Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race
Part 1

3,395 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Ijeoma Oluo has been an up and coming commentator since her breakout moment during the Rachel Dolezal brouhaha. Among a number of topics in her journalistic career, her major specialty is writing about being black. (Of course, right?) Her first book, published in 2018, is So You Want to Talk About Race.

Her brother Ahamefule provided some biographical details in an article with the evocative title “My Father Is an African Immigrant and My Mother Is a White Girl from Kansas and I Am Not the President of the United States.” He’s a musician, though I think he missed his true calling, since he writes better than his sister. By Ahamefule’s account, the Nigerian paterfamilias flew the coop when he and Ijeoma were still infants. (According to the book, they struggled with extreme poverty as young children, even to the point of homelessness. Was the child support in arrears?) The next time they heard from their father was a phone call 16 years later. It’s nice that, at long last, he finally remembered that he had kids.

Although abandoned by her African father in early childhood, it’s pretty clear which race Ijeoma identifies with and which she considers villainous. (Of course, right?). It seems that mixed-race people who prefer the white side of their heritage are hardly more common than famous Congoid mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. All too often, they become stridently anti-white, especially when they’re part African. (This is yet another reason why race-mixing is bad.) It makes no difference to their allegiances if, as usually happens, they were raised by long-suffering white single mothers while their fathers made little to no contribution to their upbringing. For example, when the American public elected Barack Obama, many hoped for a unifying figure who would heal the divisions between the races. They may have assumed that The Lightworker’s mixed heritage meant he felt affection for both races, but instead his administration left tensions remarkably worse, leading up to our present racial powderkeg.

What the critics say

On Amazon’s listing, 94% of customer ratings thus far gave So You Want to Talk About Race four or five stars. Surely it’s outstanding, then! In the book reviews section, it has some one-liners recommending it. One is from the august publication Bitch (perhaps an apt summary of their content), calling it “[a] guidebook for those who want to confront racism and white supremacy in their everyday lives, but are unsure where to start.” Sweet! I can hardly wait!

Another is by Lindy West, a tubby feminist who my former editor wryly described as a professional typist:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a writer have such an instant, visceral, electric impact on readers. Ijeoma Oluo’s intellectual clarity and moral sure-footedness make her the kind of unstoppable force that obliterates the very concept of immovable objects.

Lindy West happens to be the author’s sister-in-law, having married Ijeoma’s little brother Ahamefule in 2015. Small world, isn’t it?

Other than that, the book did make the New York Times bestseller list, even claiming the #2 spot in 2020 following the martyrdom of St. George Fentanyl. Moreover, Publisher’s Weekly recommends it:

She’s insightful and trenchant but not preachy, and her advice is valid. For some it may be eye-opening. It’s a topical book in a time when racial tensions are on the rise.

Insightful and trenchant, but not preachy? Whew! I was getting a little worried for a while. It’s great to get some reassurance here.

Surely there must be something to the book then, right? I’ve even heard that So You Want to Talk About Race has been used by the American military as a part of their thought reform program, but I haven’t been able to confirm it. If not, it would be a fine idea, since soldiers have too much insensitivity. For that matter, the military seems to suffer greatly from toxic masculinity, especially their highly problematic obsession with weapons and violence. Isn’t it time to defund the military, anyway? They’re awfully expensive and just cause trouble.

Introduction

Ijeoma Oluo | So You Want to Talk About Race | Talks at Google

The book starts off jumping right into the action:

As a black woman, race has always been a prominent part of my life. I have never been able to escape the fact that I am a black woman in a white supremacist country. My blackness is woven into how I dress each morning, what bars I feel comfortable going to, what music I enjoy, what neighborhoods I hang out in. The realities of race have not always been welcome in my life, but they have always been there. When I was a young child it was the constant questions of why I was so dark while my mom was so white — was I adopted?

A barrage of complaining follows, including about “clothes not cut for my shape.” There is a wide variety of clothing sizes and styles on the market, so what could the problem be? Is African skeletal structure really so different, other than cranial morphology? Could it be a booty thing? Carleton S. Coon’s work mentions steatopygia as a Capoid trait, but it shouldn’t be common in Congoids. Anyway, as much as blacks delight in kvetching about how tough it is to be black — a favorite pastime of theirs, in fact — the gripe about clothing not fitting is a new one to me. It may even be a hapax legomena in the canon of Afro-dyspepsia. Perhaps a gym membership would make the problem go away. Either that, or she can buy larger trousers.

That said, the black experience is not entirely a bust. The second paragraph begins:

But race has also been countless hours spent marveling at our history. Evenings spent dancing and cheering to jazz and rap and R&B. Cookouts with ribs and potato salad and sweet potato pie. It has been hands of women braiding my hair. It has been reading the magic of the words of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker and knowing that they are written for you.

