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. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

14. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

16. “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

17. “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

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. “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

20. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

27. “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

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. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

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. “But the important question is, why would a well-meaning white person want to say these words in the first place? Why would you want to invoke that pain on people of color? Why would you want to rub in the fact that you are privileged enough to not be negatively impacted by the legacy of racial oppression that these words helped create?”

— Ijeoma Oluo

36. “No matter what our intentions, everything we say and do in the pursuit of justice will one day be outdated, ineffective, and yes, probably wrong. That is the way progress works. What we do now is important and helpful so long as what we do now is what is needed now.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Disadvantaged white people are not erased by discussions of disadvantages facing people of color, just as brain cancer is not erased by talking about breast cancer. They are two different issues with two different treatments, and they require two different conversations.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

41. “White women will heap praise on my words calling for the destruction of the patriarchy, and then turn around and ask why I have to ‘be so divisive’ or say dismissively that I ‘sound like Al Sharpton’ when I dare bring up race.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

42. “Women who lead with a more “male” style do not fare any better. Women are often punished for the same personality traits that men are praised for.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

43. “Race is everywhere and racial tension and animosity and pain is in almost everything we see and touch. Ignoring it does not make it go away. There is no shoving the four hundred years’ racial oppression and violence toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

44. “For hundreds of years we have been told that the path to freedom from racial oppression lies in our virtue, that our humanity must be earned. We simply don’t deserve equality yet.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

45. “When I talk about mediocrity, I talk about how we somehow agreed that wealthy white men are the best group to bring the rest of us prosperity, when their wealth was stolen from our labor.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

46. “At every college I went to – every single one – at least one teacher of color broke down in tears describing their struggle to advocate for their students of color in such a hostile environment. Higher education is not the racial utopia that Republicans are scared of. It is not some bizarro world where students of color wield power over white students and faculty. It is a white supremacist system at its core, like all our other systems are.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

47. “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

48. “Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

49. “Asian Americans were first derided as “unskilled labor” until the 1965 Immigration Act prioritized Asian Americans who were more highly educated and financially successful, in the belief that they would “contribute” more to American society.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

50. “How do the advantages in your life contribute to your opinions and actions, and how does the lack of disadvantages in certain areas keep you from fully understanding the struggles others face, and may contribute to those struggles?”

— Ijeoma Oluo