Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in So You Want to Talk About Race, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Privilege, and White Supremacy
Confronting Racial Pain
Intersectionality, Oppression, and Social Justice
Cultural Appropriation
Summary
Analysis
As a child, Oluo is taught that Martin Luther King was a nonviolent person who didn’t see color while Malcolm X was full of hatred for white people. Teachers and popular culture depict Martin Luther King’s death as a tragedy but Malcolm X’s death as what happens to angry black people, even though both were murdered for their common goal of fighting racial injustice. People often call out Oluo’s anger against white supremacy—like that of Malcolm X, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson—as destructive to race relations in the U.S. Yet in his lifetime, people also considered Martin Luther King dangerous and harassed, assaulted, and murdered him. Oluo feels that people’s anger is always seen as too much if it threatens white supremacy.
Oluo revisits the topic anger triggered racism. Oluo argues here that systemic channels in U.S society (like education and the media) teach Americans to believe that when people of color feel angry, they’re expressing their hatred of white people or being counterproductive. However, Oluo thinks that the anger of oppressed people is rarely (if ever) unjustified. Oluo thinks that the system tries to reframe justified anger as unjustified hatred precisely because anger motivates people to act and fight the system, and that’s a genuine threat to white supremacy.
Themes
For hundreds of years, black people have been told that they will achieve equality by being nice, which to Oluo, sounds like saying black people need to earn their humanity. But, she reasons, if you believe in racial equality, you don’t exclude people just because you don’t like their tone. To Oluo, tone-policing happens when a privileged person shifts the focus of the conversation away from the topic of oppression and focuses instead on the way it is being communicated. It’s effectively a tool to prioritize the comfort of the privileged person in the situation. But oppressed people grapple with intense emotional trauma, and they aren’t always able to discuss their pain in a neutral or unemotional way.
Oluo shifts to addressing anger in personal—rather than systemic—contexts. Oluo implies that asking a person of color to stifle their anger—or change their “tone”—is discriminatory. She thinks it puts an unfair emotional burden on the oppressed person who’s already at a disadvantage. To Oluo, the privileged person effectively decides that their own comfort is more important than the other’s person’s need to express their legitimate anger.
Themes
Oluo argues that policing someone’s tone is a way of asserting dominance. A privileged person actually increases the disadvantage of an oppressed person by demanding that they communicate in specific ways. The privileged person shifts the focus from fighting oppression to earning their approval. Oluo recommends that if you don’t like the way somebody is fighting racial oppression, remember that it’s not about you or your approval, it’s about racial justice—try to keep your focus on the common goal.
Oluo also thinks that making demands about a person’s tone is counterproductive, as it shifts the focus of a conversation away from the core issue—racism—and toward policing the angry person’s behavior. She reminds the reader that the racism a person of color experiences is the target—not the justifiable anger they express.
Themes
Oluo offers some strategies for white people who want to avoid tone-policing. She say that your privilege keeps you from understanding the full pain of systemic racism, but it’s still real. Don’t distract, deflect, or forget your goal of ending systemic oppression. Instead, drop your prerequisites—you shouldn’t demand that oppression be fought in a way that’s appealing to you. Walk away if you have to, but try to build a tolerance for discomfort and remember that it’s not about your feelings. Finally, remember that you’re not doing anyone a favor, you’re doing what’s right.
Oluo reminds the reader that privileged people often feel uncomfortable in conversations about race. But, as before, the essential point she pushes is that trying to reduce one’s own discomfort is unfair. Everybody feels pain when talking about racism. People who want to fight systemic racism thus need to embrace—rather than resist—uncomfortable feelings rather than try to police an oppressed person further to make the conversation easier for themselves.
Themes
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Oluo also offers advice for people of color who are being shamed for their tone. She says that these are natural reactions to oppression. Oluo continues, saying that people of color don’t have to earn equality and justice, they already deserve it. She tells her readers of color that they matter, that they deserve to speak their truth, and that they have the right to be heard. Oluo reminds all her readers that the fight against racial oppression entails discomfort, but it’s worth it. If you live in a white supremacist society, Oluo concludes, “you are either fighting the system, or you are complicit.” There’s no neutral ground, and you can’t just opt out.
Oluo now addresses people of color by restating her central point: that anger is a legitimate, justified, and “natural” response to an extremely “unnatural” situation: oppression. Oluo ultimately argues that that experiencing difficult feelings isn’t easy, but avoiding them is actively racist: people who shy away from the topic of racism to avoid feeling uncomfortable allow a racist system to stay in place and ruin innocent people’s lives, which makes them “complicit” (or partially responsible for the pain the system causes because they let it continue to exist).
Themes
