So You Want to Talk About Race summary

Oluo was 34 the first time she had a serious conversation about race with her mother, who is white. Her mom explained that she’d told her coworkers a joke with a “Black punchline.” One of them – a Black man – asked her, “What do you know about being Black?”

Oluo’s mother was angry at her coworker at first – after all, she had three Black children! But she restrained herself. She told Oluo that she intended to let him know that she understood where he was coming from because members of her own family were Black.

A common phrase in social justice language that’s often met with an eye roll is “check your privilege.” Very few people actually know what privilege is, though – or how exactly they should go about “checking it.”

Checking your privilege means questioning when you receive benefits denied to others, even if that means giving up those benefits. It requires you to stop and consider not only how your perspective and actions have been shaped by the advantages you’ve had in life, but also the struggles you’ve avoided. 

In 2015, Oluo was driving with her two brothers when a cop pulled her over for being 1 mph over the speed limit. Witnesses are the main defense Black people have against police brutality, so Oluo fearfully tweeted, “Just got pulled over for driving while Black. Here’s hoping I get out of it safely.”

In the end, she was only issued a ticket – but in response to the tweet, she received a flood of messages. These ranged from people sharing their own stories of “driving while Black” to others questioning why she assumed it was about race in the first place. 

In order to succeed in our society, marginalized people must clear hurdles unimaginable to others. Oluo experienced this firsthand, growing up poor and attending underfunded schools. 

When she overcame the challenges those disadvantages brought and got her first job after college, Oluo volunteered for special projects and worked overtime without pay to learn new skills. Her supervisor acknowledged her efforts with a promotion – but then abruptly rescinded it. Strange.

Oluo’s brother Aham wasn’t as lucky as she was in school. As an emotional and energetic child, he was targeted by teachers who misinterpreted his energy as aggression. After one teacher implemented a misguided classroom reward system that required students to “pay rent” on their desks, Aham – who was constantly being disciplined for his bursts of energy – couldn’t “afford” it. So he sat on the floor, and the other students taunted him. At school, he became known as “the homeless kid.”

Perhaps the teacher didn’t know Aham had actually been homeless at times. But after this episode, he didn’t make friends for years, had daily panic attacks, and eventually dropped out of high school. 

Many people don’t understand why they shouldn’t use the n-word. A central, flawed argument on the topic asks: “Since many Black people use it, why can’t people of other races do so, too?”

A foundational response to this question is that all oppression begins with words. Language is how we process the world, and from the 1700s on, the n-word was used as a slur to dehumanize and express hatred of Black people. It was shouted at enslaved people, it was uttered when people spat at lynched Black bodies, and it helped establish and perpetuate oppression and inequality.

In school and popular culture, Americans are taught that there are two ways to approach the struggle for racial justice: the “nonviolent” approach favored by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and the “by any means necessary” approach advocated by Malcolm X. The perception is that if you’re a “Martin,” you promote love, equality, and pacifism – so your cause is acceptable. If you’re a “Malcolm,” you’re too angry and bitter – and your cause is unacceptable.

In her earlier writings about race, Oluo’s style was deemed more Malcolm than Martin. She was often told that the reason race relations had become a discursive topic in the first place was because of people like her, who were too “loud” and “inconvenient.” 

Oluo grew up in the 1980s with the Cosby family on TV and the promise that racism was outdated. The message was, if you kept your head down and worked hard, you wouldn’t be denied opportunities based on the color of your skin. Then came the crack epidemic and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which accelerated the criminalization and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people. 

One of the effects of this is that young people are now denouncing a system so focused on exceptionalism that it allowed for the criminalization, incarceration, and murder of those deemed “less exceptional.”