Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a moving account of the deep emotional burden of racism in the United States. Oluo shows how racist encounters trigger feelings of hurt, shame, and anger in people of color, which compound old wounds that never have a chance to heal. She thinks that insensitivity to racial pain is one of the biggest reasons why conversations about racism go wrong or end in disaster. In addition, many white people face feelings of pain and shame when confronted with their own (often unintended) racism, which can also derail conversations about race. To help this situation, Oluo lays out strategies for navigating emotions during conversations about race. Broadly, Oluo recommends that people who are unintentionally racist acknowledge (rather than dismiss) the pain they’ve caused and remember that there is a shared common goal of challenging oppression. This approach, Oluo argues, will make conversations about racism less divisive and more productive.
Throughout her book, Oluo emphasizes the heavy emotional impact of experiencing racism in order to show how people of color grapple with feelings of hurt, anger, and shame on a daily basis. Because people of color face racial pain so often, racial jabs often dig further into pre-existing hurt and have a much larger effect than is often apparent. Even seemingly harmless questions like asking someone where they’re “really” from or cracking a joke about somebody’s hair can be much more damaging than they seem. Oluo says that people of color experience these kinds of microaggressions so often than each new one is like punching somebody in a place where they already have a bruise. People of color also won’t (or can’t) always communicate their pain, especially if they don’t feel safe to do so, meaning that it’s often overlooked. Communicating pain also requires a lot of emotional labor that often goes unacknowledged. When people of color do address their pain, Oluo thinks that it’s important not to “tone police” them (ask them to be less angry) or demand a debate, since this asks for “more emotional labor from somebody who is already hurt.” It also shifts the focus of discussion away from addressing a person’s oppression. As Oluo puts it, asking somebody to adjust their tone or be less hostile is like asking them to focus on communicating in a way that “you approve” of.
Oluo thinks that ignoring or dismissing someone’s racial pain often leads to conflict in conversations about race. Her advice is to always acknowledge racial pain, even if it’s hard to understand. Oluo explains that some aspects of a person of color’s lived experience will simply be inaccessible to others. It can be easy for a person to dismiss feelings they don’t personally experience, or to become defensive about meaning well, but Oluo thinks that these reactions are counterproductive. She argues that hurting somebody by accident still causes pain. The best thing to do in such situations is to acknowledge the pain caused, even if it was unintended. It’s important to remember, Oluo says, that hurt, anger, and pain are “are natural reactions to the unnatural system of racial oppression.”
Oluo argues that white people can also experience painful feelings when confronted with their own racism—especially if their racism is unintentional—which can derail conversations about race as well. Oluo thinks that many people are racist without realizing it, because they’re inevitably influenced by a culture that’s saturated with white supremacist narratives. Confronting unexpected feelings of shame about accidentally racist behavior can make people uncomfortable and defensive. In such instances, Oluo suggests that remembering to focus on the shared goal of combatting oppression (being an ally) rather than trying to avoid discomfort (say, by laughing something off) or lashing out in defense. Ultimately, Oluo argues that confronting racial pain—by calling out the racism of others and by recognizing one’s own racism—isn’t easy, but it’s important. Learning to navigate that pain in constructive ways is thus an important part of having conversations about race.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Confronting Racial Pain ThemeTracker
Confronting Racial Pain Quotes in So You Want to Talk About Race
I remember saying once that if I stopped to feel, really feel, the pain of racism I encountered, I would start screaming and never stop.
I'm ranting now, I'm talking fast to get it all out. Not because I’m angry, because I’m not, really. I know it's not my friend’s fault that what he’s saying is the prevailing narrative, and that it's seen as the compassionate narrative. But it’s a narrative that hurts me, and so many other people of color.
It is about race if a person of color thinks it’s about race.
“You can’t just go around calling anything racist. Save that word for the big stuff. You know, for Nazis and cross burnings and lynchings. You’re just going to turn people off if you use such inflammatory language.”
“I’m just going to go to him tomorrow and explain that I have three black kids and I understand where he’s corning from.”
When you are supposed to be fighting the evils of “the man” you don't want to realize that you've become “the man” within your own movement.
[W]hen I look at the school-to-prison pipeline, the biggest tragedy to me is the loss of childhood joy.
We couldn’t say, in front of Nick and Amy, “The kids all called us niggers and your children laughed.” So we just sat silently and I tried not to cry.
A lot of people want to skip ahead to the finish line of racial harmony. Past all this unpleasantness to a place where all wounds are healed and the past is laid to rest.
But instead what I was standing in front of in that airport was a caricature of my culture. A caricature of the vibrant decorations and festive music. Everything I'd loved about African food had been skinned and draped around the shoulders of a glorified McDonalds.
Some modern and fairly well known examples of cultural appropriation by the dominant white culture in the West are things like the use of American Indian headdresses as casual fashion, the use of the bindi as an accessory, the adoption of belly-dancing into fitness routines, and basically every single “ethnic” Halloween costume.
“I’m glad it's not one of those weaves […] Those are so expensive and really bad for your hair.”
Don't force people to acknowledge your good intentions.
The director looked at me pleadingly. He didn't need training. He knew a lot of black people. He grew up with black people. He was practically black himself. He just needed to talk. With me. He repeatedly insisted that if I could just sit with him in a bar and talk this out with him, whatever had caused him to drunkenly repeat “nigger” at a dinner table surrounded by people of color would never happen again. But I did not want to talk with this man, especially not over drinks […] I wanted this man to take some action for change.
