Top 150 Ijeoma Oluo Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “So let’s all get a little uncomfortable.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

122. “Vote local. Your vote will never have more power than in local elections. This is where politicians and city and state officials have to work for your vote. And so often, this opportunity to flex local power is flushed away by those who only vote in big, sexy, national elections.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

123. “Support music, film, television, art, and books created by people of color.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

124. “In introducing the legislation, Pressley argued, “For far too long, those closest to the pain have not been closest to the power, resulting in a racist, xenophobic, rogue, and fundamentally flawed criminal legal system,” adding, “Our resolution calls for a bold transformation of the status quo – devoted to dismantling injustices so that the system is smaller, safer, less punitive, and more humane.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

125. “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

126. “Our police forces were created not to protect Americans of color, but to control Americans of color.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

127. “A lot of people want to skip ahead to the finish line of racial harmony. Past all this unpleasantness to a place where all wounds are healed and the past is laid to rest.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

128. “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

129. “They have to battle to push forward every change they were brought in to make, no matter how incremental.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

130. “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

131. “He went on to discuss how his grandma, for example, said some racist things, but she was a kind person and it would be cruel to call a harmless old lady racist and would only make her more racist. 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

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

— Ijeoma Oluo

133. “How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?”

— Ijeoma Oluo

134. “Each day he sat quietly outside and refused to join his classmates at lunch. After three days, Ryan’s mother relented and began making lunches from home again. Nothing says “American” like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

135. “Support POC-owned business. Economic exploitation is one of the cornerstones of racial oppression. You can help preserve financial independence for people of color by working with and spending your money with POC businesses.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

136. “When we consider the privilege hierarchies of race, gender, and class, it’s clear that some of us have played a larger role than others in perpetuating this harmful image of white maleness. But I also think that all of us, regardless of demographic, have played a part in upholding white male supremacy. We are all told to aspire to the largest bite of our piece of the pie – no matter how meager our piece may be.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

137. “Fear of violent black and brown youth, compounded by high-profile school shootings primarily perpetrated by white youth, led to the rise of zero-tolerance policies in schools beginning in the ’90s.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

138. “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

139. “It could be a place that dares to believe that the world does not revolve around white men.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

140. “Conversations on racism should never be about winning.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

141. “If you are constantly assumed to be great just for being white and male, why would you struggle to make a real contribution? Why take a risk or make a determined effort that might fail when you can be rewarded for keeping your head down? Societal incentives are toward mediocrity.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

142. “While in 2013 Asian Americans had the highest college graduation rate of any racial group in America by far with 53 percent, as with overall numbers of economic success, this number hides a wide disparity based on country of origin: 46 percent of second-generation Cambodian and Laotian Americans have only a high school degree or less, compared to only 6 percent of second-generation Chinese Americans.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

143. “Women and people of color who advocate for diversity and equity are often punished for their efforts in peer, team, and management evaluations. Ironically, the people who are not penalized in their evaluations for their diversity and equity efforts are – say it with me – white men.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

144. “Does this sound like too large a task? Too monumental a shift? I can see that. But I can also see how much work it has taken to create and maintain a system of white male mediocrity in this country.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

145. “We live in a society where race is one of the biggest indicators of your success in life. There are sizable racial divides in wealth, health, life expectancy, infant mortality, incarceration rates, and so much more. We cannot look at a society where racial inequality is so universal and longstanding and say, ‘This is all the doing of a few individuals with hate in their hearts.’ It just doesn’t make sense.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

146. “We find racism in our systems when we look at what the system produces. When we find systems with outputs that negatively affect people of color in a way or to a degree that they do not affect white people, we have a racist impact that can be tied to a racist cause.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

147. “If we are going to continue to make progress on issues of race and gender, and if liberal white men want to be on the right side of history, they have to address their personal issues with race and gender.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

148. “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

149. “The image of the ideal white man – the bold and confident ones we end up idolizing, giving promotions to, electing to office – that image is often the epitome of mediocrity. And when entrusted with these positions of power, such men often perform as well as someone with mediocre skills would be expected to: we see the results in our floundering businesses and in our deadlocked government. Rather than risk seeming weak by admitting mistakes, white men double down on them.”

— Ijeoma Oluo

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

— Ijeoma Oluo