Summary: Chapters 6–8

Ijeoma Oluo addresses the question “Is police brutality really about race?” She describes her own—terrifying—experiences getting pulled over for minor traffic violations and how Black people routinely let family and friends know when they’ve been pulled over, just in case something bad should happen. She explains that there’s no way for her to even know if a traffic stop is racially motivated, because asking an officer questions carries risk, too. So, she asks, how can people know police brutality is about race? She suggests that police brutality stems from a variety of factors, including power and corruption, that affect all people—but don’t affect all people equally. The data shows that Black people are pulled over more often and are more likely to be searched, ticketed, handcuffed, arrested, pepper sprayed, tasered, choked, and killed than white people. The sheer amount of data tells you that Black people are being targeted by police brutality at rates far higher than those for white people. This reality makes Black people anxious while driving, and the denial of the reality makes them tired. Yet overall, Oluo says, white people generally see the police as a benevolent presence in society, with just a few bad apples.

What accounts for this difference in perspective? Oluo explains that it has its roots in the United States’ early years, in the night patrols—whose job was to control Black and Indigenous populations in the North—and the slave patrols that returned escaped enslaved people to southern enslavers. The Fugitive Slave Act made night patrols into de facto slave patrols, and it is night patrols that developed into police forces. Police during the post-Reconstruction years were often part of the violence against Black people. There has not been a time in the country’s history in which the police did not work to control the Black population in order to protect the white population. With this history, Oluo writes, it should not be unbelievable that Black people distrust the police and are often targeted by them. Modern police may not all dislike Black people, she says, but they are influenced by stereotypes that tell them Black people are more dangerous than white people, and they behave accordingly. This stereotype even affects Black police officers. And it has devastating consequences. This adversarial relationship causes officers to react out of fear when confronted with a tense situation involving people of color. It also means Black people are unlikely to call the police for help—even when help is needed. When people have discussions about police and race, then, they need to take the enormously different perspectives between the white and Black communities into consideration. In short, Black people want to be able to trust police the way white people trust police, and all people need police who deserve that trust.

In Chapter 7, Oluo answers the question “How can I talk about affirmative action?” She describes her own path to a college degree, how that college degree led to a job, and how hard work and dedication led to a promotion. However, the promotion disappeared when a white woman complained that it was because of race. The white woman threatened to sue, and so she got the promotion. Oluo eventually left this company but found that even progressive companies had embedded racist attitudes. Even the world of writing had its own form of racism, as commissioned writing would often go to writers of color but the staff jobs—the jobs with salaries and benefits—still mostly went to white men. As a writer, she knows she’s seen as someone who overcame the odds, but it makes her angry that she’s often the only Black woman present. How many Black and brown children didn’t overcome the odds? “I have been exceptional,” she says, “and I shouldn’t have to be exceptional to be just barely getting by.” Yet despite all of this, people use the idea of “affirmative action” to suggest Black people who are successful are only successful because of the need to hire people of color—even though the opposite is true. Affirmative action, she explains, was a government program meant to address racial gaps in universities and federal agencies. It never included quotas and was in decline by the Reagan years, and today it is so ineffective that numbers of people of color are decreasing. Oluo argues that affirmative action works and that it should be expanded, not stripped away. She says that the benefits of affirmative action are easily documented, so it is easier to discuss. Then she rebuts common arguments against it: it is not needed because society isn’t as racist, you can simply sue racist employers, it makes women and people of color think they don’t need to work as hard, it is unfair to white men, and it doesn’t work. She provides statistics and other data to support her rebuttal of each argument.

Chapter 8 addresses the question “What is the school-to-prison pipeline?” She begins with a story about another Black mother, whose 5-year-old son Sagan acted out in kindergarten and who was, as a consequence, suspended. The letter sent home also suggested there should be charges pressed against him. It was noticeably missing any description of what school educators did to calm the child down or find out why he was having a rough day. This story introduces the school-to-prison pipeline in dramatic fashion; this 5-year-old Black boy had already been accused of assault, suspended from school, and threatened with criminal charges. Often, Black children are characterized as criminals, and in some cases, prosecuted as criminals. Black students are suspended, expelled, and referred to law enforcement at rates far, far higher than those of white students. And so the school-to-prison pipeline begins. The harsh punishments make students distrustful of schools and teachers and harm their self-esteem. The pipeline moves Black and brown students from school to incarceration, contributing to prison populations that are disproportionately Black and brown; one in three Black men and one in six Latino men will serve time in their lifetimes, according to current statistics. Racial bias, a lack of cultural sensitivity, and increased police presence in schools are just some contributing factors to this pattern. Oluo advises bringing the school-to-prison pipeline into discussions of racial inequity, talking with teachers and administrators about the issue, and challenging racial stereotypes as some measures that can help address the problem.

Analysis: Chapters 6–8

In Chapters 6–8 of So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo deals with three topics that might come up in a discussion about race: police brutality, affirmative action, and the school-to-prison pipeline. In each case, she first makes an argument using data and personal experiences. It’s worth asking why persuasive writing is such a key feature of the book. Its prominence suggests that conversations about racism don’t happen—or go poorly—because people have beliefs about racism that aren’t accurate. They may not believe racism really exists or that it isn’t as bad as people say. They may believe there’s some explanation other than systemic racism for police shooting unarmed Black people. They may believe affirmative action isn’t needed, doesn’t work, or puts white people at a disadvantage. So before giving practical advice about how to have a conversation about race, Oluo often presents the case for having the conversation at all.

The personal experiences she describes are harrowing, and there is an urgency and a plea in the way Oluo presents them. “I am scared and I am hurting and we are dying,” she says in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, she says of her own success, “I’m not proud. I’m heartbroken.” In Chapter 8, her shock at realizing that Sagan is only 5 years old is raw and terrible. As a result, part of the persuasiveness of her argument is its use of raw and real emotion to move readers not only to see how they could do better but to want to do better.