation at a company level.
In this chapter we’ll look at some commonly misunderstood terms that come up often in conversations about race: “privilege,” “intersectionality,” and the “model minority myth.”
The White Supremacist system is built on privilege. Privilege is a situation in which one person or group has advantages that another doesn’t. These advantages are unfairly distributed to begin with. As Oluo explains, if you have privilege, even if you worked very hard to get where you are, your successes are greater than those of someone who began without these privileges. (Shortform note: Scholar Peggy McIntosh likens privilege to an “invisible knapsack” of useful tools that privileged people carry through life.)
Privilege and disadvantage are relative concepts, so they’re two sides of the same coin. We can also talk about privilege as an “opportunity gap.” It doesn’t only apply to race—privilege is also relevant to disability, sexuality, neurotypicality, physical attractiveness, and family background.
(Shortform note: This animation, created by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Luke Harris, illustrates the effects of racial privilege and disadvantage metaphorically in the form of a running race. In this race, which has four competitors—two black and two white—the black athletes don’t even get to start until hundreds of years after the white athletes. When they finally do, they encounter a series of obstacles and complications that hinder their progress even further.)
What Exactly Do White People Believe About Privilege?
One stumbling block on the path to a more equal society is the belief of many white people that they are actually disadvantaged and that it’s minorities who have more privileges. A majority of white people (55%) now believe that whites face racial discrimination. White people as a whole see anti-white bias and “reverse racism” as a more pressing social problem than anti-black bias. With white people set to become a minority in the US over the next few decades, many white people also expect to increasingly be victims of racial discrimination in the future. These beliefs tend to fall along political and religious lines.
Oluo explains that if you’re told to “check your privilege,” you’re being asked to think honestly about how your privilege has gotten you to this point. What advantages have you had that other people haven’t? What struggles might you be unaware of in other people’s lives? How is this affecting your perspective?
“Check your privilege” has become something of a catchphrase: a cliché that provokes eye rolls and sarcastic jabs. (Shortform note: An interchange between two students at Princeton, published in Time, exemplifies the debate over this phrase. One freshman, in a piece called “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege,” explained that though he is white, his family’s story is one of courage, struggle, and sacrifice. A response by a black freshman pointed out that however real historical struggles may be, as a white man he is benefiting from privilege in the present. This means that asking him to “check his privilege” is still valid.)
All of us are blind to at least some of our privilege. That’s why it’s good to make a habit of checking it frequently. Although checking our privilege can feel bad, it opens up opportunities to do good, such as standing up for someone who lacks the same privilege.
How Can I Be a Good Ally?
Oluo doesn’t go into much detail on the subtleties involved when a white person intervenes on behalf of a person of color. Allyship has been a key part of racial justice movements over the centuries. But as a white or otherwise privileged person, how do you know if you’re “speaking up for others” or “speaking over others”? Where’s the line between being an ally and developing a white savior complex?
A Code of Ethics for Antiracist White Allies, developed by JLove Calderon and Tim Wise, proposes ten concrete tasks for antiracist allies, including keeping yourself accountable by creating systems for regular feedback and, in conversations about racial issues, giving due credit to the people of color who have spoken about these issues before.
Similarly, Roxane Gay argues that white allies need to use their own common sense to find concrete ways to support people of color without needing excessive guidance. She notes that in times of racial crisis, well-meaning white people often ask people of color, “What can I do?” But she notes that this treats people of color “as if we have access to a secret trove of wisdom for overcoming oppression” and allows the person to dodge the practical and intellectual work that they need to do to create change.
Finally, Ta-Nehisi Coates has the following advice for allies: First, listen and learn as much as possible about racism. Realize that much of what you learn will be painful and don’t shy away. Second, gradually stop thinking in terms of being an ally. You’re not here simply to “help” people of color: Demanding racial equality is your fight, too.
Intersectionality is the recognition that multiple types of disadvantage intersect in complicated ways, either offsetting or compounding one another in an individual’s life. The term was first used by race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. There’s no specific formula for intersectionality, because it depends on our individual configuration of privileges and disadvantages, as well as the environments in which we find ourselves from moment to moment.
Oluo argues that social justice movements need to consider intersectionality if they want to fight for justice for everyone. Neglecting intersectionality means that we’ll leave behind the less visible subcategories within a disadvantaged group. We can apply intersectionality to develop more inclusive practices in government, the education system, and other important institutions.
(Shortform note: Crenshaw first used the term “intersectionality” in this academic article about how the legal system treats women of color. She argued that black women are specifically disadvantaged in judicial decisions compared to groups that are disadvantaged along a single axis, such as white women and black men. She observed that black women also tend to be excluded from both feminist movements and antiracist political movements because their experiences complicate the picture. The term has since migrated from its original legal context into the social sciences more broadly, and from there into mainstream discourse.)
The model minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans are a “model” minority group: an example that all other racial and ethnic minority groups should aspire to. As Oluo notes, the phrase “model minority” was first used by sociologist William Petersen. Petersen was describing his research on Japanese Americans, in particular how they had become financially and academically successful within a short period of time after migration. He praised this group for their work ethic, talent in math and science, strict parenting, social docility, and conformity, explicitly contrasting them with other “problem minorities.”
(Shortform note: When Petersen first used this term, he put the term “problem minorities” in inverted commas. He doesn’t blame these groups for their situation, stating that a vicious cycle of stereotypes, poor education, and low income is at fault.)
But what harm can a positive stereotype do? Isn’t there some truth to all this, anyway?
Oluo notes that the myth disguises economic disparities between different Asian American groups and renders those who don’t conform exactly to the stereotype invisible. The stereotype of docility and subservience leads Asian Americans to be judged as ill-suited to leadership positions or political office. At the time of writing the book (2017), for example, there was only one Asian American in the Senate and three Asian Americans serving in the House of Representatives. Only seven Asian American state governors have been elected in all of the country’s history. (Shortform note: As of 2021, these figures had increased to two senators and 15 representatives, alongside the historic election of half-black, half-Indian American Kamala Harris as vice president.)
As Oluo shows, the model minority myth also separates Asian Americans from other minority groups, denying their common struggles. (Shortform note: Some scholars argue that the US government deliberately perpetrated the myth during the Cold War as a way to appear less racist on the global stage. The success of Asian Americans became a way to deny the grievances of African Americans: If they can do it, why can’t you? This attitude continues today, with a number of authors arguing that the success of Asian Americans shows that it’s possible to overcome structural racism, and therefore that black people are to blame for their own failures.)
Oluo notes that being Asian American and female carries specific intersectional dangers. The stereotype of docility and compliance is particularly corrosive for Asian American women, with their partners sometimes projecting it onto them with damaging results. Despite this, Asian American women are largely overlooked in mental health and domestic violence awareness initiatives.
(Shortform note: According to Project AWARE, one in four women in the United States experiences intimate partner violence. In Asian American women, this proportion is substantially elevated, with 41 to 61 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander women reporting having suffered physical or sexual abuse at the hands of their partners. Intimate partner violence toward Asian Americans increased further during the Covid-19 pandemic.)
The Sexual Objectification of Asian American Women
Asian American women are not only stereotyped as submissive; they’re also commonly fetishized and targeted with aggressively sexual behavior (you’ll find some examples in this Twitter thread).
These twin perceptions of weakness and hypersexuality merge in particularly toxic ways. On March 16 2021, a 21-year-old white man opened fire in a spa in Atlanta and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women. His actions were apparently motivated by “sex addiction” and a desire to “eliminate temptation.” As nonprofit leader Sung Yeon Choimorrow noted in an interview with NBC News, this motivation springs from a long history of sexual objectification of Asian women “as variations of the Asian temptress, the dragon ladies and the lotus blossoms, whose value is only in relation to men’s fantasies and desires.”
Examine how intersectionality works in your own life.
Write down a list of all of the social descriptors you can think of that might apply to you (for example white, Hispanic, neurotypical, Hindu, thin, working class, and so on.)
Which of these categories confer privilege? In what ways?
Which confer disadvantage?
Can you think of any ways in which these privileges and disadvantages change, compound, or offset each other?
Once we’ve settled on a common language for talking about race, we need to step back and examine how these principles operate in real time.
There are four things we need to examine more closely.
Based on our past experiences—especially on repeated or very intense experiences—we make predictions about what to expect in the future. These predictions inform our worldview.
Let’s take the police as an example. As Oluo notes, if you’re a white person, chances are that most of your encounters with the police have been cordial. Based on this, you trust the police: You feel comfortable calling them if there’s a problem, and you know they’ll be on your side when they come. After all, it’s their job to protect you.
