Ijeoma Oluo

Ijeoma Oluo—who identifies as a black, queer woman—was born to a black father from Nigeria and a white mother. Oluo’s book, So You Want to Talk about Race, addresses many aspects of her childhood and upbringing. Oluo describes growing up poor in the United States, often living without access to electricity or water and suffering from food insecurity. Many of her childhood memories center on her experiences with poverty and racism. Oluo put herself through university as a divorced single mother, graduating with a degree in political science from Western Washington University at the age of 27. She subsequently worked in technology and digital marketing while running a food blog on the side from Seattle, Washington. After the death of Tamir Rice—a 12-year-old black boy (the same age as Oluo’s own son) who was shot and killed by police in 2014 while playing with a toy gun—Oluo began writing about racism on her blog. She garnered notoriety on both Twitter and Facebook for her unapologetic views on racial injustice in the United States. Oluo’s rising social media profile caught the attention of several mainstream media outlets, and she began writing articles for publications including The Guardian, The Stranger, Jezebel, and Medium. She is an outspoken critic of racism and sexism in mainstream publishing, particularly when it comes to the erasure of the black female voice. Oluo was initially reluctant to take on the emotional labor of a large-scale project about painful topics like racial slurs and police brutality when publishers offered her a book contract, but she agreed to do so after support for the project poured in from people of color on social media. So You Want to Talk about Race was published in 2018. The book garnered significant acclaim—notably from The New York Times, Bustle, and Harper’s Bazaar—for its no-holds-barred approach to racism. A hallmark of Oluo’s writing is use of personal anecdotes—typically about racially charged situations in her day-to-day life—which she leverages to expose deeper, systemic problems with racism in U.S. society.