Top 150 Ijeoma Oluo Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?”

— Ijeoma Oluo

52. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

55. “Poor people shouldn’t have to prove how much they deserve to have a roof over their heads and feed their children.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

56. “We must start asking what we want white manhood to be, and what we will no longer accept. We must stop rewarding violence and oppression. We must stop confusing bullies with leaders. We must stop telling women and people of color that the only path to success lies in emulating white male dominance.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

57. “At some point the silence is a sin against God – because you are required to be the person you want to be, you are required to speak up,” he explained.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

58. “Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you’ve routinely enjoyed are threatened. But you have to do it anyway, because you believe that women and people of color are human beings and that we deserve to be free from oppression, even when that means you personally have to give some things up.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

59. “As long as racism exists to ruin the lives of countless people of color, it should be something that upsets us. But it upsets us because it exists, not because we talk about it. And if you are white, and don’t want to feel any of that pain by having these conversations, then you are asking people of color to continue to bear the entire burden of racism alone.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

60. “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.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

61. “Because you have been racist, and you have been anti-racist. Yes, you may now be insisting that you do not have a racist bone in your body, but that is simply not true. You have been racist, and will be in the future, even if less so. You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

62. “Racial oppression should always be an emotional topic to discuss. It should always be anger-inducing. As long as racism exists to ruin the lives of countless people of color, it should be something that upsets us. But it upsets us because it exists, not because we talk about it.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

63. “And while the arguments around affirmative action often come down to race, white women have been by far the biggest recipients of the benefits of affirmative action.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

64. “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

65. “When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail – or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “It seemed far more important to him that the white people who were spreading and upholding racism be spared the effects of being called racist, than sparing his black friend the effects of that racism.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

71. “What was said to you wasn’t okay, and should be addressed. But we are talking about two different things.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

72. “Speak up in your unions. I’ve watched with pride these last few years as my mother has leveraged her privilege at her union to help make her workplace more inclusive.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

73. “It is psychologically damaging to never see yourself reflected in positions of leadership in your own country. It limits our feeling of citizenship, and it limits the possibilities we see for ourselves and our children.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

74. “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

75. “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

76. “Race was not only created to justify a racially exploitative economic system, it was invented to lock people of color into the bottom of it. Racism in America exists to exclude people of color from opportunity and progress so that there is more profit for others deemed superior. This profit itself is the greater promise for nonracialized people – you will get more because they exist to get less.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Intersectionality decentralizes people who are used to being the primary focus of the movements they are a part of.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

81. “And while it may seem that people of color always need to “put race in everything,” it’s the neglect of the specific needs of people of color, which exist whether you acknowledge them or not, that necessitate it in the first place.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

82. “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

83. “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

84. “I live in a world where if I have a ‘black sounding’ name, I’m less likely to even be called for a job interview. Will I equally benefit from raising minimum wages when I can’t even get a job?”

— Ijeoma Oluo

85. “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

86. “Push your mayor and city council for police reform.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

87. “Because your opponent isn’t a person, it’s the system of racism that often shows up in the words and actions of other people.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

88. “Perhaps one of the most brutal of white male privileges is the opportunity to live long enough to regret the carnage you have brought upon others.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

89. “A swagger is not intent, baggy jeans are not intent, a bandana is not intent. This is culture, and any suggestion otherwise is racist.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

90. “Do not make this about your pain at being called out.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

91. “Race has also become alive. Race was not only created to justify a racially exploitative economic system, it was invented to lock people of color into the bottom of it.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

92. “But I have never had the luxury of shunning everything in our society that does not appear to be built 100 percent for me.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

93. “This right here, the realization that we may be a part of the reason why the deck is stacked against others, that we may have been contributing to it for years without our knowledge, is why the concept of privilege is so threatening to so many.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

94. “Systemic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We have to actually dismantle the machine if we want to make change.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

95. “White male identity is in a very dark place. White men have been told that they should be fulfilled, happy, successful, and powerful, and they are not. They are missing something vital – an intrinsic sense of self that is no tied to how much power or success they can hold over others – and that hole is eating away at them.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

96. “I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime. I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

97. “In order for a police force to be effective, it has to earn the trust of its people. But to those who only scratch the surface, to those who do not investigate their simplistic opinions about the root cause of crime in inner cities and the animosity between police forces and communities of color, the answer is simply more policing. But what we need is different policing. Policing not steeped from root to flower in the need to control people of color.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

98. “So I did what most of us do, I tried to make the best of it. I worked 50 percent harder than my white coworkers, I stayed late every day. I dressed like every day was a job interview. I was overpolite to white people I encountered in public. I bent over backwards to prove that I was not angry, that I was not a threat.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

99. “Tying racism to its systemic causes and effects will help others see the important difference between systemic racism, and anti-white bigotry.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

100. “When you instead shift your focus to getting people of color to fight oppression in a way in which you approve, racial justice is no longer your main goal – your approval is.”

— Ijeoma Oluo