Personal experience means that Oluo has had conversations about race her entire life, and she recognizes how utterly exhausting it is to be “the black friend” or to have to coexist in a majority-white environment. In her introduction, Oluo sets up her experience growing up in a racially marked body in America, from the micro-aggressions that populate her daily life to the pleasures of Jollof rice, family, and the glories of black culture - things like jazz, Toni Morrison, hair braiders, and sweet potato pie.īut in this book, she’s not writing to celebrate, she’s writing to educate and to fight back against this fact: “It is very hard to survive as a woman of color in this world and I remember saying once that if I stopped to feel, really feel, the pain of the racism I encountered, I would start screaming and I would never ever stop.” But what makes So You Want to Talk About Race such a strong addition to books that address race is that the author also turns her eye toward much more complex issues like intersectionality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and cultural appropriation with wit and heart. The book is divided into chapters that tackle issues such as the myth that class is a bigger problem than race or what racism and micro-aggressions actually are. While white readers are going to gain insight on hard-to-understand-unless-you’ve-lived-it topics in So You Want to Talk About Race, readers of color generally will find camaraderie and a resource in Ijeoma Oluo’s conversational approach to race, racism, and racial violence in America.

So you want to talk about