So You Want to Talk About Race
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 • So You Want to Talk About Race
Most damagingly, tone policing places prerequisites on being heard and being helped.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
Tone policing prioritizes the comfort of the privileged person in the situation over the oppression of the disadvantaged person.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
It is our role not to shape the future, but to not fuck things up so badly that our kids will be too busy correcting the past to focus on the future.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
Cultural appropriation is the product of a society that prefers its culture cloaked in whiteness.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
That power imbalance allows the culture being appropriated to be distorted and redefined by the dominant culture and siphons any material or financial benefit of that piece of culture away to the dominant culture, while marginalized cultures are still persecuted for living in that culture.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
The art form that black Americans have relied upon for generations is no longer theirs.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
The problem of cultural appropriation is primarily linked to the power imbalance between the culture doing the appropriating and the culture being appropriated.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
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.