If you’re not white, your experiences have probably been very different. Here are some of Oluo’s experiences with the police:
When Oluo sees police officers on the road, she knows that she’s the most likely target. This makes it impossible to enjoy driving. And these experiences are not unique to Oluo: Racial profiling that leads to being pulled over for “driving while black” is disturbingly common.
And it’s not just about driving. Blacks and Native Americans are three and a half to four times more likely than whites to be killed by the police. Is it any surprise that black people trust the police and believe them to be ethical and honest at a rate of less than half that of whites? This perceptual difference doesn’t come out of nowhere. (Shortform note: This statistic—28% for blacks vs 60% for whites—comes from this study, which also found that 16% of black people reported that they had been unfairly treated by the police in the last 30 days.)
As you can see, this isn’t a matter of deciding whose perception is correct. It’s about understanding that multiple valid perceptions can exist at the same time. Police can be dangerous to one group of people and honorable protectors to another. A racist joke can be both a throwaway comment for the person who makes it and a vicious dagger to the heart for the person on the receiving end.
Driving While Black
Oluo’s experiences with the police while driving are far from unique. For years, black Twitter users have been posting their experiences with the police while driving using the hashtag #DrivingWhileBlack. Common complaints are that police use minor infringements or unusual situations, such as having an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, driving a luxury car, or driving a vehicle that the police didn’t know how to categorize, as excuses to pull black people over. A 2020 PBS documentary, Driving While Black, explores in detail the freedoms and dangers in driving for black people in the United States.
A 2020 ABC News analysis of millions of traffic stops in major US cities showed striking disparities in the treatment of black and white drivers. In Minneapolis, black drivers were five times more likely to be stopped than white drivers. Black drivers in San Francisco and Chicago were four times more likely to be pulled over, while in Los Angeles and Philadelphia they were three times more likely to be targeted. (Black pedestrians are also more likely to be stopped: For example, in New York, black people on the street were eight times more likely to be stopped and searched.)
After black drivers are pulled over, they’re one and a half to five times more likely to be searched (though the probability of finding contraband is less than when whites are searched). They’re also more likely to be cited and arrested. And in police encounters that go wrong, people of color know that they’re far more likely to bear the consequences than the police officer is.
A great deal of our behavior is influenced by forces outside our normal awareness. These include implicit biases (subconscious prejudices that affect the way we perceive situations) and our inability to see the big picture. The latter mainly springs from ignorance about the realities of other people’s lives.
As we’ve seen already, racism is systemic. That means that everyone who grows up in a White Supremacist society is racist in some way.
You can’t help it. It’s part of the culture that you absorbed growing up. It doesn’t mean you’re a hateful person who actively desires harm to people of color. But it does mean that racism shapes much of what you do and believe without you realizing it.
How Does Bias Work in the Brain?
How exactly does this unconscious bias work? In Biased, social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt tracks the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in racial bias.
One such mechanism is the “other-race effect”—the fact that our brains become very practiced at differentiating faces of our own race but are usually bad at distinguishing between faces of other races. Eberhardt and her colleagues have observed the other-race effect occurring in real time with the use of imaging techniques such as fMRI. They found that your brain automatically expends more energy paying attention to and remembering faces of your own race (or the race that you saw most while growing up) than to other faces. This effect creates bias because it makes us see people of our own race as individuals worth recognizing, but those of other races as part of a homogenous group.
Another mechanism that influences bias is categorization. This is when your brain automatically associates emotions or stereotyped beliefs with a particular category of person: for example, linking black people with a feeling of fear or beliefs about crime.
These processes are automatic and occur far too fast for you to intercept. However, there are a number of ways you can manage your implicit bias. First, you can spend quality time with people of other races, as that’s been shown to change brain activation patterns. You can also disrupt automatic bias by slowing down and intentionally engaging more effortful processing. This shift between what Daniel Kahnemann calls System 1 (fast) and System 2 (effortful) thinking will help you to override any unconscious processing biases you may have.
You can start to address racial biases by coming to terms with the disowned pieces of your own behavior and belief systems. First, check your privilege.
You may have been told to “check your privilege” or have heard someone else being told to do this, perhaps as part of an argument. But how exactly do you go about checking your privilege?
Oluo provides the following broad roadmap:
Oluo’s Approach to Checking Privilege: Why Is It Effective?
The slow, systematic engagement of conscious thought processes that Oluo suggests above is an excellent way to make sure you’re bypassing knee-jerk reactions and employing Kahnemann’s conscious, effortful System 2 thinking. Step 1 reduces environmental stresses and distractions, which allows the brain to focus more deeply. (Cal Newport similarly advocates creating a calm environment conducive to intensive thinking in Deep Work.) Step 2 deliberately bypasses the reflex “But I’ve struggled too!” reactions that this kind of activity tends to elicit at first.
Step 3 focuses your attention on what you don’t know instead of what you do. This is powerful because assumptions are always based on what we think we know, so acknowledging the ways in which we’re ignorant is a deliberate way to destabilize these assumptions. Step 4, the self-initiated search for new information, is an act of intellectual and emotional humility and an opportunity to listen. Steps 3 and 4 should be seen as iterative and lifelong, as learning more always leads us to uncover more areas of ignorance.
Once you understand your privilege, use it to start breaking down barriers. Wherever you have privilege, use it for the benefit of those who don’t.
Oluo suggests the following ways to do this:
(Shortform note: This Medium article suggests 103 more ways that white people can fight for racial justice, some of which involve the exercise of privilege—for example, working with your HR department to get more people of color hired, moving your money to a black-owned bank, making donations to activist and political groups, divesting investments in prisons and detention centers, and stopping to watch when you see a black person pulled over by the police.)
As well as scrutinizing our own perspectives, we need to learn to truly value the perspectives of others and understand where they’re coming from.
As Oluo explains, participating in conversations about race isn’t easy for people of color. Most don’t seek it out, so if someone agrees to talk with you about race, it’s an act of generosity.
Every time a person of color engages in these conversations, they run a range of risks. Oluo lists some of these:
Experiencing racism is painful, and in talking about it you’re asking someone to revisit that pain.
Why, then, do people of color have these conversations? They do it because they have to. They know that nothing will change if they stay silent.
The Consequences of Speaking Out Publicly About Racism
People of color often experience considerable backlash after talking openly about their experiences. For example, doctor and Olympic athlete Omar Amr wrote about the racism he had experienced playing water polo. He lost friends, had people openly questioning his mental health, and received death threats as a result. After philosopher George Yancy published a gentle open letter in the New York Times to white people asking them to be honest about their internalized racism, he received a wave of hate mail from readers, full of racist epithets and threats of extreme violence. He feared for his safety and needed a police escort to move around the university campus. (Yancy later wrote a book, Backlash, on the response to this piece.)
Where does this abuse come from? Author of White Fragility Robin DiAngelo argued in a 2011 article that white people are used to experiencing “racial comfort.” They also tend to confuse comfort with safety, which makes even minor threats to comfort feel like serious threats to their psychological safety. To defend themselves against these threats, they may position themselves as victims and use language related to self-defense, such as saying they feel “attacked,” “like a punching bag,” or subject to a “witch-hunt.” White women are particularly skilled at flipping the discussion by weaponizing their tears and emotional reactions. This deft reversal of the aggressor-victim dynamic leaves no space for people of color to explain the mechanics of their original victimization.
The final principle to keep in mind when we’re deepening our understanding of race is the extraordinary emotional power of certain words. There are two words in particular that tend to trigger intense emotions and reactions when someone is on the receiving end. These are “nigger” and “racist.”
While the reactions might be similar, the words certainly aren’t. Here’s why.
Words carry emotions and they perpetuate social structures. Every word has a history, and the word “nigger” carries a particularly ugly emotional history of dehumanization, disadvantage, exploitation, and oppression.
The word “nigger” comes from the word for “black” in various Romance languages (languages descended from Latin, such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese). From the 1500s onwards, it was used to refer to dark-skinned people. People began to use it in a derogatory way in the late 1700s, and over the next several hundred years, it came to be a hate-charged way to talk about slaves. The word “nigger” was shouted to justify the pain and humiliation of slave whippings, slave hunts, cross burnings, and hangings. (Shortform note: Brando Simeo Starkey argues that the word also came to index slaves’ own internalized oppression, in which they believed the lie that they deserved inferior treatment.)
Every time a white person uses this word, they invoke this oppressive, violent history. This applies no matter what their intentions are. The effects of this oppressive history are still with us today. This means that the historical weight of this word hasn’t changed.
