Summary: Chapters 3–5

In Chapter 3, “What if I talk about race wrong?” Ijeoma Oluo begins by explaining that even though her white mother had been the subject of racist commentary in their southern community, conversations about race and racism within the family were rare and were brief when they did occur. Oluo says that her mother’s own whiteness had made it hard for her to see the ways racism impacted her children’s lives and made her optimistic about her children’s futures with an optimism based on her white experience. And one day, Oluo had to have a hard conversation with her mother. Among other things, she had to tell her mother that having Black kids does not make a white person understand Black people and their experiences. She says that since that conversation, her mother better understands the role a white person can play in supporting Black people: not proving she understands the Black experience but showing white people how to be better.

Oluo assures her readers that they will definitely mess up these conversations sometimes. But they should still have them. She advises readers to state their intentions for a conversation, keep their emotions in check, and interrogate their own emotional reactions. She exhorts her audience to avoid tone policing and centering themselves in the conversation. It’s more important to do better than to be right, she says. And she cautions against forcing people of color to have conversations about racism. They may choose not to, and that choice should be honored. She also gives several tips for what to do if the conversation goes wrong, including ending the conversation if it is beyond saving. If you said something hurtful, you should apologize and commit to keep trying.

In Chapter 4, Oluo tackles the question “Why am I always being told to ‘check my privilege’?” She describes growing up in the Seattle suburbs, where she and her brother were usually the only Black students in their classes. It was a lonely childhood in many ways. But as an adult, she joined a Facebook group for people of color in the Seattle area. This put her in touch with a community of color in Seattle that felt like “home.” But one day, at a picnic with people from her new community, she was confronted with the uncomfortable reality of her own privilege among people of color—and with the even more uncomfortable reality that she’d been unaware of it. Her new community of successful, artsy people of color had been creating “a hierarchy in a group in desperate need of solidarity.” Realizing her own privilege changed her and the way she went about her work, and it expanded her sense of community. She says she dislikes the way the phrase “check your privilege” is used, but she thinks taking stock of your own privilege—the advantages you have that others don’t—is useful. She explains her own privilege as a neurotypical, nondisabled, college-educated child of a college-educated mother who provided a stable home and stressed the importance of an education. She suggests that looking at our own privilege can be frightening because people see where systems have rewarded us because of our privilege, and this has, in turn, perpetuated a system of privilege that does others harm. People don’t like to think they are harming others. So they don’t want to check their privilege. But when they do check their privilege, they can find areas where they have privilege and others experience oppression—and it is in these areas where they have opportunities to bring about change. She suggests listing all one’s areas of privilege and then seeking to learn from people who do not have one’s same privileges. She also offers practical ways that people can use their privilege once they have identified it.

In Chapter 5, Oluo turns to the question “What is intersectionality and why do I need it?” She relates a story about a time she posted an angry tweet about a certain Black musician who was believed to have abused young Black women and teen girls. For this tweet, she was accused of hating Black men. Black men and women accused her of taking the side of white oppressors by calling out a Black man’s sexually predatory behavior. She points out that Black women face a different set of oppressions due to being both Black and women. This is intersectionality: a belief that, in order to work for true justice, “our social justice movements must consider all of the intersections of identity, privilege, and oppression” experienced by different individuals and groups and work to address them. In discussions about race, therefore, people must be mindful of the many ways a person’s privileges and oppressions combine in different ways to both amplify harms and mitigate them. She points out that people carry all their identities with them all the time and that therefore all social justice efforts need to take the intersections of these identities into account. While there are numerous reasons why intersectionality is often overlooked in social justice movements, she explains, it is worth putting in the effort to change this, as it will make all social justice efforts more effective.

Analysis: Chapters 3–5

Chapters 3–4 of Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race focus on two main topics: the fear people have of talking about race “wrong” and discomfort with the idea of being privileged. Both chapters help readers consider their own relationship to race and racism. They are meant to prompt readers to take stock of their own anxieties and privileges in order to prepare them to have productive conversations about race. Taking a look at one’s own fear—and how this fear might be an obstacle to frank conversations—is a necessary first step. Using a difficult conversation with her mother, Oluo shows that yes, sometimes you may talk about race wrong, but even this can be an opportunity to learn and do better. She uses another personal illustration to demonstrate how checking your own privilege can be similarly uncomfortable and yet can provide even more opportunities to learn and do better. This is an important point that Oluo will make throughout the book: talking about race is bound to be hard, but people should see its difficulty as an opportunity, not as a reason to avoid it.

Oluo then examines privilege and all its facets before shifting her focus to intersectionality in Chapter 5. The same way one person can experience a combination of different kinds of privilege, one person can experience a combination of different types of oppression. Again, she uses a personal example to show why intersectionality is important to any conversation about race—because racism will be experienced in different ways by different individuals depending on their other marginalized identities and their privileges.