The list goes on. I can think of some other positives. She can take pride in her heritage without some sniveling Leftist calling her a bigoted extremist, or trying to hit her in the head with a bike lock. Representatives of her race are not called “hatemongers” or get smeared by the media; some, in fact, are considered to be Leftist heroes. She can express her racial views without getting censored online, or perhaps even losing her bank account. In fact, she gets paid to slag off white people. Tricky “watchdog” foundations will never write up a dossier on her, unless she decides to pull a Kanye. She can count on publicity and continued sweet book deals from the mainstream media. Cheer up, Ijeoma! It’s okay to be black! In fact, she could put up a poster saying exactly that and nobody will summon the police to investigate her modest exercise of free speech.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Then she describes tension at work. It seems that diversity is not our greatest strength on the job after all — who knew, right? She turns to blogging, with the content becoming political. Although this tended to alienate local white friends, support came in from afar. As she put it, “Like dialysis, the old went out and in came the new.” That seems an odd way to speak of old friends, but perhaps the urinary analogy is fitting in her case.

In any event, she was finally able to lend her voice to the new chorus of the silenced and marginalized. (Where has she been? They’ve been griping loudly and incessantly since the 1960s.) But she never gets around to thanking all the white males at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for creating the Internet, which she uses to complain about us. Is that too much to ask? Do they ever contemplate all the amazing technology that makes their lives comfortable and think about where it came from? Do they suppose it just invents itself, or is a gift bestowed by the technology fairy?

She correctly notes that tensions have been rising. A few paragraphs of creative hyperbole conclude with this:

These are very stressful times for people of color who have been fighting and yelling and trying to protect themselves from a world that doesn’t care, to suddenly be asked by those who’ve ignored them for so long, “What has been happening your entire life? Can you educate me?” Now that we’re all in the room, how do we start this discussion?

This is not just a gap in experience and viewpoint. The Grand Canyon is a gap. This is a chasm you could drop entire solar systems into.

Her target audience includes those who want to get schooled regarding conversations about race:

Part of the reason I decided to write this book is because I regularly hear people of all races saying things like, “How do I talk to my mother in law about the racist jokes she makes?” or “I just got called out for being racist but I don’t understand what I did wrong” or “I don’t know what intersectionality is and I’m afraid to say so.” People find me on online messaging platforms and beg me to not make their questions public. People create whole new email accounts so they can email me anonymously.

And so it came to pass that she became an authority on race relations. Besides the Introduction there are 17 chapters, of which I’ll cover the first seven. The usual format is that each begins with a personal anecdote about a certain topic, typically emphasizing how tough it is to be black. (It’s a constant refrain throughout the book, representing the schwartze equivalent of the Yiddish lament, “Schwer zu sein a Yid.”) Then a sermon discusses the Leftist talking points related to the subject.

Is it really about race?

Courtesy of Stonetoss

The first chapter — according to the guidelines of rhetoric, a place where the most important subjects should be introduced — is about whether race matters more than social class. The author’s take, in brief, is that of course it does. (The fact that she says so is reason enough; I’ll recap the Prime Directive shortly, another critical concept to introduce up front.) The topic is hardly new, reflecting the century-long tension between cultural Marxism and the economic Left, which has gone much to the detriment of the latter. In the beginning, the author debates with a friend on the matter:

I’m tired because this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as “the left,” focused on “identity politics” too much.

As a white man who pontificates on politics and current events, I’ll give a hot tip to a black woman who pontificates on politics and current events: The Democrats should start nominating likeable candidates. Because they picked a dud, Cupcake lost the 2016 election, despite the mainstream media’s endless lickspittle backing of the uninspiring hack, and overconfident predictions that she had a 99% chance of victory. Why did she get the distinction of being the first swamp creature in a century to lose an election to someone not anointed by the Deep State? To name just a few defects, Cupcake is abrasive, thoroughly corrupt, visibly power-hungry, and remarkably tedious. Every morning, she has to slather on the hair gel and spritz on the perfume to hide her horns and cover up the sulfur smell.

Continuing the debate with her friend:

When he then recites the standard recommendations of strengthening unions and raising minimum wages I decide to jump to the point: “Why do you think black people are poor? Do you think it’s for the same reasons that white people are?”

Even so, in Chapter 17 one of the author’s recommended action items is “Speak up in your unions.” That’s because “[u]nions have a lot of power to combat racial discrimination and disenfranchisement at work, but only if the union decides to make it a priority.” Another recommendation is the following:

Support increases in the minimum wage. Yes, there are many reasons why so many people of color are so much poorer than white people. But we cannot ignore the fact that a larger proportion of people of color work in lower-wage jobs, and that a raise in those wages will disproportionately help people of color and can help address the vast racial wealth gap in this country.

As for black poverty rates, I’ll add that there are some factors among their average population which aren’t beneficial to a normal career: low IQ and low impulse control, criminality, something-for-nothing entitlement mentality, and truculence. Although the first item is genetic, the good news is that the others are about behavior and result from individual choices. Those have been aggravated greatly by soft-on-crime policies, endless handouts, and encouragement of rebellion for its own sake. Things will improve when blacks either form their own country, or better yet return to Africa; at that point, the Leftist coddling stops and it’s time to get sensible.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

Granted, not all of them are that way. What about blacks who don’t suffer from those problems? Those who didn’t drop out, don’t have a chip on their shoulder, and never got a criminal record will be quite employable, looking good for a company’s diversity statistics. Preferential treatment for blacks is effectively legal and widely encouraged. Being employable is therefore a function of behavior and is certainly attainable. As for the Talented Tenth — blacks at the rightmost decile of the bell curve who can qualify legitimately for skilled positions — surely they’re quite a hot commodity and have great job security.