As Oluo points out, the fact that a black person can use this word and a white person can’t might seem on the surface like a double standard. And it is a double standard—but the reason it exists is to counteract the effects of a much deeper and more serious double standard in the opposite direction. When used by a white person, the word “nigger” invokes the original double standard whereby black people were abused, dismissed, and treated as subhuman—a situation that we’ve seen still exists today in various forms. When used by a black person, the word doesn’t invoke this same double standard.
We first looked at definitions of racism in Chapter 1. Remember that when we’re deciding whether or not something is racist, we need to include the power structures that support the racist bias. When black people use the N-word, it doesn’t tap into these power structures. And when it does, it taps into them only to subvert them. That’s why who’s using the word matters. (Shortform note: Some black authors, however, argue that if black people investigated the history of the word more thoroughly, they might change their minds about using it too.)
At the Edges of Acceptability
While it’s clear that white people should not casually throw around the N-word, some controversial borderline cases highlight the subtleties surrounding its use. For example, is it okay for a white person to use the word when they’re singing along to the lyrics of a black artist? The majority of linguists and black writers argue that it’s not, some giving the example of white rapper Eminem’s scrupulous avoidance of even euphemisms like “nizzle” when performing the work of black artists.
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates answers a question on similar casual uses of the word by talking about how the words we choose are tied to relationships in all human languages. He gives the example of “bitch”: A friend of his wife’s might affectionately call her “bitch” in a conversation, but that doesn’t give him any desire to do the same, because the word has a particular meaning within that friendship that doesn’t carry over to the marriage. Coates queries the motivation that a white person would have for wanting to use the N-word in the first place: Is it because white people are socialized to believe that everything belongs to them?
Some examples, however, may be instances of overcorrection. For instance, in Spring 2019, a white professor of creative writing was teaching an advanced seminar on James Baldwin. She asked her students to think about why Baldwin’s original use of the N-word had been changed to “negro” in the title of the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro. She was reported by a white student in the class and formally investigated by the school. In 2016, the books To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were removed from some Virginia school curricula and libraries because of a complaint about their use of the N-word.
Black university professor Neal Lester developed a whole college-level class centered around the N-word. As Lester notes, the point of these discussions is not to forbid the word or make it taboo without explaining why. Instead, it’s to make us more sensitive and thoughtful in the way we use language. Instead, it’s “about self-education and self-critique, not trying to control others by telling them what to say or how to think, but rather trying to figure out how we think and how the words we use mirror our thinking.”
For many white people, “racist” is one of the worst insults they can possibly imagine. (Shortform note: For example, when journalist Dawn Butler called Boris Johnson a racist, she was told this was “extremely offensive.”)
Don’t go into conversations about race terrified of being called racist. Go in with the aim to uncover and educate the racist parts of yourself that you already know are there. And remember that getting called racist isn’t as bad as dealing with the actual effects of systemic racism.
If you get called racist:
Reactions to Being Called Out: The “Boots and Sandals” Analogy
Presley Pizzo offers an analogy for thinking about criticism of this type in which she encourages white people to imagine their privilege as a pair of sturdy boots. If you’re wearing boots and someone else is only in sandals, they’ll feel pain if you step on their foot, while you’ll hardly feel anything if they step on yours.
Pizzo asks: If someone says, “Ouch! You’re stepping on my toes,” what do you do? She reframes common responses to being confronted over racist actions in these terms, for example: “I can’t believe you think I’m a toe-stepper! I’m a good person,” “I’d move my foot if you’d ask me more nicely,” and “All toes matter!” Very few people would respond in this way if they’d stepped on someone’s foot because they know doing so would be unacceptable; so, why should responding to an accusation of racism be any different?
Now that you understand the basics about racism, you can start to make connections that weren’t possible before. You can connect the past with the present (Chapter 4), uncovering all of the ways in which our history is still present today. You can connect the present with the future (Chapter 5) and chronicle the ways in which today’s disadvantage will create tomorrow’s injustice. And you can connect the small with the systemic (Chapter 6), looking at how seemingly insignificant events can accumulate to do considerable damage.
Think about some reactions you’ve experienced to the word “racist.”
Think about a time when something you’ve done was called racist. (If you can’t think of one, think of a time when you’ve called someone else out for racist behavior or have seen this happen to someone else.) Describe what happened.
If it was you, how did you react? If it was someone else, how did they react?
What thoughts and feelings did you have at the time? (For example: “I thought the person was overreacting,” “I felt attacked,” “I felt ashamed.”)
Are there any ways that this situation could have been handled better?
If you haven’t been called racist, how do you think you personally will react if that happens in the future? (Will you become defensive? Apologize? Deny? Get offended?) What automatic tendencies will you have to overcome to stay focused on fighting racial injustice?
Our current system of racial inequality didn’t come out of nowhere. We inherit ways of acting and ways of talking that are powerful and often subconscious. (Shortform note: As James Baldwin wrote in 1965, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”)
In this chapter, you’ll see how the history of race in the United States continues to shape its current realities. History is still here, embedded in current behavior patterns. How did this White Supremacist system come to be? Who designed it? Who benefits?
The original function of White Supremacist beliefs wasn’t to make white people feel good. As Oluo points out, it was to justify an economic system built on the theft of indigenous land, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the practice of chattel slavery (slavery systems in which some people are the personal property of others).
The goal of all of this was profit for White America (and white American men in particular). The comfort of one race was built on the pain and discomfort of another. To rationalize the theft, mass murder, and social and economic subjugation, there needed to be a widely held belief that people of color were subhuman. This belief “explained” why actions that would be crimes if a white person did them to other white people were acceptable if the targets were non-whites.
(Shortform note: These views, rooted in a long history of scientific racism, persist. A letter entitled “Are Negroes Closer to Apes Than to Humans?”, sent in 2012 to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, argues that black people should be classified as a different species.)
Slavery meant that the labor of black people did not belong to them. After slavery was abolished, the racist beliefs that sustained it were redeployed to perpetuate unequal economic realities. Oluo lists some of the concrete ways in which people of color still face economic disadvantage:
1) Prejudice from college admissions officers may hobble future employees of color before they even start to study in their chosen field. (Shortform note: One 2018 study showed that a student’s history of racial activism while in high school, and specifically activism that’s anti-racist in nature rather than focusing on racial unity, significantly reduces the email response rate from white college admissions counselors on the question of “Would I be a good fit for your school?”)
2) While Asian Americans are generally well represented on college campuses, they may deal with lower acceptance rates because of a perception that they’re already overrepresented in higher education. (Shortform note: A high-profile lawsuit against Harvard University, initiated in 2014, alleged that the university discriminated against Asian candidates because Asian applicants who had higher academic and extracurricular ratings but lower personal ratings (a more subjective measure) were disproportionately rejected. A federal appeals court cleared Harvard in 2020.)
3) Only 15% of Hispanic Americans and 22% of black Americans have a four-year college degree, meaning that the majority of Hispanic and black Americans are ineligible for white-collar jobs. (Shortform note: Oluo doesn’t provide a comparison figure for white Americans. Based on 2017 statistics published by the American Council on Education, figures for the proportion of people holding a bachelor’s degree or higher are the following:
4) If you have a typical “black-sounding” name, you’re significantly less likely to be called for a job interview than someone whose name sounds white. (Shortform note: A 2003 study found that the effect of race was so strong that white men with a criminal record received more callbacks (17%) than comparably qualified black men with no criminal record (14%). In a 2011 study using Arab names, male candidates with classically white names received double the callbacks of male candidates with Arab names.)
As Oluo points out, this initial difficulty in finding work triggers a cascade of negative economic effects.
5) The net worth of an average white American is 13 times that of an average black American and 10 times that of an average Hispanic American. (Shortform note: Despite perceptions that the wealth gap between black and white Americans is closing, the gap actually tripled between 1984 and 2009. During that period, the median net worth of black Americans rose from $5,781 to $28,500. That of white Americans rose from $90,581 to $265,000. Note that average net wealth estimates can vary across studies due to the differing data collection techniques used.)
6) The poverty rate in Native American communities is more than three times the poverty rate of white Americans. (Shortform note: According to data from the 2018 census, poverty rates by race are as follows:
7) For every white man’s dollar:
These negative economic effects include housing. Some banks, for example, have a history of targeting communities of color through predatory home loans that are designed to end in foreclosures. And houses are worth less in “black neighborhoods,” creating a barrier to mobility out of these neighborhoods. (Shortform note: This problem has worsened, not improved, since the 1980s. In May 2021, a black homeowner in Indianapolis found that when she removed all indications of her race from her house and asked a white friend to stand in for her during an appraisal, the estimated value of the home doubled.)
