Top 150 Ijeoma Oluo Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Mediocre white men who want to be heroes too often feel the need to fabricate villains to justify their imagined role – even if that means vilifying entire populations of people. Their dreams of grand adventures are mere whims and fantasy, but the violence such white men visit upon others is often very, very real.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

61. “Get in schools. Do you know what the racial achievement gap is in your school district? Find out, and then ask your school board, principals, and teachers what they are doing to address it.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

63. “Boycott businesses that exploit workers of color.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

64. “Vote for diverse government representatives. Help put people of color into the positions of power where they can self-advocate for the change that their communities need. Support candidates of color and support platforms that make diversity, inclusion, and racial justice a priority.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

65. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

70. “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

71. “Martin was why white America couldn’t support equality. Because no matter what we ask for, if it threatens the system of White Supremacy, it will always be seen as too much.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

72. “The stereotype of the “meek” Asian American, combined with social pressure to stick to science and technology fields, has discouraged many Asian Americans from seeking political leadership and activism roles and prevents those who do seek those roles from being seen as “strong enough” leaders for the task.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

73. “Note: ‘people like you’ is a good warning that a conversation is about to head into pretty racist territory.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

74. “The thing about anger is that it needs a home.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

75. “The ultimate goal of racism was the profit and comfort of the white race, specifically, of rich white men. The oppression of people of color was an easy way to get this wealth and power, and racism was a good way to justify it.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

76. “But we live in a society where if you’re a person of color, a disabled person, a single mother, or an LGBT person, you have to be exceptional. And if you are exceptional, by the standards put forth by white supremacist patriarchy, and you are lucky, you will most likely just barely get by. There’s nothing inspirational about that.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

77. “But then, a funny thing happens when a woman or a person of color is promoted to the head of the company. White male managers stop collaborating with their coworkers – especially their women coworkers and coworkers of color. Why do white men decrease their level of performance when a woman or person of color becomes CEO? Because suddenly they feel less connected to the company.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

78. “After sitting for two games, Kaepernick met with a military veteran. The man asked Kaepernick to kneel instead of sitting for the anthem, as a way to protest injustice against Black people in America while still showing respect for US military vets. Kaepernick took the veteran’s advice and began kneeling in protest instead of sitting.34.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

79. “Intersectionality and the recognition and confrontation of our privilege, can make us better people with better lives.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

80. “Note, if you are a white person in this situation, do not think that just because you may not be aware of your racial identity at the time that you did not bring race to your experience of the situation as well. We are all products of a racialized society, and it affects everything we bring to our interactions.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

81. “Most women and people of color have to claw their way to any chance at success or power, have to work twice as hard as white men and prove themselves to be exceptional talents before we begin to entertain discussions of truly equal representation in our workplaces or government.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

83. “I tell them what I also tell white people who are looking for reasons to be antiracist: Yes, it will offer some real benefits for you. Your life will be better in many ways when we work to end oppression. But it will not always benefit you.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

84. “We are expected to support white male supremacy in order to get a promotion, to be respected by our peers, for our children to succeed in school.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

85. “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

86. “It should be enough that this is hurting us. It is insulting that I have to point out the ways in which these issues also hurt white Americans in the hopes that I might get more people to care.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

87. “As white men saw that their degrees no longer put them as far ahead of women and people of color as the degrees once did, they began to question whether a diploma was worth the cost.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

88. “We have to investigate the way in which all of us, regardless of race or gender, have been conditioned to uphold white male supremacy.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

89. “Banks that sell bad loans to people of color should not get your business.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

90. “These microaggressions help hold the system of White Supremacy together, because if we didn’t have all these little ways to separate and dehumanize people, we’d empathize with them more fully, and then we’d have to really care about the system that is crushing them.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

91. “Filipino Americans, on average, have a low poverty rate of 6.7 percent – more than 3 percentage points lower than white Americans. But Cambodian, Laotian, Pakistani, and Thai Americans have a poverty rate of around 18 percent. Bangladeshi and Hmong Americans have poverty rates between 26 and 28 percent, matching or surpassing that of blacks and Hispanic Americans.1 Pacific Islanders have the highest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the US.2.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

92. “Remember: it’s not just this one incident. This incident is the continuation of a long history of microaggressions for people of color. Racial trauma is cumulative, and you cannot expect a person of color to react to each situation the way that you would having encountered it for the first time. It may not seem fair that you would take some of the blame for what has happened in the past, but what is truly unfair is the fact that people of color have to endure this every day.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “My mom has shifted her focus on race from proving to black people that she is “down” to pressuring fellow white people to do better.”

— 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. “Bear witness. If you are a white person and you see a person of color being stopped by police, if you see a person of color being harassed in a store: bear witness and offer to help, when it is safe to do so. Sometimes just the watchful presence of another white person will make others stop and consider their actions more carefully.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

100. “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