I know — work sucks; film at 11. Surely the author has her own set of lived experiences and all that. Still, it’s difficult for me to take seriously her assertion that blacks have to work so much harder for their careers. If they indeed worked much harder, wouldn’t they be praised to the skies for their efficiency and cooperativeness?

Then there’s more singing the blues:

If I do get a good job and do what society says I should do and save up and buy a house — will I benefit equally when the fact that I live in a ‘black neighborhood’ means that my house will be worth far less? Will I benefit equally when I’m much more likely to get higher mortgage rates from my bank, or predatory loans that will skyrocket in cost after a few years causing me to foreclose and lose my home and equity and credit, because of the color of my skin?

There’s so much to unpack from merely two sentences of Afro-dyspepsia!

• If a house is relatively undervalued because of the location, that’s obviously a good thing when it’s time to buy it. This is especially so now that prices are exorbitant. (The house-flipping speculators were bad enough. Now we have gigantic corporations sucking up real estate like a defictionalized Monopoly game.) Thus, if the author can get a big house in the ‘hood for what a little house in the ‘burbs costs, why complain about getting a bargain?
• Better yet, in a black neighborhood she’ll get a much friendlier reception than gays and hipsters who renovate distressed property. Whites who move into their neighborhoods aren’t exactly embraced with open arms. Although blacks don’t have a Klan, they might try to scare off the newcomers by burning a watermelon on their lawn.
• There’s nothing preventing her from buying a house anywhere she wants. In the United States, American Indians are the only race with land set aside for their exclusive use. If Ijeoma Oluo wanted to be my next-door neighbor, I’d have no say in the matter.
• Banks don’t assign interest rates based on race. In fact, they’ve made great efforts to avoid even the possibility of bias, such as reviewing credit reports with the names and addresses removed. That’s because banks don’t like getting sued by the usual black shakedown artists. Interest rates are based on the Federal Reserve’s prime rate (which depends on how much Viagra is in Janet Yellen’s bloodstream at the moment) and on the borrower’s credit history. Like anyone else, blacks who manage their budgets carefully will get excellent FICO scores. The ones who have bad credit ratings from late payments, defaults, repossessions, and the like need to get their finances in order. There are indeed blacks who know better. It’s not about “oppression”; it’s about behavior.
• To avoid “predatory loans that will skyrocket in cost after a few years,” tell the loan officer that you don’t want an adjustable rate mortgage. Fixed rate mortgages have slightly higher interest than an Adjustable-Rate Mortgage (ARM) loan’s starting rate, but it never changes unless the borrower refinances it. On the other hand, with an ARM the borrower will squeal like a piglet whenever Janet Yellen gets another stiffie.
• Saying this is “because of the color of my skin” is therefore false. Blaming whites for this is nasty and disingenuous. A moment of reflection should’ve made this and the other points obvious.

There’s more catastrophizing and Afro-dyspepsia about how tough it is to be black, but I’ll cut it short at this point. I’m unconvinced of the chapter’s main thesis, and hold the contrary position that social class matters more than race and all the other intersectional identity categories protected by The System.

The other major point in the chapter is the subject of — in the context of argumentation — what is about race and what isn’t. A brief summary precedes much commentary:

1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race.
2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color.
3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.

So there you have it. After a beginning like this, we might as well skip the rest, right? The Prime Directive makes the next two directives redundant, and also several long paragraphs of commentary following that. Just remember that non-whites are always right about this matter. Apparently they have access to special knowledge that the rest of us can’t fathom. That said, the redundant commentary begins with the following:

Now, looking at this short list, it’s easy to think — hey, that is far too broad, almost anything can fall under those categories! And it’s true, almost anything can fall under these categories. Why? Because race impacts almost every aspect of our lives.

Maybe there’s something to this much. As Benjamin Disraeli put it, “Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it.” This guy had his moments; they sure don’t make bagel connoisseurs like that lately! Anyway, commentary about the Prime Directive begins with this:

It is about race if a person of color thinks it’s about race. This may sound at first like I’m asking you to just take every person of color’s word for it, as if they are infallible and incapable of lying or misinterpreting a situation. But the truth is, whether or not someone is fallible is beside the point. We are, each and every one of us, a collection of our lived experiences. Our lived experiences shape us, how we interact with the world, and how we live in the world. And our experiences are valid.

Ah, the standpoint argument. Peachy keen, but do only non-whites get to have valid lived experiences? If so, why? Moreover, if this difference in perspective is indeed an unbridgeable gulf that you could drop entire solar systems into, then why waste time writing about it? The well-worn standpoint argument is an instance of the special pleading fallacy which boils down to: “You can’t possibly understand our blues, therefore we’re right.” Granted, it’s not always easy to walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins, but that doesn’t mean minoritist claims are always right, deserve special credence, or should be exempt from debate.