8) Based on the model minority myth, Asian Americans should be doing well economically. But:
All of this shows that the model minority myth was not created to benefit Asian Americans. Instead it’s based on the appropriation and exploitation of Asian American labor and the erasure of Asian Americans who don’t fit the stereotype.
Oluo states that the original law enforcement agencies in the United States had two functions: to protect white communities from black ones, and to round up slaves who didn’t comply and send them back to their masters. White slave owners had the right to discipline any noncompliant slaves using whatever violent means they saw fit. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the first police forces exercised that same discipline on a wider scale.
Contemporary US police forces began as slave patrols and Night Watches. The Night Watches were based in New England. One of their key functions was to manage Native American and black populations. The Fugitive Slave Act empowered the Night Watches to catch escaped slaves. The Slave Patrols were based in the South. Their job was to hunt down escaped slaves and bring them back to their owners for punishment. (Shortform note: Policing in the northern states was based in municipal police departments modeled on English policing systems, while the Slave Patrols had domestic origins.)
Oluo notes that even after the Civil War, police officers in the South continued to participate in threatening and murderous acts against black populations, carrying out lynchings, physical assaults, and acts of intimidation as members of the Ku Klux Klan. This acrimonious history of the relationship between police officers and communities of color is still with us. Though the vast majority of police officers today no longer consciously see their job as disciplining and controlling populations of color, old racist structures still show through as a pattern of attitudes and practices toward people of color. (Shortform note: As late as the early 1990s, Californian police officers used the acronym NHI (“No Humans Involved”) to talk about cases relating to black men.)
We saw in Chapter 3 that police behavior differs toward whites and people of color in measurable ways. For example, at traffic stops, people of color are more likely to be pulled over, searched, ticketed, and arrested.
As Oluo notes, they’re also more likely to be subject to unnecessary and humiliating disciplinary measures. A 2016 study (reported in the Washington Post) found that over 13 months, in traffic stops in which nobody was arrested, police in Oakland handcuffed 1,466 black people and only 72 white people. Another 2016 study found that black people were 3.6 times more likely than white people to be on the receiving end of physical force from police (hitting, choking, pepper spray, tasers, and guns). (Shortform note: This effect was specific to black people. The same study found that other people of color—people of Hispanic, Asian, and other ethnic backgrounds—were subject to force at rates below those of both blacks and whites.)
One in every three black men and one in every six Latino men go to jail at least once in their lives. Women of color are also disproportionately likely to be incarcerated). (Shortform note: The Washington Post fact-checked the “one in three black men” claim when Bernie Sanders made it in 2015, finding that it was correct in 2001 but that incarceration rates of black men had decreased since. The revised estimate is that one in four black men go to jail at least once. The figure for whites is one in 23.)
Police are part of the community. They share broadly held views that people of color are primitive and dangerous, feeding into an implicit bias against people of color. This bias may be relatively inactive in neutral situations but becomes active in stressful situations, such as police encounters, especially with a person who you’ve learned to see as menacing and unpredictable because of the color of their skin. When a white police officer says that he pulled the trigger because he feared for his life, it’s probably the truth. But, tragically, the menace is often imaginary.
(Shortform note: The effect of stress on activating implicit bias has also been measured in a medical context. Overcrowding of the emergency department, for example, seems to increase doctors’ implicit racial bias scores.)
Muslim Experiences in America
Throughout the book, Oluo goes into detail about the racially charged experiences of black Americans and Asian Americans. However, she doesn’t discuss the experiences of Muslims in the United States, though there seems to be near-universal agreement that this group faces the most discrimination of all.
Islam in America has a long history—it’s estimated that up to 30% of the slaves who were originally brought over from Africa were Muslim. However, as Moroccan immigrant Laila Lalami notes, Muslims are still seen as “unwanted latecomers” to the country, and their sense of belonging in the United States to this day is tenuous. Muslims were particularly demonized following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and Muslim arrivals in the United States were targeted in the “Muslim ban” instituted via a series of contested executive orders in 2017.
During the Trump presidency, there was an increase in expressed xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment and a volume of anti-Muslim hate crimes that exceeded post-9/11 levels. One study found that in the days following anti-Muslim tweets from Trump there were specific spikes in racist tweets, negative cable news coverage of Muslims, and the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded in cities across the United States.
Muslims are regularly targeted in insensitive comments and “jokes” about terrorism, and Muslim political representatives receive a huge volume of hate speech. Despite this, the vast majority of US Muslims are both proud to be Muslim and proud to be American. Muslim Americans are expressing their diverse experiences not only through political activism but also through comics, slam poetry, and music.
Think more about the role of racist history in today’s patterns of inequality.
The historical events and processes that you read about in this chapter are by no means exhaustive. Can you think of another racially charged historical event or situation that wasn’t mentioned?
What echoes of this event or situation can you still see today?
Today’s children of color are tomorrow’s adults of color. That means that any race-based disadvantage they’re facing now will follow them all their lives. This chapter looks at how children of color are affected by systemic racism.
As Oluo points out, the opportunity gap between white students and students of color begins to open up even before they start school. On average, children of color are born into households with fewer resources (for food, internet, and books). They also live in areas with underfunded schools. (Shortform note: Children of color make up 73% of the 11.9 million children currently living in poverty, and The Century Institute calculates that the school funding deficit amounts to over $5,000 per student per year.)
There’s an intergenerational effect of incarceration: Five-year-old boys whose fathers went to jail for the first time when the child was between one and five are less likely to be judged emotionally and behaviorally ready to start school because of difficulties concentrating and controlling their emotions. At age nine, this same group is more likely to be in special education programs. (Shortform note: This study controlled for race, finding that young boys of all races are affected equally when their fathers are incarcerated. However, as we saw earlier, men of color are imprisoned at disproportionate rates, leading to a higher population-level impact on young black boys.)
Preschool teachers are more likely to perceive the play of children of color as aggressive and threatening and to look for challenging behaviors in black children. (Shortform note: This study tracked the eye gazes of teachers who had been told to look for problem behaviors in a video clip of a mixed-race, mixed-gender play group. The teachers gazed longer at black boys. In reality there were no problem behaviors in the video clip.)
Teachers may also lack empathy for children of different races to their own. (This is significant because most preschool teachers are white women.) Inflated perceptions of aggression and relative lack of empathy lead to more suspensions and expulsions of black children, even at preschool level. (Shortform note: Teachers also need to beware of “false empathy,” which is when you assume you have more understanding of another person’s situation than you actually do. This can lead to paternalistic attitudes and is a subtle way of silencing oppressed others and appropriating their voices.)
Black preschool students are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white students. (Shortform note: Yale’s Walter Gilliam, who has been studying preschool expulsions for decades, found that black students are expelled at twice the rate of white students and says that the three biggest risk factors for expulsion—none of which have anything to do with actual behavior—are “big, black, and boy.”)
This disproportionate reaction is what happens when the education system looks at children of color and sees violent, dangerous, unstable future criminals and not normal children learning to regulate their emotions.
Asian American children are the minority kids held up as an example by the White Supremacist mainstream. But Asian American students can be disadvantaged when teachers believe that they don’t need as many academic resources as other kids to be successful. This belief is common among teachers, despite the fact that one third of Asian American elementary school kids are behind their counterparts in reading, writing, and speaking, a delay that’s more common in kids that grow up in non-English-speaking households. (Shortform note: Asian American children were also disproportionately affected during the COVID-19 pandemic, both because of incidents of racial hate and because of the professions of their parents, who are more likely to be essential workers.)
Throughout elementary school, black children are 54 percent less likely to be selected for gifted programs than white children. Children of color are also pathologized at higher rates than white children. They’re more likely to be placed in special education programs, even though they have the same rates of learning disabilities as white children. (Shortform note: This claim is contested, with some findings indicating that when you control for socioeconomic status and test scores, black children are in fact less likely to be identified as needing special education.)
The disproportionate suspensions and expulsions continue in elementary school. Black students are also perceived as more threatening than white students. (Shortform note: Teachers in training have been shown to misperceive anger more frequently in black children than in white children. For example, a 12-year-old black boy was suspended in 2015 for staring at a white girl during a staring contest, an outcome that was confusing to him because she was giggling throughout.)
