So You Want to Talk About Race

Oluo recalls her school days: when Oluo is seven, her family lives with another family in a tiny apartment, and her mother struggles to make ends meet. Their electricity and water are disconnected, and they have to sneak into an empty show apartment down the hall to shower and cook food. Eventually, Oluo’s mother becomes eligible for university housing, and they move—Oluo moves around a lot in her childhood. Teachers perceive her strong academic record as “rare” among black students. Her brother Aham is also very talented but struggles in school because he’s emotional and energetic, and teachers interpret his behavior as aggressive. Soon, students begin bullying Aham. He develops daily panic attacks and drops out of school.

Oluo winds up divorced with a toddler at 22. She knows (from her mother) that education is her only chance of escaping poverty. She moves away, gets loans for college, and puts herself through school—as the only black person in her classes—while raising her son alone. She remembers feeling exhausted and isolated. Nonetheless, Oluo graduates, finds a job, and dives in with gusto. One day, Oluo is told she’s getting a promotion, but her boss has to withdraw the offer because a white woman complains that Oluo is being promoted because she’s black.

Oluo switches departments. She’s the only black woman in a new team, and people make suggestive jokes about her body. Oluo learns that her black and Latinx colleagues earn a lot less than others, and she quits. At Oluo’s next job, people think that her enthusiasm makes her “loud” and “opinionated.” The company sends around an employee satisfaction survey and brainstorms ways to improve—except the directors assume that employees who criticize the lack of promotions among people of color “didn’t understand the question.” Over time, Oluo becomes “lonely and disheartened” as the only black woman in her division, so she starts a blog to help with her loneliness.

Oluo luckily finds herself writing during a time when media outlets are seeking black and brown voices. Publications (usually run by white men) start approaching her to contribute unpaid or low-paid articles. The publications’ bylines become more diverse, but their staffed positions (with living wages and health insurance) don’t. Eventually, Oluo quits her day job, starts hustling, and manages to eke out a career as a writer. She’s proud, of course, but she’s also angry. When she looks around, she’s still the only black woman in the room, and she wonders what happened to the others that were left behind.

Oluo wonders about the all the black and brown kids who were treated as difficult instead of talented and wound up in juvenile detention. She wonders about every queer person and every disabled person who can’t be in the room with her, and she feels like her heart is broken. Oluo feels that people who are marginalized (like people of color, disabled people, single mothers, and non-heterosexual people) have to be better than everybody else just to get noticed—and even then, they’ll likely just barely manage to eke out a living. 

Oluo thinks affirmative action isn’t well understood in society. The concept was introduced by President Kennedy in the 1960s to force federal employers and educators to reduce opportunity disparities for people of color that resulted from of hundreds of years of racial and gender discrimination. The Supreme Court struck down efforts to enforce quotas to measure improvement. By the 1980s, when Reagan was elected, most conservatives declared affirmative action “no longer necessary” and began to defund it. Oluo thinks affirmative action should be expanded to cover other marginalized groups because it works—though not as well as it should—and this should matter to people who “value equality and diversity.” Yet many people still believe that affirmative action is unjust.

Oluo summarizes some of the arguments commonly used against affirmative actions: first, some people argue that affirmative action isn’t needed because society has progressed beyond the racism and sexism of the past. Oluo acknowledges that it’s hard to quantify racism and sexism but argues that statistics show that disparities still exist. Since Reagan’s cuts began, the wage gap for black men has stayed the same, and the wage gap for Hispanic men has worsened “from 71 to 69 cents for every dollar made by a white man.” Grade school education studies show that teachers are more likely to look for problem behavior in (and suspend) black children. Black and Hispanic students are still underrepresented in universities by 20 percent.

Second, some think that people of color can just sue racist or sexist employers. Oluo notes that technically, an employer can fire someone for any reason—so without a paper trail proving discrimination, there’s actually not much an employee can do. Since salaries are kept confidential, wage gaps also often go undetected. It’s also harder for people of color and women to make it through the interview process in the first place.

Third, people argue that affirmative makes people of color and women lazier than white men. Fourth, people think that affirmative action is unfair because it takes opportunities away from white men. Oluo sighs and notes that people of color and women are striving for an equal opportunity, which they don’t have yet. Finally, some simply deny that affirmative action works, which Oluo says just isn’t true. Multiple studies show that affirmative action increases the proportion of people of color in schools and public sector jobs. Moreover, these arguments all focus on race, yet white women have been the largest recipients of affirmative action so far.

Oluo concludes that affirmative action can improve the  economic prospects of women and people of color. But even so, it’s still just  “a Band-Aid on [the] festering sore” of systemic racism. Oluo agrees with Michelle Alexander that the only problem with affirmative action is the false belief that it will be enough to achieve racial justice. Oluo says there’s a tough  ahead.