Top 150 Ijeoma Oluo Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “At its core, police brutality is about power and corruption. Police brutality is about the intersection of fear and guns.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

2. “Pacific Islanders. The culture, history, and voices of people of Hawaiian, Guamanian, Tongan, Fijian, Samoan, and Marshallese descent, and more, are largely invisible to greater American society and culture, and the needs of Pacific Islanders are often left out of discussions on the needs of Asian Americans.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

3. “Intersectionality brings people face-to-face with their privilege. People, in general, do not like to recognize the ways in which they may be unfairly advantaged over other people. To embrace intersectionality is to also embrace the knowledge of those advantages and to acknowledge that your advantages may have kept you from first seeing the disadvantages others face.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

4. “To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

5. “Being privileged doesn’t mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

6. “If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system of you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice, it is not something you can just opt out of.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

7. “Do you believe in justice and equality? Because if you believe in justice and equality you believe in it all of the time, for all people. You believe in it for newborn babies, you believe in it for single mothers, you believe in it for kids in the street, you believe in justice and equality for people you like and people you don’t. You believe in it for people who don’t say please.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

8. “Racism is any prejudice against someone because of their race when those views are reinforced by systems of power.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

9. “Microaggressions are constant reminders that you don’t belong, that you are less than, that you are not worthy of the same respect that white people are afforded. They keep you off balance, keep you distracted, and keep you defensive. They keep you from enjoying an outing on the town or a day at the office.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

10. “But, looking at American history, words have been used to separate, dehumanize, and oppress, and the power of those words is still felt today.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

11. “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” When writer Sarah Hagi said those words in 2015, they launched a thousand memes, T-shirts, and coffee mugs.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

12. “Apologize. You’ve done something that hurt another human being. Even if you don’t fully understand why or how, you should apologize. It is the decent thing to do when you respect people. You don’t have to totally “get it” to know that you don’t want to continue doing something that hurts people.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

13. “We can broadly define the concept of cultural appropriation as the adoption or exploitation of another culture by a more dominant culture.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

14. “Intersectionality brings people face-to-face with their privilege. People, in general, do not like to recognize the ways in which they may be unfairly advantaged over other people.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

15. “There are very few hardships out there that hit only people of color and not white people, but there are a lot of hardships that hit people of color a lot more than white people.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

16. “White Supremacy is this nation’s oldest pyramid scheme. Even those who have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

17. “This divide-and-conquer technique serves to redirect struggle against oppressive White Supremacy to competition between Asian Americans and other people of color.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

18. “I hope that if parts of this book make you uncomfortable, you can sit with that discomfort for awhile to see if it has anything else to offer you.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

19. “Am I providing a safe space for marginalized people to speak out? If you find yourself saying, “Well, disabled people never talk to me about this” or, “I just never hear from black women,” then you need to ask yourself why and what you can do to make people feel safe to speak up around you.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

20. “You have to get over the fear of facing the worst in yourself. You should instead fear unexamined racism. Fear the thought that right now, you could be contributing to the oppression of others and you don’t know it. But do not fear those who bring that oppression to light. Do not fear the opportunity to do better.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

21. “Privilege, in the social justice context, is an advantage or a set of advantages that you have that others do not.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

22. “When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

23. “When we say ‘Asian American’ we are talking about so much more than can be fit in a single stereotype.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

24. “Intersectionality forces people to interact with, listen to, and consider people they don’t usually interact with, listen to, or consider.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

25. “It was shocking, because you have the idea where you are a brotherhood. When you have an issue outside of football and you’re looking for your brothers to be there for you, and when you find out they aren’t, that hurts a little bit.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

26. “Our humanity is worth a little discomfort, it’s actually worth a lot of discomfort.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

27. “Demand college diversity. If you are in college, getting ready for college, or have a kid going to college, let your college know that the diversity and inclusiveness of students, curriculum, and staff is a top priority for you. Make sure colleges know that you expect any quality higher-education institution to embrace and promote diversity if they expect your tuition money.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

28. “State your intentions. Do you know why you are having this particular conversation? Do you know why this matters to you? Is there something in particular you are trying to communicate or understand?”