From early on, parents of color have to prohibit their children from playing with toy guns in the street. Parents of white children don’t have to do this. On one occasion when Oluo’s son went to play at his father’s house, for example, the father had to explain to his son why his white stepbrother was allowed to play with guns outside but he wasn’t. (Shortform note: This conversation is so common in black families in the US that many parents and grandparents see it as a kind of rite of passage for black boys, and avoiding it is a dereliction of the duty of care they have toward their children. As the authors of this Nature article comment, this talk “situates parents as the instructors of an impossible lesson: explaining racism and its imminent dangers to children.”)
Criminalizing Children of Color at School
Black parents’ fear for their children is completely rational: There are numerous cases of teachers being quick to involve the police. One school principal called the police on a black boy who was playing with a fluorescent green and orange toy gun. Another 12-year-old boy was suspended and formally written up for playing with a toy gun during a virtual class. The police also came to his house, terrifying him.
Even science projects aren’t immune. In 2013, black 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention center for fingerprinting after bringing a homemade volcano to school. In 2015, Muslim 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was handcuffed and arrested for bringing in his homemade clock, which teachers assumed was a bomb.
These problems persist in the higher grades. In secondary school, math teachers are more likely to communicate with the parents of children of color (black and Latino) about problem behaviors. They’re also less likely to contact immigrant parents (parents of first-generation Asian and Latino students) about their children’s accomplishments in class. (Shortform note: The same study found that math and English teachers are less likely to contact the parents of Asian students about behavioral and academic issues, potentially leaving serious problems neglected.)
Around eighteen percent of the school population is black, but 31 percent of suspended students and 40 percent of expelled students are black. Black students are suspended at more than three times the rate of white students and Native American students are more than twice as likely as white students to be suspended. Furthermore, black children tend to be suspended for subjective offenses (for example “defiance” or “disrespect”), while white children tend to be suspended for objectively provable reasons (for example truancy, drugs, or violence).
The Effect of Suspensions and Expulsions as Punishment
Punishing children (of any race) by denying them education has long-lasting effects. Suspensions have marked effects on school performance, with suspended students often having to repeat the school year. Many of them decide to drop out of school completely instead, which brings further risk.
In the case of one participant in this study, one suspension had severe long-lasting consequences. Following the suspension, the student’s behavioral problems continued until he was permanently expelled from the school. While expelled, he got into legal difficulties, leaving him both without formal qualifications and with a criminal record. These factors led to the participant struggling to find a job.
White Teachers Have Lower Expectations for Students of Color
Oluo mentions in passing that teachers may have lower expectations for children of color. There’s a significant body of research that backs this up. One study, for example, found that teachers expected 58 percent of their white high school students to complete a bachelor’s degree or higher, but the corresponding figure was only 37 percent for their black students.
These researchers asked two teachers (one white and one black) to evaluate the same students. For the same black student, white teachers were nine percentage points less likely than black teachers to believe that the student would complete a four-year college degree. This effect was even stronger for black male students, where the difference was 11 percentage points. This gap is particularly concerning given that the majority of teachers in schools are white.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about his experiences with low teacher expectations in this video, speculating about all the other potential black astrophysicists who might have been thwarted by racism. These lower expectations do have measurable effects: Positive teacher expectations have been shown to lead to better academic outcomes. Soft feedback may be partially to blame: White teachers have been shown to give less critical feedback to black and Latino students than to white students on the same poor-quality essay. (This is clearly a difficult balancing act for teachers, as they may risk appearing racist if their feedback is too negative.)
The phrase “school-to-prison pipeline” describes the continuity between the overdiscipline of children of color at school and the overpolicing of adults of color. To a degree, the mechanism is obvious: For example, seventy percent of the students arrested in school and referred to law enforcement are black or Latino. This starts a chain of knock-on effects: Young black people who have their first encounter with police in their early teenage years are 11 times more likely to have been arrested by the time they turn 20. (Shortform note: This effect is absent for white teenagers.)
However, other factors that strengthen the school-to-prison pipeline are more subtle. As Oluo points out, children of color spend most of their waking lives in an education system that constantly punishes them, criminalizes them, and searches for ways to remove them. Children’s trust in their teachers and schools is damaged from early on by this unfair and overly severe discipline. (Shortform note: This loss of trust is measurable and is predictive of subsequent negative educational outcomes, including increased school-based discipline and lower college enrollment.)
For some kids, getting expelled isn’t even the worst consequence of being criminalized on the basis of your skin color. On November 22, 2014, Cleveland police arrived at a playground and shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds after arrival for holding a toy gun. When his 14-year-old sister ran over to help him, police tackled her and put her in handcuffs. Steve Loomis, President of the Cleveland Police Union, said later that the boy was oversized and “menacing.”
(Shortform note: Police officers have been shown to judge black children as less innocent and more culpable for their actions than white children, also overestimating the ages of black children aged ten to 17 by approximately three years. Participants in the latter study overestimated the ages of black felony suspects by 4.53 years, meaning that black boys aged only 13 and a half would be perceived as adults. This was even more pronounced in Tamir’s case, with an officer who arrived after the boy had been shot saying that he “looked to be 19 or 20 years old.” The investigation into the Tamir Rice case continued until December 2020, when the Department of Justice concluded that there was insufficient evidence to lay federal charges.)
To end this cycle for the next generation of children of color, Oluo suggests that we can showcase their achievements instead of lamenting disciplinary difficulties. We can discourage racially charged language (“thugs” and “hoodlums”), increase the visibility of black and brown kids when we talk about childhood in general, and encourage schools to address the opportunity gap. (Shortform note: Retaining black teachers is crucial to making black students feel more comfortable at school. This article suggests two ways in which white teachers can support their black colleagues: Becoming aware of racial microaggressions and being willing to engage in emotional labor.)
In Chapter 1, we saw that racism is systemic, and examined how its smaller and seemingly more harmless manifestations are linked at the deepest level to the most aggressive and damaging ones. In this chapter, we’ll look in more detail at why racist incidents are not isolated events.
We’ll look at microaggressions, including tone policing, and cultural appropriation to peer beneath the surface of things that may look trivial at first glance.
Microaggressions are subtle acts of psychological violence against a person because they belong to a marginalized group. Microaggressions can be directed toward any group (can be racist, sexist, transphobic, and so on), but in this guide we’re specifically talking about racist microaggressions.
Microaggressions can appear harmless on the surface, which makes it easy to deny responsibility or say that someone is overreacting. (Shortform note: In fact, this ambiguity makes things even more stressful for people of color. One 2012 study showed that interacting with a white person who showed subtle racial bias impaired the cognitive functioning of black and Latino participants, while interacting with someone who showed obvious racial bias didn’t.)
Racist microaggressions can be verbal (racist jokes, comments, insults, backhanded compliments, and minimizations) or nonverbal (hair touching, purse clutching, following a customer around in a store, locking car doors as someone passes, overzealous airport security checks, and taxis that don’t stop).
Microaggressions can be indirect. For example, they can present as compliments: “Wow, your English is perfect!”, or “Your hair is so wild and crazy! I love it!”, or “You’re so lucky you’re black. You’ll have no problems getting into college.”
Microaggressions can also be unintentional. Often, people genuinely don’t mean them to be offensive. For example, holding your purse closer when a person of color walks past may be an unconscious reflex, and people who ask “Where are you from?” may be showing their genuine curiosity about people from other places.
(Shortform note: As linguist Robin Lakoff notes, the indirectness and ambiguous intentions of these comments make them particularly difficult to parse: The surface layer seems to be positive, or at least innocent, but the underlying assumption is negative.)
Microaggressions are linked to more extreme forms of racism because they’re both manifestations of the same system. Microaggressions reveal implicit bias and racist assumptions that might otherwise stay hidden. (Shortform note: Studies have confirmed this. For example, white people who self-reported as more likely to make a range of microaggressive comments showed significantly more racial prejudice than those who reported that they would not make those comments. The phrase that best predicted feelings of hostility toward black people was “A lot of minorities are too sensitive.”)
As Oluo explains, the effects of microaggressions are cumulative. While any single one might be easily shaken off, they add up they create a burden that makes it difficult to function effectively. (Shortform note: Microaggressions have been shown to affect both the mental and physical health of people of color, including Latino Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. These negative health outcomes include pain, fatigue, increased frequency of heart attacks, and symptoms of depression.)
If you get called out on a microaggression, Oluo suggests that you stop and think. Question whether an unconsciously racist assumption might have been activated. Ask yourself: “Would I have said this to someone of the same race as me?” Remember that racial trauma is cumulative, and what you did is just one incident in a long line of similar incidents. Apologize, even if you don’t fully understand what you did wrong, and seek more information afterwards on why what you did was offensive.
