Over the past two weeks, I have been listening to Ijeoma Oluo’s “So You Want to Talk About Race” in audiobook form. The biggest issue with buying this as an audiobook is that now I’m going to be compelled to buy a physical copy – to highlight, add post-it notes to – and as needed, beat people over the head with until they get it.
I have a lot of conversations with thoughtful people about many issues of politics, including racial justice. Oftentimes, I have felt like I’m treading in quicksand in these conversations – not because I feel lost, but because I feel like there’s no good basis on which we’re having the conversation.
Over and over, in this book, I found that the words I needed were there. For discussing issues of racism, I now have words to redirect the conversation to be about structural racism. For conversations about microaggressions, I now have the language to bring these things to the front of conversations. For how to feel when I’ve been called out for being racist in something I’ve said – which is sadly true more often than I’d like – I now have a way to process this information.
Hearing Ijeoma’s words in describing how it felt to be in a space where she felt truly represented for the first time made me cry. Hearing her discuss the successes she’s had in building her communities up together made me happy – to imagine that we can do better, we can improve. Hearing her discuss the full range of thoughtless racist behaviors – many of which I have been guilty of in the past, and likely will be again – was eye-opening.
At one point in the car, my daughter Julie heard the reader say “If you are born white in a white supremacist society, you are going to be racist. If you are not living in poverty in a capitalist society, you are going to be classist.” She asked “What does she mean, I’m classist?” I asked her to wait a moment, and we listened to the rest of the chapter together. As it was explained that these things – the little decisions we make, the feelings we have, the choices we have in front of us – are all influenced by that society in which we live, in ways that we have no way of preventing, Julie nodded her head and said “oh, right, that.”
(I will admit I found it amusing that Julie objected to ‘classist’ and not ‘racist’ – it speaks to the fact that she already recognized that being racist in a white supremacist society is the default for white folks. I guess I’m doing something right!)
This book is good. Everyone who wants to be involved in these conversations – and I know many of my friends do want to be involved – should read this book. It is an excellent starting point that gives you the basic building blocks to build on conversations of racial justice – the tools you need to both talk about the work to be done, and to get started on doing the work.
The first two chapters, as well as a set of links to buy, are available from Hatchette Books. If you are at all interested in doing the work of racial justice – please consider giving this book a read. (And once my physical copy gets here, I’ll happily lend it to anyone who wants to borrow it.)