— Ijeoma Oluo

29. “No, the problem isn’t just that a white person may think black people are lazy and that hurts people’s feelings, it’s that the belief that black people are lazy reinforces and is reinforced by a general dialogue that believes the same, and uses that belief to justify not hiring black people for jobs, denying black people housing, and discriminating against black people in schools.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

30. “There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice – it is not something you can just opt out of.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

31. “My son thought about the pledge of allegiance and he looked at this country and he decided that he didn’t want to say it anymore. “I don’t think this country treats people who look like me very well so the ‘liberty and justice for all’ part is a lie. And I don’t think that every day we should all be excited about saying a lie.” “Well,” I said, “That’s a good enough reason for me.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

32. “Getting my neighbor to love people of color might make it easier to hang around him, but it won’t do anything to combat police brutality, racial income inequality, food deserts, or the prison industrial complex.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

33. “But over generations, feminism has grown and changed. There is still what is called “white feminism” – the tendency for white feminists to center themselves at the expense of women of color – but at least now we have a name for it. And in naming it, we can think about how to move beyond it.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

34. “As I said earlier, just because something is about race, doesn’t mean it’s only about race. This also means that just because something is about race, doesn’t mean that white people can’t be similarly impacted by it and it doesn’t mean that the experience of white people negatively impacted is invalidated by acknowledging that people of color are disproportionately impacted.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

35. “Ours is a society where white culture is normalized and universalized, while cultures of color are demonized, exotified, or erased.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

36. “Mediocre, highly forgettable white men regularly enter feminist spaces and expect to be centered and rewarded, and they have been. They get to be highly flawed, they get to regularly betray the values of their movement, yet they will be praised for their intentions or even simply for their presence – while women must be above reproach in their personal and public lives in order to avoid seeing themselves and their entire movement engulfed in scandal.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

37. “White male mediocrity seems to impact every aspect of our lives, and yet it only seems to be people who aren’t white men who recognize the imbalance.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

38. “Our police force was not created to serve black Americans; it was created to police black Americans and serve white Americans.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

39. “But often these men are completely unaware of their hypocrisy because they are not doing anything out of the ordinary by centering themselves when they’ve always been centered, or by taking advantage of those who have always been taken advantage of – they’re just living according to the norms of society.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

40. “Often, being a person of color in white-dominated society is like being in an abusive relationship with the world.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

41. “My goal as a writer and an activist is not to shape future generations. I hope to give a platform, a foundation for our young people to build upon and then smash to bits when it is no longer needed. That is what our kids are doing right now, with all of the work we have done, all that we have dedicated to them – they are building upon it so that they can smash it all down. And it’s a beautiful thing to see.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

42. “And if you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist. If you are able-bodied, you are ableist. If you are anything above poverty in a capitalist society, you are classist. You can sometimes be all of these things at once.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

43. “The concept of privilege violates everything we’ve been told about fairness and everything we’ve been told about the American Dream of hard work paying off and good things happening to good people.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

44. “We were that desperate for a white man to not be trash that we treated mediocrity like it was a masterpiece.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

45. “If I don’t have the right to deem your life, what you see and hear and feel, a lie, why do you have the right to do it to me? Why do you deserve to be believed and people of color don’t?”

— Ijeoma Oluo

46. “But if you don’t embrace intersectionality, even if you make progress for some, you will look around one day and find that you’ve become the oppressor of others.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

47. “Intersectionality slows things down. The simple truth is, when you are only considering the needs of a select few, it’s a lot easier to make what looks like progress than when you have to consider the needs of a diverse group of people. This is where you often hear people say things like, “Well, let’s just work on what the majority needs first and we’ll get to the rest later.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

48. “Regular exposure to microaggressions causes a person of color to feel isolated and invalidated. The inability to predict where and when a microaggression may occur leads to hypervigilance, which can then lead to anxiety disorders and depression.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

49. “I know that it’s hard to believe that the people you look to for safety and security are the same people who are causing us so much harm. But I’m not lying and I’m not delusional. I am scared and I am hurting and we are dying. And I really, really need you to believe me.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

50. “In the South, through the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement, it was well known locally that many police officers were also members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

— Ijeoma Oluo