How Can You Tell Whether Something is a Microaggression?
If you’re a white person and you feel unsure about whether you might accidentally commit a microaggression, it’s a good idea to do some research first. This Business Insider article lists 14 common microaggressions, explains why each is damaging, and provides suggestions for what to say instead. (Unsurprisingly, the most common suggestion is “say nothing.”) For example:
Microaggression: “You’re so articulate.”
Problem: This rests on an assumption that people of color will by default be less able to express themselves. It also feeds into assumptions about the intellect and leadership capacity of people of color.
To say instead: Feel free to comment positively on the content of the contribution that the person has made, but refrain from linking this to their personal qualities.
If you’re the victim of a microaggression, Oluo suggests that you state what happened clearly. (For example, “You assumed I don’t speak English.”) You can also ask some awkward questions: “Why would you say that?” or “I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me?” Remind the person that good intentions aren’t a sufficient defense: “If you really have good intentions, you’ll stop saying this to people who look like me.”
Pre-Prepare Some Responses to Microaggressions
The Oregon Center for Educational Equity suggests that you prepare a few responses to future racist comments, because freezing up in these situations is common for both white people and people of color. Their sheet of interruptions provides a range of possible responses (some of which are more appropriate to specific types of situations than others). Suggested interruptions include “That’s not funny to me. It sounds racist,” “That’s curious. It sounded like you just said __,” and “I have no idea if you realize the impact of those words.” The authors suggest that you choose a few, memorize them, and then pull them out if you’re a witness to or the victim of a microaggression and can’t think of anything to say.
As we’ve seen, microaggressions are important because they act as signposts for problematic assumptions.
In addition to this, microaggressions often have a metaphorical component that only becomes evident when we think about them carefully. Small actions can be imbued with symbolic meaning. Two examples of this are hair touching and tone policing.
For Oluo and her friends of color, having people reach out to touch their hair is one of the more common and obnoxious microaggressions. As Oluo notes, some of the reasons why hair touching is inappropriate are practical. It’s unhygienic: Hair is dirty, hands are dirty, and touching someone else’s hair is generally kind of gross. You might also mess up the style. Curls are labor-intensive and time-consuming to create, but easy to destroy with a careless touch.
Other reasons have to do with basic bodily autonomy. Touching someone without their consent is simply not acceptable. We teach our kids this. Would you walk up to someone and touch them on the shoulder just to see what it felt like? So why would you do that to their hair? (Shortform note: One suggested response to unwanted hair touching might be to do the same thing to the other person and see how they like it.)
And some of the reasons are linked to the racist history of this country. Black bodies have been exotic curiosities ever since the first slaves arrived. They were appraised, abused, exploited, and exoticized. Wanting to touch a black woman’s hair because it looks exotic to you is participating in this. And black bodies were considered property. By reaching out to touch someone’s hair without their permission, you’re asserting that that person is yours to touch and play with. (Shortform note: Kalonda Mulamba discusses the history of white people’s oppressive attitudes toward black hair in this Medium article, adding that natural black hair can be seen as a form of resistance to white imperialism.)
Hair Touching: A Pervasive Problem
The hair touching that black women endure is so frequent that it’s regularly mentioned in pop culture. It’s the subject of a song by Solange Knowles and a video game by Momo Pixel. It’s a problem outside the US as well: UK-based speaker, diversity facilitator, and entrepreneur Dr. Mena Fombo, for example, has given a TED talk discussing her experiences of unwanted hair touching.
In her song about this issue, “Don’t Touch My Hair,” Solange Knowles sings:
"They don't understand
What it means to me
Where we chose to go
Where we've been to know"
These lyrics arguably suggest an additional reason why white people shouldn’t touch black women’s hair: because they don’t realize the history and culture that this hair represents.
Oluo also explains the practice of tone policing: a series of strategies that turn the focus of a discussion from what someone is saying to how they’re saying it. Tone policing takes the form of comments like “Okay, calm down,” “Anger won’t get us anywhere,” or “Relax!” (Shortform note: The term “tone policing” became more widely known after a viral explanatory comic was published in 2015 on the Everyday Feminism website.)
As with microaggressions, you might not know you’re tone policing. You might, for example, just think you’re trying to keep the conversation on an even keel. Or you might think you’re simply reminding everyone to be respectful.
But in reality, tone policing paints people’s justifiable emotions about the issues as being distracting or a turnoff. Silencing someone carries the message that they don’t have the right to be heard. And putting conditions on your listening asserts your right to control the behavior of people of color for your own benefit.
As Oluo comments, people often refuse to listen to or engage with a person of color because they’re “inflammatory” or “too angry.” The stereotype of the angry black person makes it easy to minimize or dismiss people who are justifiably angry about their suffering and that of other people of color. If you dismiss this anger, you’re saying that only people of color who prioritize the comfort of white listeners deserve to be listened to. People of color who don’t prioritize white comfort don’t deserve to be listened to. They don’t deserve equality. But, as Oluo argues, equality shouldn’t need to be earned through deference to white people’s emotional needs.
Tracing the Perceived Right to Discipline Tone
The idea that the acceptability of what someone says about race depends on the comfort level of the white listener harks back yet again to the history of slavery: The main priority for the white person is their own comfort, and the main priority for the person of color should be the comfort of the white person.
In Chapter 4, we saw that racist law enforcement practices spring from the idea that black people are to be feared, disciplined, and kept under control. In Chapter 5, we saw that black children are subject to higher rates of discipline than white children. The assumed right to police the tone of people of color is linked to the assumed right to police the behavior of people of color.
This perceived right to discipline and control can present in more subtle ways too. For example, who polices the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable in a conversation about race? Ask yourself: Who has the right to control whom? Who has to bend to whose wishes? Every time you tone police, you’re demonstrating that the White Supremacist system is still intact.
Oluo suggests that when you’re subject to tone policing, you should remember that:
Managing Your Defensive Reactions: Lessons from Crucial Conversations
Though Crucial Conversations doesn’t specifically address tone policing or conversations about race, it does offer some clues about what might be going on when people tone police. The authors of Crucial Conversations argue that we’re not very good at talking about issues that are emotional and high-stakes (and, as we’ve seen, the stakes in conversations about race are very high for both people of color and white people, especially when the white person sees the term “racist” as a threat). The authors argue that we’re bad at having these conversations because visible negative emotions in others trigger our fight-or-flight response, which sends blood out to our limbs and away from the problem-solving part of our brain. We also lack the skills and preparation to manage these conversations well.
Interpreted this way, tone policing may be part of a natural reaction to strong emotions—an attempt to soothe oneself and the other person. But it’s clearly not the ideal response. What are our other options? The authors of Crucial Conversations suggest that we step back and look at the conversation from a different angle. If our brain is stuck spinning its wheels in one particular rut, can we give it a new problem and let it find some traction there? The authors suggest revisiting the common purpose of the conversation as a way to find this distance. They also recommend that you interpret emotion or perceived aggression from others not as an attack but as a signal that the other person doesn’t feel safe. Can you figure out why they might not feel safe? Can you change something about the conversation to make it safer?
If someone is trying to tone police you and you’d like to explain this to them and continue the conversation, you could try the technique of “contrasting”: using two paired statements that reassure the other person and clarify your own purpose. When contrasting, first you state what your intention isn’t. Then you state clearly what your intention is. For example: “I’m not trying to attack you personally here. I just want you to understand how angry I am at the racism I’ve experienced throughout my life.”
Cultural appropriation occurs when members of a dominant culture adopt selected aspects of another culture without respect, background knowledge, or proper attribution.
Cultural appropriation is a controversial topic. It tends to confuse people, and there’s considerable disagreement about it even among people of the same culture.
To explain the impact of cultural appropriation, Oluo gives the example of a white person wearing a Native American war bonnet to a music festival. As she notes, by doing this, that person is trivializing and overriding whole social structures—he’s bypassing the traditional process for choosing a leader to wear these bonnets and claiming the right for himself. (For more information on the careless use of war bonnets, see the box below.)
Oluo also considers the case of a white person who wears dreadlocks because she thinks they look “cool.” By doing this, she’s ignoring the long history of pain and protest that this hairstyle has for communities of color. If she’s complimented on her new hairstyle while a black person is denied a job for the same hairstyle, this highlights the problems with cultural appropriation. (Shortform note: Dreadlocks have multiple cultural origins, so the case for cultural appropriation here may be a little less clear-cut.)
Native American Cultural Appropriation: War Bonnets and Vision Quests
If we look closely at instances of cultural appropriation, we can see that at their heart is always the same thing: the rights to ownership of a culture. If you can take selected elements of a culture and manipulate them for your own benefit, you’re claiming ownership of pieces of that culture. This is a form of theft. One instance in which this theft has been litigated is the lawsuit brought by the Navajo nation against clothing manufacturer Urban Outfitters for a clothing line that included the “Navajo hipster panty.”
As noted above, Oluo gives Native American war bonnets as another example of cultural appropriation. War bonnets have long been common at music festivals and on the heads of celebrities. However, music festivals are slowly beginning to ban them after extended campaigns from Native American scholars and activists. Cherokee nation scholar Adrienne Keene has published a series of blog posts about this issue, arguing that war bonnet trends stereotype, homogenize, and disrespect indigenous cultures. Keene notes in an interview for this Guardian article that many white people believe that they’re “respecting” or “honoring” Native American culture in these situations (she suggests this cartoon as a pithy summary of that argument).
There’s also a burgeoning New Age industry of pseudo-Native American vision quests run by “plastic shamans.” A short story by Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo/African-American writer Rebecca Roanhorse considers the ways in which these “vision quests” perpetuate patterns of cultural theft.
To work out whether or not something is cultural appropriation, you can start with the difference between “appreciation” and “appropriation.” Appreciation is learning all you can about the aspects of a culture that interest you and participating respectfully. Appropriation is perpetuating the exploitative power dynamics that characterize White Supremacy.
Let’s take rap music as an example. Rap can be traced back to the royal griot oral history traditions of West Africa. As Oluo explains, this musical storytelling style came over with the slaves and influenced blues and jazz before evolving into the style we now know as rap. Rap, along with other black music styles, was originally marginalized by the white mainstream. Black artists who performed in segregated clubs weren’t allowed to use the main entrance and were paid far less than white musicians in the same club.
For a long time, white people associated rap and hip-hop with crime and blamed it for social problems. (Shortform note: This argument does not fall completely along racial lines. Black jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, for example, criticized rap on The Washington Post’s Cape Up podcast, calling it a “pipeline of filth”.)
As Oluo chronicles, white people then started imitating rap. They immediately became more famous and more financially successful than their black counterparts, even if they were far less skilled. This white overlay has changed the understanding of what constitutes “good rap,” pushing out talented black artists and making it increasingly difficult for them to succeed.
Nicki Minaj and Amandla Stenberg on Selective Racism in the Arts
It’s a common observation in creative fields that white people seem to feel comfortable taking the easy, fun parts of black culture without engaging with the struggles of black people. Hip-hop artist and rapper Nicki Minaj comments on this tendency in an interview for a New York Times article. To Miley Cyrus, she says: “You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important?...If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle...then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us.”
In a similar vein, in a short 2015 video titled “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows,” actor Amandla Stenberg discusses the phenomenon of white people wearing black hairstyles such as cornrows and asks: “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture?”
As Oluo says, you can do whatever you like. But before you adopt something from another culture, if you want to do it in a respectful way, it’s a good idea to do your research.
How Can I Participate in Cultural Activities but Avoid Cultural Appropriation?
The following list can serve as a starting point for respectful participation in activities that have origins in other cultures:
> * Be honest about your motives. Is this exploitation for personal gain? Or respectful participation?
> * Do you understand the meaning of this practice in the original culture?
> * Are people in the home culture still being discriminated against for this practice? If so, what can you do to increase knowledge and respect around this practice?
> * If someone from the home culture says they’re hurt by what you’re doing, listen to them. Ask them how you can do better.
One example of someone who has adjusted her attitude and practice to avoid cultural appropriation is professional belly dancer Nancy Trunzo. In a post on Trunzo’s website, she discusses her initially hostile reaction to a controversial article by Randa Jarrar called “Why I Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers.” When she learned more about cultural appropriation, Trunzo didn’t stop dancing. She did, however, repackage her dance class offerings, stop performing under an Arabic name, and deliberately include more cultural discussions in her dance classes.
Examine the belief structures hidden in microaggressions.
Most of us have done things or made comments that we thought were innocent, only to find out later that they were offensive. Describe a time that this happened to you. (Perhaps the person on the receiving end let you know that the comment was inappropriate, or perhaps you only found out by reading this book or seeing information elsewhere.)
Identify the hidden belief structures embedded in that comment. What concrete effects do these same beliefs have in people’s lives?
Identify some ways in which you might be participating in cultural appropriation.
What activities do you participate in, items of clothing do you wear, and/or music do you listen to that originated in a non-white culture?
In what ways have you benefited (financially, socially, or otherwise) from these activities? In what ways have other whites benefited? (For example, you might practice yoga, and your membership fee benefits the white studio owner.)
What might you do to offset the effects of this cultural appropriation? (For example, you might learn more about the history of the practice, or confront your biases about the home culture, and/or engage more with members of that culture in your community.)
Now, with the foundations of racism clear and an understanding of the types of higher-level connections we need to look for, let’s look at how to have a conversation about race.
Oluo weaves advice for talking about race throughout the book. We’ve synthesized the key themes and elaborated on them to create a practical how-to guide for having these conversations. Here are the practical nuts and bolts.
Before the conversation starts, do your homework:
(Shortform note: If you’re a white person not sure where to start, there are various sites and articles that can help you educate yourself. They provide resources including:
Check your privilege (Chapter 2). Being aware of your privilege in the area you’re going to talk about will help you avoid ignorant statements and microaggressions.
Seek out different perspectives on the issue. Keep intersectionality in mind. If you’ve already talked to an Asian American man, seek out someone with a different background.
Check that the person wants to talk. Conversations about race are exhausting for people of color, so do everything you can to make the other person feel comfortable. If the other person doesn’t want to talk, or doesn’t want to talk right now, respect that.
1. Clarify and share your intentions, and keep your priorities straight.
2. Listen more than you talk.
3. Be willing to feel uncomfortable.
4. Talk to people of your own race too.
5. Don’t substitute other prejudices for racism.
6. Do what’s right, not what feels good.
Approaching Conversations With the Right Mindset
All of the practical advice above boils down to one thing: Your attitude matters. If you’re a white person entering these conversations, at some point you’ll probably feel torn between two conflicting goals—You want to learn more, but you also want to protect your ego and preserve aspects of your current way of thinking. You can analyze these conflicting goals in terms of the mindset that underlies them.
As Carol Dweck argues in Mindset, you can approach tasks with one of two possible mindsets. In a fixed mindset, you believe that you and others are incapable of meaningful change. Because of this, you tend to expend effort in proving yourself and defending your views and capabilities, and you’re fearful of challenging activities that might reveal you to be less than perfect. In a growth mindset, you believe that you and others are growing, learning, and improving all the time. A growth mindset directs your efforts toward activities that will help you to learn. A growth mindset prompts you to seek out challenges and means that you don’t feel threatened by failure.
Looking again at the seven suggestions above, you can see that several of these are smart ways to trigger a growth mindset. Suggestions 1 and 6 (“Clarify and share your intentions,” “Keep your priorities straight,” and “Do what’s right, not what feels good”) keep you focused on the goal of the conversation and not on your own “performance” within it. Tip 2 (“Listen more than you talk”) encourages you to seek out new information rather than relying on the information and ideas you already have. And Tip 3 (“Be willing to feel uncomfortable”) acknowledges that growth usually happens when you step outside of your comfort zone.
If you’re having a lot of these conversations, it’s almost certain that eventually you’ll make a mistake.
If things really start to go pear-shaped, Oluo suggests that you:
1. Apologize.
2. Decenter your own feelings and intentions.
3. Know when to leave it alone.
4. Don’t castigate yourself for all eternity.
5. Keep trying.
Mistakes and Shame: The Work of Brené Brown
As Oluo notes, if you do make a mistake during a conversation about race, you’ll almost certainly feel bad about it. You may feel angry at yourself for making a misstep—or, you may feel ashamed of yourself for unwittingly participating in the racist system.
If you become wrapped up in shame about your mistake, this may prevent you from being able to respond to the mistake in the healthy and productive ways that Oluo outlines above. As shame researcher Brené Brown notes in her book The Gifts of Imperfection, when we feel ashamed, we often react in unhealthy ways—for instance, by lashing out at other people or distancing ourselves from the person we hurt.
In the context of making a mistake in a conversation about race, neither of these unhealthy approaches to shame is productive. If you lash out at the person of color you’ve already hurt with your mistake, you’re only deepening the wound caused by your racist behavior. Further, if you distance yourself from that person, you’re unlikely to follow Oluo’s recommendations of apologizing or trying to have a productive conversation in the future.
So, how can you stop yourself from reacting to shame unhealthily (and instead implement Oluo’s recommendations for moving past your mistake)? Brown recommends developing shame resilience. This means being able to identify shame as it occurs and move past it in a healthy way. You can develop shame resilience by:
Learning how shame manifests for you so that you can identify and address it
Identifying why you’re feeling ashamed and considering if shame is the most productive response to your behavior
Talking to someone trustworthy about how you’re feeling
Actively resisting the urge to engage in unhealthy shame-triggered behaviors
Decide what conversation you’re going to have first.
What area of racial justice would you like to talk about first? (You could pick an area that you already know quite a bit about, to build confidence, or one that you know little about, to maximize your learning.)
Who are you going to have the conversation with and why?
What do you need to do to prepare for the conversation? (This may include doing some homework, checking your privilege in this area, making sure you’re seeking a range of perspectives, and checking that the person wants to talk.)
Oluo acknowledges that it’s easy to get hooked on the good feeling that comes with having successful conversations about race. But she recommends that you don’t get trapped in a feel-good cycle of saying the right things and doing nothing. It’s what we do after we have the conversations that matters.
Oluo argues that there are many ways you can put your new understanding into action in the political, educational, economic, workplace, and personal spheres. Pick whichever of these suggestions resonate best with you:
Oluo suggests that you:
Vote. And not just in big elections: Vote on school boards, local elections, and so on. Local politics is often where the real change happens.
Vocally support increasing the minimum wage. Proportionately more people of color work in minimum-wage jobs, so increasing the minimum wage will benefit more people of color.
Support affirmative action. Ever since the 1960s, affirmative action has aimed to increase the representation of marginalized groups in higher education and the federal workforce. The people who criticize affirmative action as “unfair” simply don’t know the facts. There have never been any quotas, and the goal representation percentages are often far below actual parity. For example, a Supreme Court decision in 1980 upheld the reservation of ten percent of funds for minority businesses, when the actual minority population was 17 percent. As Oluo points out, affirmative action targets exist to redress a systemic opportunity gap. They’re not back doors or easy ways to get hired.
(Shortform note: If you’re against affirmative action, consider your motivations carefully. A series of studies on reactions to affirmative action—reviewed here—suggest that white people reap psychological benefits by blaming affirmative action for their struggles. For example, if you believe you didn’t get a job because you weren’t good enough, this might damage your ego. If you believe you didn’t get it because you’re white and they were only looking for candidates of color, your ego is protected.)
Approach mayors and local governments about police reform. Ask about policies regarding officer training, body cams, and complaints procedures. Demand reform wherever necessary. Keep applying pressure.
Insist on justice for police shootings. District prosecutors care about their jobs. If they risk losing their jobs because of publicity around their poor handling of police shootings, they’re more likely to follow due process.
Political Actions: Focus on Changing Policy
For Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, political action (in the form of fighting racist policies) should be the main goal of antiracist efforts. Kendi is the founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, which assembles multidisciplinary teams to examine and improve racist policy: for example, policy relating to COVID-19.
Kendi advocates a framework that includes careful policy examination, public education that highlights the racist effects of policies and introduces possible antiracist alternatives, and ultimately the purposeful implementation and evaluation of antiracist policies.
Oluo suggests that you:
Harness the power of your wallet. Remember that economic inequalities are at the core of the White Supremacist system and do what you can to offset this.
Wherever possible, support businesses that are run by people of color. Boycott businesses that take advantage of people of color—steer clear of banks that employ racist lending practices and avoid businesses that rely on low-wage labor from people of color.
Donate to grassroots organizations that are working for change.
Offer compensation when you book a speaker of color. If you are trying to raise racial awareness in your workplace or community and want someone to come in and speak, don’t assume they’ll volunteer their time. Remember that we’re fighting against the economic exploitation of people of color, not participating in it.
Economic Actions: Racial Justice Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game
On an individual level, your choices about how to allocate your money are an either-or proposition (you’re choosing whether to support a business run by a person of color rather than buying the same product from a white-run business, for example).
However, on a national level, it doesn’t work like that. When people of color suffer economically, white people don’t benefit, because the economy as a whole suffers. A 2020 study by Citigroup, for example, found that racist practices have cost the US economy a total of $16 trillion (almost the same amount as the current annual GDP). These losses were mainly due to discriminatory lending practices resulting in lost business revenue; wage shortfalls; insufficient housing loans; and unequal access to higher education.
These researchers estimate that if racist practices in certain key areas were targeted for improvement today, the resulting economic boost over the next five years would be on the order of $5 trillion.
Oluo suggests that you:
Engage with schools. Ask about the opportunity gap in your school district. Find out about the history curriculum. Are there any curricula and textbooks that erase people of color or teach a whitewashed version of history?
Contact teachers and educational leaders to tell them that racial issues are a priority.
If you’re at college, will soon be applying for college, or have a child in either of those situations, contact colleges to find out their policies and track record on diversity and representation.
Educational Actions: Resources for Teachers
While we can’t expect teachers to bear full responsibility for antiracist education, they do have a crucial role. Expert teachers suggest integrating educational material on racism into the curriculum. An increasing number of resources for teachers are available online, often including lesson plans, text, posters, and media resources. Two examples of websites with high-quality resources are Learning for Justice and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Oluo suggests that you:
Become active in your unions. A racially aware union can do a lot for people of color. If you speak up enough in your union over time, people will eventually start listening.
Call out tokenism. If management tries to implement perfunctory, superficial measures that look good but don’t run deep—for instance, hiring one person of color but making no further efforts to diversify the workforce—let them know.
Workplace Actions: Tackling Workplace Racism From a Whole-Company Perspective
In a 2020 article in the Harvard Business Review, Robert Livingston suggests that companies that are serious about tackling racism should engage in a systematic five-step process (acronym PRESS):
Problem awareness. This involves canvassing the staff to find out whether they believe there’s a problem (white employees may not, and may even believe there is anti-white racism—a belief that will jeopardize the success of any initiatives). Formalized diversity initiatives are not enough; these overt declarations can encourage complacency and mask discriminatory practices.
Root-cause analysis. Discerning the root causes of a problem usually involves moving away from band-aid solutions, such as workshops that try to change the behavior of individual employees, and toward addressing the systems and structures that are to blame.
Empathy. In Livingston’s experience, organizations build empathy best when employees have the opportunity to listen to their non-white co-workers’ stories of discrimination. This helps to dispel the myth that racism no longer exists.
Strategy. For maximum effectiveness, leaders need to focus on changing three things simultaneously: individual attitudes, informal workplace culture, and formal policies. These three aspects of company life affect one another, such that failure to move on one of them will cause the others to drag or even backfire.
Sacrifice. Sacrifice means ensuring that the company makes an adequate investment of time, energy, and resources in bringing its strategies to life. Livingston notes that the stumbling block in true organizational change isn’t usually the inability to come up with appropriate strategies; it’s whether the organization is ultimately willing to divert resources toward the change. The good news is, however, that diversity often costs less than people expect.
Oluo suggests that you:
Diversify the art and music you engage with. Mainstream television, film, music, and literature is white by default. Seek out work by people of color, films in which the majority of actors are not white, and books by people of diverse backgrounds.
Watching films and reading books is a great way to listen to people of color without demanding personalized emotional labor.
Personal Actions: Seek Out Books and Films by People of Color
If you’d like to start reading more books by people of color, this Buzzfeed list has a broad range of recommended titles, including books by Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ta-Nahisi Coates. This list, by the Chicago Review of Books, showcases indigenous writers from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada as well as the United States. This list suggests 25 books by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and this list recommends ten novels by or about Muslim Americans.
This list of 17 films is a good entry point into films about being black in the United States. This Vox article lists 11 antiracist films that tackle racism head-on. And on a more romantic note, this list introduces five films about people of color in love around the world, from India to Vanuatu.
Thank you for joining this conversation. Though it may be deeply challenging at times, know that you’re working to create a better future for all of us. (Shortform note: As James Baldwin famously observed: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”)
Please continue to courageously talk, fail, learn, and talk some more. It’s through these difficult conversations that we’ll gradually overcome our racist history, untangle and let go of our own racist assumptions, and put the future on a more just and equal track.
Think about ways you can put your new understanding into practice.
You can take action in the political, economic, educational, workplace, and personal spheres. Pick two of these categories and list some specific things you could do in these categories.
It’s likely that you’ll need some more information before you implement at least some of these changes. How might you go about getting this information?